Odds and Ends and Trellis Stitch

Another project that I have up and running this year is a reproduction of the Jane Turner Sampler of 1668, which is available through The Essamplaire  You can see the entire sampler here.  I find that with reproduction samplers, I tend to be drawn to the earlier ones (mostly 17th century), and I do like those with at least one central pictorial motif, like the lady in the garden of this sampler. 

Unlike some stitchers, I am not adamant about exact historical recreation, and I plan to only stitch this piece through the garden pictorial band and the two narrow "gardeny" bands under it.  I personally do not care for the unsymmetrical wide flower band near the bottom or the off-center alphabet, so I plan to just stop!

I have had several issues with this piece. . . mostly having to do with color substitution.  I found that a couple of the specified colors just disappeared into the fabric.  This is especially frustrating when doing reversible double-running, since under the best of circumstances you often can't really see what you're doing until you do the second pass.   Here's a photo of the top third of so of the sampler that I've either completed or have well underway.

An interesting feature of this sampler is that many of the double-running outlines (which I personally really enjoy stitching), are filled in with satin stitch.  It makes for a nice effect when finished, but is rather tricky to stitch.  Looking at a fairly good photo of the historic piece, it appears that Jane used filament silk for her satin stitch, which looks quite different than satin using DMC.  In order to get a result I liked, in my piece I've made most of my satin stitch horizontal across the little motifs, rather than vertically along the motifs as Jane did. 

My most recent accomplishment is the trellis stitch filling in the main stem of the band pictured below.  I've never used trellis stitch in quite this way. . . and procrastinated quite a bit before attempting it because I usually have issues with trellis stitch.  But much to my surprise, it came out pretty well.  (General rejoicing!)

Here's a close up of part of the band showing part of the double running outline before the trellis filling and with the filling stitches.

Interestingly, in her sampler, Jane only did trellis stitch in the longer and wider sections of the central stem and just filled the narrower W-shaped sections (like that circled in blue in the photo below) with satin stitch. To my mind, this ended up looking rather messy, so I took a DEEP breath and decided to try to do a trellis filling throughout.  While not perfect, I think it looks pretty good.  (More rejoicing!)