Dorcas Haynes: Ta Dah!

The finish was a quiet breath as I pulled tight the last stitch and buried my thread in the back. No big feelings, just a pleasant satisfaction that I did it. And I am 2 days shy of month’s end which means I judged my time very well and didn’t have to rush or compromise to finish my goal. That, almost more than finishing Dorcas, is quite satisfying. How did it go? Well…

Friday night, I finished stitching the acorn band.

Those acorn tops were really not too bad. A little fiddly, but the detached buttonhole stitch not too time consuming once you get going with it and you can fill in the area pretty quickly actually. Some of my caps are better than others but for the most part I’m happy with my consistency and didn’t redo anything from before.

This morning, I spent a bit of time choosing colors and watching bullion knot tutorials to remind myself what I was about, and it took about 2 hours to fill in the flower centers with the bullion knots. I did take out my first one but the restitch wasn’t a huge improvement so maybe it didn’t matter too much. Anyway, they came out pretty cute.

I was 1 stitch short on the flower on the left hand side so had to get out all my colors to add a stitch’s worth of pattern continuation. I’m glad I did that. It looks more balanced.

The only think I would really redo at this point is improve the spacing of the verse and spread the little geometric motifs to the right so the verse band lines up better on the right side. But I did mostly follow the chart there so I guess that’s how Dorcas did it.

So! She is done! Here are photos of my favorite bits.

I’ll try to get my color list and method posted at some point and there are also more words to write about my adventure than I want to get into here.

I’ve already started something new and spent a good chunk of time this morning evaluating WIPs. I have no idea what comes next but whatever it is, I’m excited for something new!