The Italian Sock is moving forward again; I've turned the heel and am deep into the ankle decrease stage on the first one. I really like the yarn, but I learn from bopping around on Ravelry that it's been discontinued -- what a shame! Maybe I'll find it somewhere on sale.
The Sampler By Any Other Name is still steaming along as well. I finished the top alphabet and then had to stop for a couple of days to plan the rest of it. At first, I thought one of those snarky anti-feminist verses might do to tickle my sarcastic irony bone, but naaah. Digging through my library, I couldn't find any poetry anthologies (which I'm going to remedy ASAP). The Emperor handed me his ancient Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and looking through it reminded me of how much I love the poetry of William Blake. I picked a bit from Blake's "Auguries of Innocence":
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
I charted it out with an alphabet from a book and started stitching, but decided that it was not satisfactory and picked the stitches out. I thought, 'you're a smart person, you have a creative bent, why don't you chart your own alphabet!' but before I could chart the verse again I had to get online, find printable graph paper in an appropriate size, and print some out. New alphabet in hand, I decided that I needed a decorative element between the alphabet and the verse, and selected one from an antique sampler featured in Sarah Don's Traditional Samplers. Having stitched that, I decided to keep a design motif from the original pattern: paired roaring lions with crowns, one on each side of the verse. So, I'm stitching the left-side lion now.
Whew! This sampler designing is hard work. When this one is finished I'll decide whether I want to purse my fleeting brainzap of doing a series of samplers featuring Blake poetry, with matching design motifs for each according to the verses featured. Somebody stop me!
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