A Stitcher's Companion

So to get you up to speed on the last week, I completed all the stitching for A Stitcher's Companion by Enchanting Lair. I'm VERY unhappy with the finishing instructions, though! THEY SUCK!

My Problems with Enchanting Lair's A Stitcher's Companion:

I used foam-core backing inside the pages. The problem was that when I put the foam-core in the cover, the book won't close. So I've now taken out all the foam-core and am putting it aside til I cool off. Believe me, I didn't spend two months stitching this just to throw it out!



Also, in my opinion, the pages on the panels are backwards. It's hard to explain in just words, but after you whip-stitch the pages together (like you do with a biscornu), you have three sides of whip stitch and one side of plain back stitching. Logic would tell you to use the line of back stitching on the fourth side and one of the lines of back stitching in the spine of the cover to whip-stitch together in order to attach the page to the cover, right?

Nope! If you do, all your pages are backwards. You have to use one of the whip-stitched sides instead. When the book is assembled, all of the visible sides of the cover and the pages are whip-stitched together, except the outer edge of the pages, which are a plain line of back stitching.

All Enchanting Lair had to do to fix this was switch the panels' sides. Then, once everything is whip-stitched together, you simply use that fourth side, with the back stitching, to attach the pages to the cover. It's that simple. And there are NO clear pictures of the entire project completed in the chart OR on their website.

They give you no measurements to lay out the individual panels on your fabric, just a fuzzy scan of an 18x27 piece of fabric. I used two pieces because it looked like their borders were less than an inch around the sides of the fabric. They tell you to use QSnaps, but you need more than an inch of clearance in order to stitch on them! I also do not like the fact that they don't bother to give you the stitch count of some of the parts. You have to count the thread pocket and the band sampler yourself.

Should I go on? Well, here goes... It says to machine stitch the pockets together and machine stitch them onto the page of the book. However, if you switch your fabric to a hand-dyed like I did, no thread matches it. Because of that, I back stitched extra lines so that I could whip-stitch the pockets together and to the fabric, all in one step. I also centered motifs on three different pages by moving them over one thread. They were: the motif on the front cover, the lettering on the spine, and the fourth row of the band sampler.

On the spine, you HAVE to stitch your letters first, especially if you're using three initials! I stitched the diamond motifs first and one of my letters ended up touching it. I frogged the diamonds and left them off in the end. I centered my letters side-to-side and top-to-bottom, leaving three spaces between each letter. There was no room for the diamond motifs after doing that.

I changed the entire font of the personalization page because the lettering they used is very styalized and doesn't go with the Gothic font they used everywhere else in the book. AND I had to move "eedles" of "Needles" up two threads because they didn't have that word lined up like they did all the other words in the book.

The final two changes I made from the charts were:

1. Instead of filling in "A Stitcher's Trove" with cross stitching, I left it with just the back stitching so that it would match "Needles" on the facing page, and



2. I used Wild Lavender (light purple) rather than variegated to stitch the pair of scissors. I used Yallingup (variegated) to back stitch around the scissors.

I don't like the look of variegated outlined in variegated, so I definitely had to change that.

Is that enough?? I WILL HAVE A BOOK WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE! I just need to take a break from it for a week or so.