Twilight Silhouette

It is done! Before and after backstitching:

There's a lot more fairy dust after the backstitching. There were a lot more French knots than I thought going into this. I didn't think there were quite that many French knot stars.

The French knots actually weren't that bad. It was the blending filament that was the worst. It was trying to curl up on itself, so it would knot easily when being drawn through the fabric, but it also needed three strands at once, which meant both that it was even more prone to knotting, and the three threads always wanted to sit in the needle at different points because of the curling. I ended up doing one strand at a time, and just doing all the backstitching thrice.

The black backstitching I did the same thing with, but for a different reason: most of the black was one strand, but there were a couple places where it used two strands (the sparkles) and four strands (the curls on the wing tips). I didn't want to have to come back and lock down a new set of threads, so since there were so few places with more strands and they were so close to where the single strand stitches were supposed to go, I just did those with the single strand as well, just going over the stitches multiple times to make up the weight.

The difference in colour in the black cross stitches worked itself out, so I'm pretty confident in saying that the thread faded from me handling it. Unfortunately - though the cross stitches now match - the black half stitches were done a lot later and weren't handled near as much... and they're a lot darker still. I'm hoping washing the piece evens everything out.

Also, I'm sure I've probably missed at least one blade of grass (it was hard to keep track as I went), but oh well. It's done. I'm not going back now. So there.