Thursday, July 28, 2016

July Smalls SAL Post!

My regular readers have already seen all of these, but here they are again, all rounded up for an official Smalls SAL post. :)

Bride's Tree ornament #7 (Brooke's Books)

Bride's Tree ornament #8 (Brooke's Books)

Father Winter Ornament (Teresa Wentzler freebie)

I'll be continuing with the Brooke's Books ornaments next month. And who knows what other cute things will draw my attention... :)

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

a trio of new starts! (and one finish)

Whoops, so much for working exclusively on one project this month! Beaded Dragonfly Tile got pushed aside after the last update I posted on it, and I've managed to start three new things since then. And I finished one of them! Mainly because it was tiny, haha.

My start and finish was a Teresa Wentzler freebie, Father Winter Ornament. I actually stitched this once before, but ended up giving it away in an ormanent exchange. But my wife still wanted it, so I just whipped up another. Only took about a day's worth of stitching and it's lovely!


But before that, I started the Durene Jones Fantasy SAL (exclusive from Lakeside Needlecraft in the UK) because I saw some lovely WIP pictures on Facebook. It's just the border so far, so I'm really hoping that the rest is just as pretty! I know, I know, I said I wouldn't do any more mystery SALs, but I also said I wouldn't buy more nail polish and that also ended in failure. Haha.

Got my circles done and started a bit on the main part of the border. This is stitched on Crafty Kitten's May 2015 limited edition. :)


And then I started a project I've had in the back of my mind for a long time! This is the beginning of Ghost Story by Dark Side of the Moon, which I think is long out of business. :(


It's pretty tough to find any pictures of the DSotM designs if you search because the results are flooded with cross stitch adaptations of the iconic Pink Floyd album cover, haha. So here's the model picture!


The model fabric looks like a Picture This Plus dark grey (maybe Dusk or Echo?) but I'm stitching mine on PTP Haunted, which has some purple and blue tones added to the grey. 

Plus COME ON she's a GHOST, she has to go on the fabric called Haunted, right?!?

So in short, monthly goals are shot, I don't care, I do what I want, YOLO, etc. So there! :p

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

bride's tree ornament #7

And here's the seventh Bride's Tree ornament, since I skipped it last time!


I didn't really make any changes, except to leave off the top and bottom rows of the brown at the bottom. Once I finished the part you see, I liked it that way, so I decided I was finished. :)

Plus, to be perfectly honest, I'm a bit paranoid about running out of this replacement brown color, so I'm trying to conserve as much as I can. :)

And a little bit of stashing this month - I needed to get the grey linen to replace the aida in the kit that's pictured, so I picked up the rest of my wishlist while I was at it. My FIL has wanted the kit done for a while, but my wife pretty much never stitches anymore (she's a knitter) so I decided to make it for him. :)

Sorry about the awful pic here, my camera lens must be dirty...


Just a few little things, really. I have a bit of a thing for mistletoe thanks to fandom stuff, and the wreath was just too cute to pass up. Then there's the next part of the Jeannette Douglas "By the Sea" sampler, a DMC Coloris leaflet - I didn't even know DMC had made more variegated colors! - and a couple of skeins of DMC I was missing. Definitely got used up on Mirabilia patterns. :)

I also ordered some fabric from Crafty Kitten for my birthday, and I know my wife ordered a few pieces from Picture This Plus as well... starting to think maybe I need to put a complete stop to fabric stashing, since I can only use so much in one year! But in my defense, this is the only "stashy" fabric I've purchased since my last birthday - everything else has been for specific designs and is already kitted up or used up!

Yeah, yeah, justification, I know. Time to get back to stitching from stash, you know? :)

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

bride's tree ornament #8 finished!

Just a quick post with a little finish! The border on Beaded Dragonfly Tile was getting to me, so I switched over to the next bride's tree ornament to give myself a break. The new ornament was super simple, so it was done in just two days. :)


There are some extra shapes connected to the round pink flowers (the ones with the white lace around the bottom), but I didn't like how it looked, so I left it off. I can always add it later if I want. :D

Back to the dragonflies...

(Oops, did I forget to post my finish of #7 in this series? Oh well, I'll do that next time!)

Saturday, July 09, 2016

the toughest border...

Finally made some good progress on Beaded Dragonfly Tile, which hasn't come out to play in almost a year. I'm devoting the rest of July to this small but exceedingly complex beauty, and I wonder just how much I can get done in the next three weeks...

The last time I posted about Dragonfly, it looked like this:


I made a little more progress after that, but I never posted about it since it wasn't all that much. So some of the progress shown below was done about a year ago, but I still feel like I got a fair amount done over this past week!


I quickly realized that this project was going to head right back to UFO land if I had to keep threading needles every three stitches (seriously, those flower buds in the border have about 12 different colors in them!), so I made myself a needle organizer.


This is pretty much the cheap and crappy version of the expensive Pako brand needle organizer. Sure, it's ugly, but it was practically free! I just wrote the key on a piece of foamcore board, cut it to size, and removed the posterboard covering along the left side. (Just cut through the posterboard layer with something like an exacto knife and peel it off.) I still have to change colors every two seconds, but at least I'm not spending over half of my stitching time threading needles over and over!

This project is still a massive pain and honestly, I wish the border was different on each side instead of having to do the same tedious pattern four times in a row. But I'm not giving up SO THERE. :p

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

June Smalls SAL

Regular readers have already seen these, but I finished three of the Bride's Tree ornaments in June!




For more details, check out my Brooke's Books tag. :)

Friday, July 01, 2016

Geranium blooms & monthly goals!

All done! I guess I'll let the pictures do the talking. :)





As always, the colors are a bit off, but I can't seem to adjust them well enough to get an accurate represention of both the fabric and the stitching. Imagine the fabric as a lighter, more subtle version of the color Jungle Boogie by Silkweaver, and that's about right. The parts of the fabric that show up as almost white in the photos are actually yellow!

Didn't really make any changes here except for a few cosmetic details:
- used DMC 356 to backstitch the skin
- changed the size 6 beads to similar (but darker) size 8 beads

Also, I'm kind of surprised by how small she is, even on 28ct fabric!


And no, I don't have a monster hand, mine's just about average for an adult woman. :3

~~~

While I'm here, how about a goals update?

Here's what I had for June:

- finish Bride's Tree Ornament 4 - YES!
- finish Bride's Tree Ornament 5 - YES!
- finish Bride's Tree Ornament 6 - YES!
- hardanger SAL part 5 - I quit the SAL, at least for now, so this doesn't count :p
- hardanger SAL part 6 - ditto
- start Geranium Pixie - pretty much finished it all in June too :p

So here's what I want to do in July:
- finish Bride's Tree Ornament 7
- complete half of the Beaded Dragonfly Tile border

After seeing what about 20 days of focused stitching can do (finish an entire small Mira, that's what!), I thought I'd turn that laser focus to another project. Hopefully this is a realistic goal, haha. :)