Circling Round

 

I'm gathering the supplies to make the Sue Spargo embroidery sampler, Toned Down Circle Sampler. I had bought a bag of wool circles ages ago. I used some of these to make my 5-4-5-7 quilt earlier this year. The circles came in two sizes, 1" and 2". The pattern calls for 1" circles so I counted out all the 1" circles required. Almost enough to do the pattern.

I chose four of the 2" circles to cut down to 1", so now I have enough circles for the pattern.  I now need to find a piece of wool for the background to appliqué these onto. The only piece I have on hand is a FabMo sourced one that is a very bright orange and is quite heavy-weight. I haven't gone through my felted wool box yet though. 

I'm trying hard to use what I already have on hand, but as I said earlier I did buy this package of threads along with the pattern. They are a wool-acrylic blend thread called Ellana which I've never used before. The other three spools of Eleganza perlé cotton were previous purchases that happened to match up with the specific colors called for in the pattern. 

I still have to look through the rest of my embroidery threads to make sure I have a good enough assortment of colors and types that will work well enough with the colors of the circles. Hopefully I'll have enough of the embroidery threads of many of the types and weights that are called for. I think I'll likely have enough as I'm not trying to exactly match the sampler pattern. The actual Toned-Down Circles pattern is basically a recipe book of stitch combinations with fairly simple illustrations that refers to the Creative Stitching book by Sue Spargo. That's a book I've had for a while but haven't worked with too much yet. It's a really well-done presentation of a variety of stitches that I've seen but never tried myself.