First I Drink the Coffee

At spring Market, Beth from Heartstring Samplery introduced the second design in her Magical Elixer series, Coffee Quaker. When I first saw it and saw that my Instagram friend Natasha was organizing a SAL, I knew I needed to stitch it. It’s been a long time since I jumped right on a bandwagon, but I thought this was such a fun piece that it just had to be stitched.

I ordered the called for fabric 40ct Stars Hollow from R&R. Although I’m not a huge fan of R&R, I made an exception because of the color name. I mean, who can resist a Gilmore Girls reference? I also ordered the three or four threads I didn’t already have in my stash. I had decided early on that I didn’t love the bright green and bright red that were included but went ahead and ordered those two colors so I could make a decision once I had them in front of me with my fabric. I still didn’t love them.

Once I started stitching I realized that one of the threads called for was way too close to my fabric color, so I switched it out. In fact, I went through my thread inventory and pulled any colors I thought were “coffee-inspired”. I did use the called for Weeks Palomino, GAST Apple Cider, GAST Picnic Basket, GAST Dark Chocolate, and Classic Colorworks Hazelnut. I decided to add a green, but a much more muted green. I chose GAST Chamomile after auditioning several greens with some test stitches. I really wanted to use my GAST Zombieflesh, because it seemed appropriate, but alas Chamomile won out.

The threads I added were: GAST Cinnamon, Weeks Mocha, GAST Roasted Chestnut, GAST Chamomile, GAST Espresso Bean, Weeks Swiss Chocolate. That Swiss Chocolate is my absolute favorite. I most definitely need to get another skein of it to have on hand. Since I switched out some colors, I had to do a little bit of rearranging in order to keep the arrangement of lights and darks.

Here’s a map of which colors I used where.

One of the other changes I made was with the infamous basket. A lot of people in the Facebook group had no idea what this was supposed to be. In sampler stitching, this is most often a fruit basket/bowl. When I got to looking at it closely in the chart I noticed that Beth had put in some lighter colored “lines” in each of the “fruits”. So I decided that these must be coffee beans! In order to highlight the individual beans I did alternate colors of them so you could see they were actual individual beans. It took a while to get my colors all sorted out, but I love love love how it turned out. It may be my favorite thing on the sampler.

I do also love that bird on the right hand side with the coffee bean in his beak though. The only other change I made was to follow Emily‘s lead and add an extra stitch to the bird under the 17 so his beak was a tad longer and looked like a beak.

I’m so happy with how this whole piece came out and it was an absolute joy to stitch. I started it on April 1st and finished it on July 2nd. Such a super fun piece. I definitely want to stitch her other pieces in the series:

Coffee Saves Lives …