A Bluestocking Knits

This band of the "Virtue" sampler is getting worked in stages, a few threads of each color at a time: first the light-green "arcade" and adjoining leaves as I come to them, then the very-dark green ditto, adding the stems and tendrils, then the purplish grapes, and lastly filling in every other grape (why every other? I don't know, I've been tempted now and then to fill all of them …), with queen stitches.  Darlene O'Steen is the queen of queen stitches — strewth, there are queen stitches all over this piece!  Grapes, flowers in the central field, dividing bands worked horizontally, that border — thirty-nine flowers, each made of forty-five queen stitches!  I don't even want to do the math.  I like the way the finished queen stitch looks, but it's a bit of a pain to work, as for me it takes two hands to get it to lie flat.  Oh well — this is one of my favorite charts ever.  (Not that I'm resistant to a bit of tweaking.  I came to that dividing band between the two parts of the small alphabet and thought, "wait, just crosses? Darlene O'Steen did a dividing band in plain old cross stitch?!" and I worked it in Montenegrin, because there isn't any in this chart at all!)

These are O'Steen's original colors, all DMC, though I must say they look noticeably darker in real life than in the photograph on the cover of the chart!  I like the fabric a lot — there was no suggestion for it, and so I chose this 32-count “Milk Chocolate” from xJudesign, a lovely soft brown with a bit of depth from that hint of mottling.

I have not given up knitting, though it may seem so at times from the lack of it here — it occurred to me not long ago that I am actually running short on knitted socks (!), and so I dug out some KnitPicks Stroll in "Mountain Pass" that was a years-ago gift (thanks, mom!), and cast on for "Petty Harbour".  The pattern is fairly simple, though I admit that the dark-green of the yarn makes it hard to see which row I'm on, and I'm having to check off each row as I go.