A Bluestocking Knits

The "Philadelphia Vine, 1755" sampler from The Scarlett House.  I fell head over heels for this the moment I saw it.  The colors! the silks with each other, and the silks on the grey-brown linen! the neatly-turned corners!  Oh my.  Being more than a little late to the reproduction-samplers party, I was surprised to see that this is a nearly-brand-new chart, since so many of the ones I've fancied have been long out-of-print and required combing through second-hand sales to find!

Surprisingly, I had no trouble getting the same fabric as recommended, though that was after I discovered that Weeks Dye Works' "Confederate Grey" is now called simply "Grey".  The harder part was getting the silks.  Since the colors were what caught me in the first place, I wanted to not substitute for any of them — but fate was against me.  The three Dinky Dye silks were quite easy, but Gloriana "Summer Gold" was in short supply, and I could not find "Evergreen" for love or money, and I even came to the point of figuring out DMC substitutions, but then I decided that "Evergreen Dark" seems actually pretty close.  Gloriana's "Old Red Barn" was another problem, as it looked quite, well, barn-ish in the pictures I saw, and so when I found a shop in Michigan that had the "Evergreen Dark" and the two other Gloriana reds I figured were most beautiful, I nearly jumped with joy.  The colors above are Dinky Dye's "Cottesloe" (the creamy-white), "Saltbush" (light green), and "Seagrass" (dark green), and Gloriana's "Summer Gold," "Evergreen Dark" (dark blue-green), and the two deep reds, "Rosewood" and "Cranberry."

These last are very similar, and probably could easily be substituted for one another without much problem.  This skein of "Rosewood" seemed a little deeper to me, and didn't have quite as much variation as the "Cranberry," wh. I now have a full skein of for another project (!).

And after that, this was a pleasure to stitch.  I almost wish that I'd had longer to enjoy the process!

The chart is clear and easy-to-read, and aside from those little gold "plusses" in the lower floral border being red on the model and gold on the chart there were no inconsistencies.

The over-one section looks much more cramped on mine than on the model in Scarlett House's photo — I remember seeing somewhere the recommended fabric being 30- or 35-count, not the 40 that is on the chart now, so perhaps the model was worked at a slightly larger scale? 

Curiously, considering the trouble that I had in getting hold of it, there was quite a lot of the silk floss left over — maybe even enough to do the whole thing again.  (I did not, by the way, have any issue with the silk being wound on a paper bobbin this way — no creases, dents, etc.  I suppose that the end closest to the center will have some creases on it when I get there, but I've never found that to be an issue with my cotton floss, as once it's worked on the fabric, it smooths itself out.  I do usually wet-block my pieces in cotton floss, though I suppose I won't risk it with the silk here.)