The "A" monogram

This is a tidy little number that I decided to do over the Resurrection Remembrance holiday. (I should post on that later too)! I'll warn you now that this is a long post because I'm almost finished and there is a lot I want to share with you. As for this project... Husband tells me that I'm always doing projects for others and that I don't do any for our house. It's true, he's right, again! So I decided that since there are a lot of techniques I'm just learning about, I'd experiment on us. I got a free monogram pattern from Mary Corbet's Needle and Thread (link) and began to work it up. Please visit her site if embroidery interests you (just make sure to still visit me some times too)!   I had certain elements I wanted to include, gold work (I'm using DMC metallic gold thread), and needle painting are the two biggest. I started out using a royal blue but without the camera flash and only under my incandescent lights  it looked black and dreary.

I changed to a wine red color and it looks much better. Again, the camera's flash changes the color to a raspberry hue but is really a rich deep color.
 
   I'm getting way ahead of myself though. Let me start at the beginning.
I printed a copy of the pattern onto a piece of regular paper. I then taped the paper down onto my hard surface ( a wooden TV tray table).  I doubt you can do this with most fabrics but I was using an off white quilter's fat quarter. (a square of cotton fabric, of a certain size, from which I clipped a smaller square) As I mentioned it's off white so I could see the printed paper through my fabric.  When I had it centered I taped the fabric over the paper then I traced the pattern with a #2 pencil. You can see the faint pencil lines in the above snapshots. To give you a sense of the size, the hoop that I'm using is a 4" metal spring hoop. There is probably a good reason why they don't make metal hoops anymore but I love them. My Mother and my Grandmother, Erma both used metal hoops so to me they are homey and nostalgic. (Hi, Mom)!

   This picture shows the color a little more realistically. As you can see I don't have much to go. At this point I had satin stitched all the little circles and most of the ovals. I used Long and Short stitch to needle paint the flower and the leaves. Everything is outlined in couched gold thread (a gold looking metal is flattened and wrapped around a thread). The 'A' itself is chain stitched, I might have satin stitched it but I felt that it was too large. It is instead chain stitched, I'm filling it with chain stitches.
Have a great day everyone!