Blast from the Past- Cross Stitch Plus, May '93- Sampler Bell Pull and Pillow

Some of you may remember that I spent 14 years writing and designing for craft magazines, before I wrote my 6 mysteries (and before I started writing knitting books). Sometimes it was a couple of years between the time a project was finished and when it finally hit the stands (much like book publishing, come to think of it), so a few of my articles came out around the same time that my first mystery was published.

That's the case with this Sampler Bell Pull and Pillow, which was published in House of White Birches' Cross-Stitch Plus in May of 1993. HWB is still in business, though Cross Stitch Plus is long gone.

I have a copy of each of the magazines that published my articles (I sold my first one in '80, and the last was published in '94), but they're in storage. However, my friend Lorah found a few in her collection and she gave them to me.

I kept very few of my own designs, but I do have the bell pull, still hanging on a wall. I have no idea what happened to the pillow (gotta say good riddance to eyelet lace, though...)

It was worked with a single strand of wool embroidery thread from DMC called Flower Thread, which does not seem to be in production any more. I did the design on 18 ct wool cloth that I got from Wichelt.(side note: I haven't done cross stitch in a long time- I'm glad to see that Wichelt is still in business. They provided most of the cloth that I used in my years as a cross stitch designer, and I was always very happy with the quality of their fabric).

These charts could be adapted to Fair Isle knitting, if you adjusted the colors to just 2 per row.

p.s. I loved samplers, and designed a boatload of them, back in the day