Do you use embroidery to embellish your projects? Lately, I have been looking for websites with basic pictures and explanations of the different stitches, as well as tutorials.
The two I have found that I really like are Mary Corbet's Needle n Thread, which has great video tutorials, and Sarah's Hand Embroidery Tutorials, which is very well organized and the tutorials are all very easy to follow. Sarah's blog is all tutorials, and Mary Corbet's is a blog about her needlework (she does some amazing stuff - but WAYYYY out of my league!).
Anyway, when I am wanting to spice up a project with embroidery, I often think - what stitches should I use? I mean, its not like I've been doing this very long, so I don't really know what different stitches even look like. So I thought I'd make a sampler. But this one is made with ALL running stitches.
Sarah's got the stitch tutorials grouped in "families", that is, running stitches with all it's variations, chain stitches with all variations, etc. Very well organized.
So I just went down the line in the Running Stitches group and used all of them!
Next I really want to do a chain stitch sampler. There are so many really really cool looking stitches that are in that group!
I have several other really cool projects in the works first, though.
It's fun knowing that if I get stuck trying to figure out what stitches will look good on my projects that I can just look up my sampler and pick one! My very own sampler. Who'd've thunk it?!!!