Vicki saw Tony's Persian Tile design in the first issue of Needlepoint Now, really liked it, and knew that she would one day stitch it. She was in no particular hurry, but then several people on the ANG email list started talking about the piece and the possibility of doing all 12 of Tony's color choices and making a bellpull out of the piece. Vicki had no real interest in doing a bellpull, but that got her creative juices flowing. She loves doing geometrics and thought she could do several "tiles" in a pattern, put some other stitches around them and that it might come out fairly well.

She started playing around with different patterns and came up with the idea of having one tile in the center of the piece, with 4 others arranged around the center forming a square shape. That left 4 blank areas where she knew she could put another type of stitching. Then she decided that a border was needed to give the overall piece a diamond shape, since she much prefers diamonds to squares.

Vicki found this a really fun piece to do and it lent itself very well to being altered. She loves using the color of the canvas as part of the overall design, so she knew that she wanted blank areas in the piece. And that's also why she decided on the black Congress cloth for this piece. She loves stitching on black - she thinks it can really make the colors pop. The hardest thing about this piece, aside from coming up with the arrangement of the tiles, was deciding what colors to use. Vicki originally planned to use 5 different Waterlilies in complimentary tones, but couldn't find 5 that really went well together, so she decided to just use one color of Waterlilies and to do the centers of all the tiles except for the center one in a solid color.

She finally decided on using the color Painted Desert, since it had several different colors in it, and then she decided to use Needlepoint Inc. silk for the remainder of the silk floss since she loves their colors.

One of the easiest decisions was what to put in the blank areas - Vicki knew from the beginning that she wanted to use Jean Hilton's 16 pointed star. She loves the look of that stitch and knew it would look terrific with the tiles. She decided to do the first layer of all 4 stars with the Waterlilies and then use a different color of silk for the second layer of each star, with the final layer worked with the Kreinik #8 braid.

The final decision was the border around the piece. Using Jean Hilton's "Borderlines" for inspiration, Vicki found what she thought would be the perfect pattern, so did all the counting and got all the spacing figured out. The particular pattern she chose starts out with a simple half scotch stitch, and she did that using the Waterlilies. But once she got that done, she realized that adding anything else would be superfluous. It looked great just the way it was. That definitely made finishing the piece go a lot faster.

Vicki really enjoyed making all the design and color decisions as much as she did the actually stitching, and was extremely happy with the way this piece came out.