We are heading home to Canada today after a wonderful two weeks away in Antigua and Barbuda. The weather has been beautiful and we have had a very relaxing time.

With Christmas around the corner, I will be throwing myself into decorating the house and getting those last minute gifts ready for Christmas.  I tend to shop early during the year as I see things people would like. This has an unfortunate consequence that I often forget what I have purchased by the time Christmas 

These past few weeks I have been working on the inner corners of the Mary Ellen. I intend to complete all four corners before starting on the center of the rug. I feel this will give me more points of reference to use to double check the placement of my center motifs.

It is fun watching the abstract flowers take shape behind the geometric corner motif. When working the flowers I have been working from the lightest color to the darkest color so that no dark threads end up under my light colors. In this way, they won't show through from the front.
 
Tonight, I should be able to finish the geometric shape in the left corner and begin the shape in the next corner.  

A couple of days ago I was able to finish the background for the inner border. I decided to stitch it all, leaving blanks where the flowers and vines will go and just get it all finished. I am running out of background thread and need to start a new skein, but wanted to make sure I could finish this section before I switch to the next skein. When I completed the last stitch, I had only one thread of an 8" strand of floss left! This worked out perfectly and the new skein can start in another area of the pattern where it won't touch.

It was not easy getting to this stage since, for some reason, there was one section of the background (shown below creating a butterfly looking shape) that I simply could not stitch properly. No matter how carefully I counted, I would make a mistake. I think in the end, I must have taken out the mistake and re-stitched the area about 15-20 times!

When this happens, I try not to despair. After the 5th or 6th re-stitch, I decided to put it down and go do something else for a while. This helped to clear my brain, but obviously not enough, since I continued to struggle. I put it aside for a few days before attempting again, then was able to finally stitch it correctly.
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Hopefully, this will be my last stitching hurdle, but I doubt it. Mistakes happen quite frequently and I am lucky that I am able to catch them quite quickly due to checking placement with the elements in the green border. When caught early, they are easy to fix, so I don't mind and tell myself it is a learning experience.

I have been spending a lot of time getting ready for the MET Show which is tomorrow. In the evenings however, I have still been taking the time to complete some more on my Mary Ellen rug. I have been working my way up the right side of the rug and have been reminding myself to check placement of the elements frequently so that I don't have to undo stitching.

So far, it has been going very well and I am enjoying seeing the pattern emerge. Now that I am constantly checking for placement of each element against the outer border, I haven't made a mistake. This definitely helps the stitching go faster.

I also finished some little Christmas stockings and sewed the backing onto them.  While doing so, I took photos and will be writing up a tutorial for that. Stay tuned, next week I will write up the tutorial and post photos of my adorable little stockings.

This post, I am going to be focusing on mistakes. We all make them, no matter how many years we have been doing this.  My biggest message to you is not to be afraid of making a mistake. It is always a learning experience and helps you remember to do something differently the next time. 
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As I have said before, I like to get my border set properly before I do the middle. Partly, this is to make sure my borders always look the way they should and partly so that I can use the border to determine if I have made a mistake when stitching the middle. When I do this, I can often catch a mistake early on (as long as I remember to double check the placement with the border!)

In the photo above, you will see my mistake quite easily. I began stitching the beige and a green line to border that. My green line should be lining up with the small green line at the top of the little square, but it is 1 row too high! At first, I was devastated that this had happened when I was so careful. Then I reminded myself that I had luckily caught it early on, so I could take out the stitches fairly easily and fix my mistake. 
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This I was able to do, then I continued to stitch. The lesson that I learned (again!) is to double check more often so that I can catch a mistake before I get too far past it. Someday, maybe I will remember this lesson better, lol!

​I made two more minor mistakes after this that I caught very quickly because I was double checking more often.

After approximately 2 weeks of stitching each evening for about 4 hours, I now have the inner border completed and the outer border almost complete on my Mary Ellen.

True to my usual method of stitching, I am trying to complete some of the boring stitching first so that it doesn't seem so overwhelming at the end of the stitching process.
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I stitched the inner border first in order to place the size of the pattern properly. I do this by stitching and counting each little motif until I have the correct amount across each side. Once this has been accomplished, I can rest easy that my rug will be stitched to the correct size and my borders will all match properly. There is nothing worse than stitching the entire middle of the rug and most of the border, only to find out that you have made a counting error and your border does not line up properly.

Two days ago I began stitching my next dollhouse rug, the Mary Ellen.  I saw this rug in the front hall of one of my friend's homes and asked permission to photograph it and create a pattern using the rug as inspiration. I created the pattern back in 2021, and stitched my little test square to approve the colors. I am happy to now be able stitch the entire rug. It is called Mary Ellen in honor of this friend.

As usual, I am starting in the bottom left corner of the rug and will be working my way around the borders before beginning the middle. The finished size of the rug will be approximately 5" x 7" (12.7cm x 17.8cm) so I chose a frame I had that had an opening of  6" x 9". There is about 1/2" space on either side and 1" on the top and bottom because I want to do a fringe on this one without having to move the rug around in the frame.

Stay tuned as I make more progress in coming weeks.

​After blocking the Mariko for about 3 weeks, I finally hemmed it today. Here it is finished at last!

This rug will be travelling with me to the Miniature Enthusiasts of Toronto's Miniature sale where I will have a table and will hopefully sell it.

I have had fun testing this pattern and definitely needed to change some colors to make them more visible. Now, each element stands out as much (or as little) as I want it to and I only needed to change two colors!

Tonight, I will work on getting my pattern ready to publish with the approved colors and will hopefully be able to post it sometime tomorrow. The pattern will be called Bianca.
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I have several rug patterns in the works that need testing, so I will now finish stitching this little pillow and begin testing my next rug pattern.

I hope you enjoyed my sneak peak into how I determine the final colors for a pattern.