Scarlet Quince Ramblings

You may not have noticed in the picture of letters D-H that there’s a mistake, but it’s there. (It’s a small picture, but if you know where to look you can see it.) It slowly filtered through my brain as I was working on borders. These squares have a variety of borders, so if the horizontal lines don’t line up, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there has been a mistake, but D and E do have the same border, so the lines at the bottom of those letters should line up. And I realized one day that they didn’t. Arrrgh. Yep, I’ve now added counting to my list of un-talents. The E should have 3 unstitched rows inside the top border above the figures, but I left 4. So this makes the bottom border 1 row too low. I picked out the bottom border stitches while I thought about what to do. The E didn’t take that long to stitch so I briefly considered redoing the whole thing, but it was so much work (because of the way I’m stitching) to rip the border stitches out that I quickly decided against that. I also considered just moving the border up, but there should be 2 rows between the figures and the border, and if there was only 1 row, I decided it would look too squeezed. Here’s what I did instead. The left side is the original, the right is my redo.

I picked out about the rowest 3 rows of stitches in the swirly things, then replaced them with 2 rows of stitches that taper off faster. Some of the figures are now on the flat side on the bottom, but I don’t think anyone will notice. This pattern has odd places where things aren’t symmetric where you would expect them to be, and some of the curves are much jaggier than they really need to be. (Sometimes I have smoothed out the curves; sometimes I’ve followed the chart.) I don’t really have a lot of emotional investment in this particular piece, so I’m satisfied with this solution.