Page 1 of 3 complete! Well, not counting the backstitching of course.
I waffled on doing the backstitching on this page before continuing, but eventually decided that I'm going to get all the cross stitching done first. For three reasons: 1, there's metallic backstitching on this section; 2, there was enough backstitch lines that continued up into the next page that I didn't want to start them in the middle; and 3, at least one of the lines from 2 was couched, which definitely can't be started and stopped in the middle.
Now I just need to decide if I'm going back for some more pages on Hidden Harbor. Probably.
About one week later...
Actually, it was only worked on 4 days this week and only one of those was a weekend, since we picked up The Witness on Wednesday, and that's basically how I spent my Thurs/Fri/Sat this week. Still a good amount of progress, and much more than I would have been able to accomplish had I continued using parking.
Decided that I wanted to do some work on Elegance this weekend, to take a break from Hidden Harbor. I did a little bit of the cream on Saturday, but the bulk of the cream and all of the light yellow were done today.
I decided to go back to go back to Travelling Salesman with this one. I wasn't liking the vertical lines I was getting from parking, plus this is a WHOLE lot faster. The pattern is split into thirds, so I've only run through the bottom third into this calculation. I've already finished off the largest two colours in this section. There were 8818 stitches (not including the stitches that I'd already finished by parking), and the top two colours make up 2053 stitches (23.3%)... did I mention how fast Salesman is?
You can make out where the large flower on the side of her robe is going to end up in the cream near the center. I'm stitching the colours with the most stitches first, so that I'm less likely to make mistakes while counting, so it'll be a bit before there's much more added to the flower.
Unfortunately, the only cross stitch store in town is moving to another town 1.5 hours away. Fortunately, she had a moving sale 25% off kits and charts. This was one of the ones I picked up yesterday. It came with the hoop.
I always underestimate the amount of time these things will take; I figured about 4 hours, I think it actually took closer to 7-8.
Going to bring this in to work and hang it next to my un-moving rock.
Next section completed! Which puts me at 8 out of 104 pages completed, or 8.02% done :)
I bought a new scroll frame this week that should be wide enough to fit this piece (sideways, but what can you do?). I don't technically feel like I really need it until I finish off the next four pages (that's about what will fit in the Q-snap), but it'll be good to get it on the new frame.
I was having a REALLY hard time getting a shot of this one that wasn't super blurry for some reason. I've got three colours left in this section. This is what a long weekend will get you :)
Those cliffs on the right look a whole lot better when you zoom out. I'm very pleased with colour of the grass on the second ledge; the darkening of the green towards the right side is very satisfying.
I didn't think the mountain would be quite so... pink. But I double checked the mockup on HAED's website, and it definitely looks pink. So I'm pretty sure I've used the right colour there.
I thought that the second mountain would be a little bit higher and quite visible in this section, but it looks like just the very tip-top of it's going to be visible until I get a little bit lower.
The thread on the back behind those cliffs is THICK. There are a lot of colours with only a couple stitches in that section, so there's a lot of carried threads in the back. You can see there are a lot more waste knots on that side.
Another section completed... I thought that there would be the tops of those purple mountains in this section: I think the small darker pink section right in the middle on the bottom is the very top of the right mountain, but I'll have to get farther into the bottom section here to confirm.
I would post more frequent WIP shots, but the problem is that these sections are made up of a lot of very light colours, and it's very hard to tell the difference between what's stitched and what's still empty cloth, so you can't really see anything in the WIP shots.
I also picked up a copy of The World of Cross Stitching magazine this week, and spent a couple hours working on this piece instead of Hidden Harbor. This is supposed to be inserted in a cut-out greeting card, but I haven't made the effort to assemble the card yet.
