The Guardian

Another two colours down. Another big one, and a small one. I am almost done with that bottom row, there are a couple more colours to go there, and then I'll start looking at the second row. Once I get those two filled in, I should be able to scroll the piece up and not have to worry as much about which colours I'm doing in which order. 

The castle's got another colour added to it, and a bunch of pink confetti down the back of the tail.

31 colours left to go!

The Guardian

Three colours done today, but two of them were larger ones. You can start to see its toes, and the feathers on the bottom of the wing are starting to form too. Also starting to see the outline of where the castle's going (and that's just with one extra colour on the castle).

33 colours left to go! If I can get done by March 20th, I can finally enter one of the r/CrossStitch contests!

The Guardian

The tail is getting really well defined there. So I kind of messed up a bit and had two colours in the same file: one was an upside down T and one was a bold upside down T, so when I transcribed it I didn't notice that there were two different upside down T's. They were both in separate sections of the piece and I noticed in time, so I didn't stitch the incorrect colours, but it means that I miscounted when I was figuring how many colours are left.

There are 36 colours left. For real this time.

The Guardian

Got another two (green) colours done! That bottom left corner's really filling in nicely. Cross my fingers that I get to work on something other than green at some point this weekend? :) 39 colours left to go.

The Guardian

I like flipping back and forth between the previous progress pic and the current one to get an idea of what's changed between them. Only finished off two colours today (and one of them I'd started on yesterday), but there's quite a bit more green filled in. 41 colours left.

I was working on the second colour and I totally mixed up my colours at some point. But they were close enough (471 vs 3348) that I decided to just leave it and use the right colour for the remaining stitches, because I didn't know at what point I'd switched over and I didn't want to rip out all of them. Then I get to the end of the colour and realize that the original floss I'd used that I thought was incorrect, was actually the right colour after all. I left it. I don't think you can tell.

The Guardian

It really didn't seem like I was making much progress at all... until I compared this pic with the last one (and the original one I'd taken when I found the piece). There's a lot more stuff going on now, and you can see a lot more of the main shapes of the piece. The only thing I think that's not really well defined now is the castle. I mean, you can see where the turrets are going to go, but its outline is not yet defined.

I'm doing a lot of the greens and purples of the ground right now: my scroll frame is not quite tall enough to work on the entire piece at once, and I was getting tired of scrolling up and down, so instead of working on the colours from the least stitches up (which I started doing originally, so there are no longer any colours left with less than 100 stitches), I've picked colours that are part of the bottom part of the piece, filling in those bottom rows, then I can just scroll the whole thing up to finish off those last colours.

There are 43 colours left to go, which still seems like a lot; I'd originally started with 82, so I'm not even halfway through, but at the same time the three biggest ones have already been dealt with.

Dachshund Blues

Didn't I say it would be done on Saturday? And I didn't even do any work on it last night. Above is of course the before and after backstitching. And as always, the backstitching really makes the piece pop, picking out the details. I like the whiskers on the left cat, where they change from black to white depending on the cross stitch colour in the background. It's a nice effect.

I'll probably be returning to The Guardian now, because I really do want to get that piece finished since it's been sitting so long.

Dachshund Blues

It's getting close now! You can easily see where all three cats are now. Four colours left to go, then the backstitching. This will almost probably not be done by tomorrow night, but it should be finished on Saturday I should think.

Dachshund Blues

I'm not sure if the keyboard is supposed to be part of the dog, or if it's just resting on her back. I'm going to say that it's not actually part of the dog, so that I can say that the dog is complete! Except for her collar. And the one white stitch for the shine on her nose. But those are left on purpose (there aren't very many green stitches, so I'm leaving those until near the end, probably just before the backstitching).

Dachshund Blues

It's a lot more obvious now where the dog is! I also may have been a little bit optimistic when I thought that 1/4 was already done last time, either that or I just didn't get as much done today.

Dachshund Blues

When the spouse is away... there's no one around to remind you that there are plenty of WIPs already started and you should really be working on those instead of starting on something new.

At least this one's not that big (I think this is already a good quarter of the cross stitches done), and I don't see any reason why it won't be completely finished before hubby gets back in a week. So at least I'll have something to show for it!

The Guardian

I've been working on the border colours for The Guardian this past week. I say colours and not just the border as I finished off all the stitches in those colours, even where they showed up in the main piece.

Once I finished the cross stitches, I decided to just finish off the border, so I started backstitching it too. I don't usually do any backstitching until the very end of the piece, but in this case the border is very separate from the rest, and I wanted to be rid of it! You can see the line where the backstitching stops: the scroll frame I'm using isn't big enough to show the whole piece at once, so that's what I had visible for the bottom section. The border really does look so much nicer with the backstitching defining the strands of the Celtic knot.

I also drew grid lines on for the center since I'll be jumping around a lot. I'm hoping this will speed up a bit now that the border's done: one of the colours in the border had over 5000 stitches!