Another hanky in the works

When I went through my stash of hankies I realized that I'm out blue flowers, so I got to thinking that I ought to do matching edgings for the hankies I have and finish them off, so I can buy more with blue flowers. Here's the current assortment.

I'm thinking that I'll use a double bobbin shuttle for the pink and blue flowers so that I can repeat the colour on the edging. I haven't come up with a design that I like that I can do that with so I selected a hanky with a single flower to work with.

I chose this pink flower and then went looking for threads to match. Out of the threads I have none of them are quite right. There isn't much of the deep pink and the pale pink thread is a little off. The pink flower has a bit too much yellow in it.

The variegated pink might work, but then I'd have to pair it up with a green to match. The green leaves are a yellow/green and not a blue/green like the thread. The best match in the greens is a yellow/green variegate. I don't like mixing 2 variegates together. Too often they don't quite work and I don't want to tat 44 inches of lace that doesn't look quite right.

You'd think that with nearly a 100 partial balls of thread, finding a match would be easier. Nearly running out of thread on the last hanky has me wary of starting another one without being sure of enough to complete the job. One of the other options I have is a pink green variegate that on the ball looks like a perfect match.

Once I had the thread chosen, I opted for using a traditional design, just to get things going. Designing edgings isn't my strong point. When I do an edging I want it to be fairly wide. I don't like skimpy edgings. Of course wider edgings take longer to complete and use more thread so it's a bit of a balancing act.

I've started, using what I think of as a vine edging, which is just a variation of a ring and chain edging, but it's skimpy. The edging makes a wider design if it's mirrored back to back, but that will mean playing around with the corner treatment which I have already done for the first side. I like the corner the way it is.

My options are to put the mirror image on the inside, and play round with how it connect to the first corner, or mirror it on the outside and just follow around the outline of the existing corner. Of course I could always just repeat the edging part and just join it to the existing corner.

Decisions, decisions, what shall I do? I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait and see how I feel when the first row is done. Yet another reason why I don't like multi row edgings.

Of course it's February and I really out to design another heart.

Have I mentioned before I have the attention span of a flea?