Petit point in progress for a pole screen

Over the last couple of days I've been working on a little project for the Blue and White Room -- a pole screen.  I've got a McQueenie Miniatures kit I picked up from eBay, and I've designed a piece to fit -- it's 51 stitches square on 40 count silk gauze, and I based it on a Ming dynasty dais cloth, so it's the right period :)

It's actually coming along really quickly, even though I have to count like the dickens when I stitch it (this is the second time I've started it -- the first time I made a basic mistake in counting and tried to rearrange things around my mistake and then I chose a colour for the central motif that was far too close to the background.  It was really ghastly!) 

And here's the McQueenie kit -- I love their kits, even though the mahogany they use is not period for projects before about 1730. I'll do my usual -- stain it oak to tone down the red and see how that goes :)  They're all well constructed and go together easily.

It's a really pretty screen design.

You can buy McQueenie kits either directly from their website or from Minimum World.

(There's a wonderful article on the history of fire guards or pole screens in The Antiquarian.)