After sleeping on it, I realized that the problem with the eternity-heart motif wasn’t the motif itself, but the spacing. I had been threading up straight draw, and as a result the pattern repeated every half-inch, crowding the motifs together.
Unfortunately there was no way to do both the knot and the heart in 24 shafts and still leave 4 shafts left over for the broken twill background, so I eliminated the heart (heartless me) and went with the eternity knots, spaced about 1″ apart. I like this a lot better:
Again, you’ll have to zoom in to see the eternity-knot pattern.
I like this a lot more; it’s not nearly as distracting. And it leaves room for embellishment (beads anyone?) should I decide to go that route. I could see pearls or small crystal hearts or gold beads. Or nothing at all.
Are you set on gold thread for the eternity knot? Because I think the clash would be toned down to enhance if the cloth was a tone on tone pattern, while the double happiness ribbon could be a rich gold color. Or if not tone on tone, then a very close tone, like palest yellow to white.
FYI: if you click through to my blog, you might be interested in my comments on Outliers. I found your comments on it interesting enough that I decided to read it, and found it both fascinating and frustrating.
Much nicer.