SNOW MAIDEN IN BLUE AND PURPLE Scroll down for descriptions.

Snow Maiden's  Description

One of the more challenging designs I have stitched,

I started Snow Maiden over a year ago. I reached a certain point, couldn't make up my mind what to do and stashed her in my unfinished drawer till last February.

In the dead of winter, I pulled her out of the drawer, rethought my original plan, eventually she and I came to terms and here she is, rising up over her village in the midst of a Russian winter.

Snow Maiden is 7.5" wide x 9.5" tall on white congress cloth 12" x 14".  I cut the congress 12.5" x 14.5" because I don't like tape. If you wish, you may turn under the edges 1/4" and hem them before putting the congress cloth on stretcher bars.

The kit is full-bodied: 12 different silks, 8 different flosses,  3 Kreinik braids for highlights, Burmilana for fur to keep her warm and a small accent of FyreWerks.

Snow Maiden's bling includes some of my best vintage jewels and pearls, along with little silver accents of beads, all sorted and keyed to the design in 8 little baggies.

The instructions are extensive: color copies of Snow Maiden without the beads as an aid to following the stitching patterns and Snow Maiden with all her beads to guide you through placement, a color appendix for Snow Maiden's face, 44 pages of instructions and 10 Oversize Graphs on 13" x 19" graph paper, plus appropriate title pages.

Snow Maiden is available as Snow Maiden Blue or Snow Maiden Purple. The colors are not bright, they have a subtle grayed effect to soften the image in keeping with Pushkin's vision through the distance of a snow storm.

My Adventure into AI

About the time I finished Snow Maiden, AI was in the news daily with its threats of power so clever, so vast it could yield forth the sums of human knowledge in seconds!

So I signed up for a ChatGPT account and asked for a poem about Snow Maiden in the fashion of Puskin.

I kept trying, 50+ times in all. The results were quite dreadful. Obvious, static and mechanical, with one great outcome for me.  I stopped dreading AI. Artificial Intelligence may be able to sum up numbers, solve some problems and beat the world's best Chess Players, but it has a way to go before it replaces all of the greatness of the human mind.

Snow Maiden's personal gift to me.

So What kept me from finishing Snow Maiden?

The fur. In short, I stitched all the fur in Turkeywork, began auditioning the beads and it was just so wrong: it sat up so high on the canvas, even though I had clipped it as short as I dared.

I ripped out all the Turkeywork and began playing around with my usual fur of brushed French Knots. Alas, it sat too low on the canvas.

Finally I had an idea: I used an easy stitch in a most unconventional way and finally I had my fur. It was right in so many respects, mostly in density and in height. I saw it was right as soon as I auditioned the vintage jewels.

The difficult part of a design is fitting the elements in their context, ie nothing is isolated. It took me a while to fit it all together gracefully, but finally enough struggles later it worked for me.

Why Snow Maiden?

Ever since I have known him (which is nearly forever) DH has been a fan of Pushkin, the Russian Shakespeare.

Pushkin wrote a poem about a sleigh in a snow storm and everywhere he looked endless white, then off in the distance a vision of Snow Maiden.

Read aloud in Russian the poem is musical.

How could I resist trying my hand at a Snow Maiden.

Snow Maiden's Village

From my very first thought about Snow Maiden, I knew that I would open her cape to reveal a Russian Village in the snow. Notice that the Village on its own is Bell-shaped. I've thought since my first drawings that it would make an elegant Ornament on its own.

In keeping with almost all my kits, I have given you ample threads; if you stitch all of Snow Maiden without too many rippings, you will likely have enough of the threads to make the bell ornament, should you wish to.

Deposits are non-refundable unless I can't fill the order.