Monogram

One great thing about those plastic canvas iPhone cases is that whatever you embroider on them will start to look worn out long before the plastic itself does. Maybe this is not so great if you produce only excellent work that satisfies you forever, but for fickle changeable me it's pretty ideal. I had a grouchy curse on my phone for a few months, but last night I removed it and replaced it with something a bit classier.

Some recent sifting through my mountain of pattern samples has left me feeling very grateful for Ravelry, without which I'd never really know when I made something or indeed whether it was me who made it. I don't sign or date my knitting the way I might a big piece of embroidery or patchwork or a garment (on a tag attached to a seam allowance inside). There are some tells that something was mine—obsessively adding yo-k2togs at the beginnings of edging rows; revisiting Mrs Montague's Pattern and its variations over and over; arranging almost everything into grids—but looking at all that work carefully produced but unsigned freaked me out a bit, and it came out in my noodling around on the phone case.

There is very little to this design other than that I signed and dated it. The alphabet I drew the letters from is in an old DMC booklet of many alphabets and borders; the letters are slightly too small to have effectively twined together, so I just nestled them close instead, and I think it still counts as a monogram. It looks pretty portable and I want to add it to other things now (towels? handkerchiefs? the insides of things I sew for myself?).

This is ecru DMC floss, and I doubt that it will stay looking pristine for very many weeks, but I also doubt that I won't change my mind and want to re-embroider again in the same timeframe.