[WIP] Golden Hardanger Doily

It's been a long, long time since I showed any embroidery. So, it's highest time to change that :). I'd like to show you what I've been working on for some time. It's my favorite, lovely Hardanger. The pattern comes from Yvette Stanton's book: "Elegant Hardanger Embroidery" and it'll be square doily. However, I decided not to use classic white colors, as seen in the book but instead to try this pattern on light yellow fabric and stitch it with dark gold thread. There's a lot to stitch and then cut, so I have no idea when I finish it but whenever I have a couple minutes here or there, I try to stitch. It's a small project so it's easy to take it wherever I go.

The doily will be around 28x28 cm. Materials I use: Zweigart Lugana light yellow fabric (color nr 274); DMC Pearl Cotton nr 5 and 8 dark gold (color nr 783).

Little cool gadget for embroiderers :)

Recently, I long waited parcel knocked at my door. Here what it had inside. I don't use a lot of different colors in my embroidery yet, but I just had such a strong wish to buy a Color Card that I finally did it. It's the DMC Color Card. I mostly chose this one because I wanted to have all the Pearl Cotton colors that are available. It always took me while to decide on the color only looking on the websites. Now, it will always take me a lot of time, to choose among such a huge amount :).

Along with the Color Card, 12 lovely DMC pearl cotton balls came in. I bought them for hand quilting but I guess one day I'll try them in embroidery as well.

Fabric and threads for Hardanger

When doing the current project - i.e. another pillow with hardanger, I thought of making some sort of step by step tutorial in case any of you would be interested in trying hardanger. So, this is the first part of it.
Before you start any kind of embroidery you need to have two things - fabric and threads. For hardanger the fabric has to be the even weave type. The essential part of this embroidery is removing part of the threads from the fabric so to create the pattern and only the even weave fabric enables that. So far I had the fabrics of two manufacturers: DMC and Zweigart. DMC offers good quality fabrics for a decent price, Zweigart ones are much more expensive but I believe this comes with a better quality. Also Zweigart offers much bigger variety of colors. When you need colors like red, dark green or brown I think only Zweigart offers such.
Another thing about fabric is the number it has. You may see something like 22ct, 25ct and it stands for the number of threads to the inch. This means that the higher the number is the more dense the fabric you get. Also, the same pattern will become smaller on the more dense fabric. The fabrics with smaller number should be easier to embroider, however I would not buy the fabric with smaller number than 20ct. This one is loose enough to cut the threads easily and I'm afraid that the ones with a smaller number wouldn't look nice for such things as a tablecloth or a pillow. To compare - the ecru fabric on the photo is 20ct, the red one 25ct.

Now, the threads. If you read some books you'll read about pearl cotton. It's a thread with 2 twisted stands. You can also read it's doubled mercerised. Till today I had no idea what it means but for purposes of this blog I decided to check :). Here's what you can find in Wikipedia:
Mercerisation is a treatment for cotton fabric and thread that gives fabric a lustrous appearance. The process is applied to materials like cotton or hemp.
The threads also have its numbers: no.3, 5, 8 and 12 - the higher number the thinner the thread. For hardanger you need two sizes of the threads. The size of thread depends on the count of the fabric you'll choose.
As a less expensive replace for pearl cotton I used DMC Petra thread with quite good effect.