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.