I have put a few hours into Tim's Christmas Stocking in the last week. Unfortunately, I came to a halt because I ran out of the Kreinik metallic thread. As I bought this as a kit with threads and stitching guide, I was a bit surprised to run out of thread. I think if I'd realised that I could run out of thread, I might have put more thought into how I was stitching. It's possible that the way I am stitching is using more thread than if I found a neater, more conservative way of stitching.
It hasn't been super easy to solve this thread supply issue. Canberra doesn't have a big enough population to warrant more than one or two shops that carry embroidery threads. I visited or rang all of the local stores and they did not have this speciality thread in stock.
I looked on-line but as I only needed one spool of thread it seemed excessive to pay high postage costs for the one small spool. So, I sat down with my other tapestry projects and tried to work through all my thread needs to see if I could summon up a large enough order to warrant the postage costs. I spent hours on this! The lengths one has to go to. Eventually I found that The Ferry tapestry probably needed a few more skeins of soft cotton and the cat tapestry needed some more paternayan wool. Finally, I ordered from the Embroidery Den in Melbourne, which has an extensive range of threads for sale on-line.
After I'd been through all my bags and thread supplies I came across this post on a stitching blog....which told me about excel spreadsheets you can download to keep records of threads in your stash. Naturally enough I downloaded them! It certainly would have made my purchasing much easier if I had an accessible record system. Not sure though - it would probably take hours to record all these details and then keep them up-to-date. Hard to know on balance what is more effective.
Previous posts
On the frame - Tim's stocking (April 2011)
Tim's Christmas stocking (April 2011)
