Sarah's Band Sampler

I have finally finished my band for Sarah. I must admit that this one was a little harder to think of than the previous ones I have worked on, but I think it fits in with the theme.

In the package for this sampler was a little book with a card as a cover. On this card is a wonderful picture of a Chinese Emperor standing in a garden in front of a building. So I decided to use this card as the inspiration for my band. On the Emperor's robe is border featuring a key pattern, so I took this key, mirrored it horizontally, then again vertically, to achieve my pattern.

I found single crossed eyelets ( a stitch I had not done before) in a pulled work book and I felt that this would work beautifully on the fabric supplied. At first I graphed it so the key pattern was 3 squares wide. I wanted to use the eyelets in a checkerboard effect, but when I started to graph it out, the design was too wide for the sampler. So then I graphed it only one square wide, so each square would be an eyelet.

The eyelets were worked in 2 strands of DMC stranded thread, & when finished it looked a little bland. I needed to add another colour to give it a lift. I tried to outline the key shape, but as it was 5 threads wide, backstitching over 2 threads did not work mathamateically. I tried over 1 thread & also over 5 threads, both of which did not look good either. So in the end I worked tiny cross stitches over the single cross in the center of each eyelet.