Right now, my world is very colorful, and all this color has me really excited!

At long last, I have in my hands (not quite literally) on an array of lovely linen in beautiful colors – high quality linen that performs marvelously for both surface embroidery and counted embroidery. And did I mention, it’s in color?!

As icing on the cake, I’ve just gotten in some silks in Massive hanks. They’re the kind of hanks that plop when you set them down. They’re so heavy and luscious and lovely…

I just have to give you a sneak peek at these treasures!

While hastily-snapped photos presented to you through the medium of your computer monitor may not be the Best Way in the World to introduce you to these patches of color in my life, I just can’t help it! I have to talk about it. I’m so delighted about having colored linen on hand! I feel like my enthusiasm for it is bubbling over onto everything.

The colors here are a deep sky blue, a lavender-pink (a little more pink than lavender, but with a purpley hint), a buttery golden yellow, and a lively spring green.

I’m presently using the yellow on the Reticello sampler I’ve been playing with

I used the spring green years ago for some of the sample letters (like this S) for my Stitch Sampler Alphabet.

Like I said, the linen works great for either surface, free-style embroidery (thanks to its full weave) and for counted work (it’s a moderately high count even-weave linen). So there are loads of project possibilities with this fabric. If you’ve been dying for good quality, colorful linen that’s not so flimsy that the threads pull when you embroider free style on it, and that has a full, firm weave for your counted work, this fabric will delight you, too!

We’re doing a load of cutting right now, turning much of my newly acquired bounty into colored linen sample packs (to complement the other linen sample packs in natural and white that I already carry) so that you can delight in stitching on gourmet quality linen in beautiful colors, too.

I’m also using the blue right now to stitch up the samples for the next Stitch Snippets project! Yay!

And then there’s the silk.

Ahhhhhhh. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Siiiiiilk.

I love these colors – they’re sumptuous! And the fact that they’re in these huge fat hanks just adds to their luxuriance.

This is Soie d’Alger, which is a high quality spun silk. It’s a stranded silk, with seven strands per thread. It can be separated into individual strands (like stranded cotton can), so that you can control the weight of density of your embroidery by adding or subtracting strands in your needle.

If you’re not familiar with silk for hand embroidery, these three articles below will help you understand a bit more about embroidery silks:

Silk Hand Embroidery Thread 101: Getting Started with Silk

Silk Hand Embroidery Thread 101: Twisted Filament Silk

Silk Hand Embroidery Thread 101: Flat Silk

I know it’s just now summer, but the autumn colors above have my little heart palpitating in anticipation of my favorite season. I love autumn! And these threads are going to come together in a delightfully-autumnal little project for you.

So that’s the color in my world at the moment. It’s keeping us very busy in the studio… along with myriad other things going on!

And speaking of other things going on, did you get out early this morning to see the conjunction of the five planets above the horizon before dawn? I did. And it rained and rained, and the lightning danced and the thunder roared… and I didn’t see a thing. Well. There’s always next time!

Have a lovely weekend!