Scarlet Quince News
July 2011

We occasionally get emails from people saying "Help! I haven't stitched with blended colors before -- how do I get started?" We have a new tutorial on blending colors which we hope will answer that question. Most of the material is covered elsewhere but you would probably have to read the whole tips section to find it, so now it's in one place! There is one technique which is new to our pages and we've included it below.

If you take a stitch and find that one color is sitting on top of the other, you can reset that stitch.

Original stitch

Take a spare needle and pull the stitch up a little.

Now insert the needle under just the color that was underneath. Pull the color that was on top, down again, while holding the other color up with the needle.

Pull the second color down and it will lie alongside the first color.

We have a pattern award this month! Linda Beadle, USA suggested Still Life: Fruit and Flowers by Severin Roesen, shown below, and we've sent her a copy of the pattern. Thank you, Linda!

We've discovered that there is a problem with some copies of two of our patterns. These are Baile en Tehuantepec - Diego Rivera (RIV002 and RIV002lg) and Lady with Fan (larger) - Gustav Klimt (KLI004-L and KLI004-Llg). Somehow, one symbol that should have been two musical notes got turned into one musical note which is almost identical to a musical note symbol already used in the pattern. We'd like to blame this on the computer but it's probably reading this and would take revenge. (Ha ha! Just kidding. Nice computer!) Anyway, we've contacted everyone who bought either of these patterns from us, but if you bought one of them from a shop or missed the email, please check your pattern and let us know if you need a replacement. It's on us.

N is for Needle
Jessie Willcox Smith

Still Life: Flowers and Fruit
Severin Roesen

Los Hijos de mi Compadre (Retratos de Modesto y Jesus Sanchez) - Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera