Elegance

Foreground is complete! Now all that's left is 35 rows of flowers and branches. It's all coming together now!

Elegance

Her face is done! Her eyes look weird though, just being a single pixel atm (technically, there's a white stitch next to each black stitch, but they're hard to see against her light skin): the backstitching should make them look less weird.

The dove is almost done as well, just the last couple of feathers on that front wing. Her hair's a mess of blue and black, then it's just a bunch of background flowers and branches before finishing.

Elegance

Ah, the organized chaos that is full-width parking!

This is the first 20 rows of the last page done, which is about 110 rows total (I say about, because I think there are a couple rows that have no stitches on them).

The half stitches on the flowers are kind of annoying because of all the switching colours. I'm still liking the look of the stitches with this technique though, so nice and consistent.

Christmas Village Ornaments

Well, that's all the crosses done. I'm not going to do the backstitches etc. until either all six have their crosses done, or I can find a frame for it that's not going to interfere with previous embellishments (either a small enough scroll frame, or stretcher bars).

I am pleased with how the stitches look though. It takes longer, but I think it might be worth it, at least for certain patterns. I'm going to see how well it works on Elegance.

I'm probably going to put this set away for a bit, as I really only started it to test out the new pattern program.

Christmas Village Ornaments

Only 10 more to go!

I was thinking that I'd finish this one off (backstitching and everything) before doing the next one, but I'm not so sure about the squishing/pulling that might happen if/when those sections go inside the q-snap. So it's looking like I'll probably get the crosses of all six done first.

Christmas Village Ornaments

Getting close to that right side now. I really do like the way the stitches look done like this, but for bigger pieces I'm not sure I'd have enough needles to hold all that thread! This is only 84 stitches tall, but I had over 30 needles going at once at some points. I'm thinking I may be able to cut up bigger patterns into diagonal sections and still have the stitches looking good.

Christmas Village Ornaments

Half done. Santa's pretty much done, and so is the lady.

I realized after I was quite far in that the darkest yellow in the windows was supposed to be three strands instead of two. I didn't want to switch it up halfway through, so this panel is going to use two strands for that colour throughout. I may use three on the other panels though.

Christmas Village Ornaments

Got another 10 columns down. You can definitely see the building now, as well as Santa's sleigh and some bags of presents. I'm hoping to hit halfway this weekend, especially since Monday's a holiday.

Parking always looks so messy, but I swear there's a system there!

Treble Clef - Latch Hook

Was browsing at my local Michael's this week. Unfortunately, their cross stitch selection is 1 - small and 2 - never changing. I've kept from caving and picking up a latch hook previously... but this time I wasn't strong enough!

These kits don't come with the hook, but I've got a half dozen picked up from various thrift shops, so that wasn't an issue (though I did have to spend a bunch of time to find where I'd stashed them).

One problem with this kit was that the picture on the front of the box was not the same as the pattern inside. I don't know how easy it is to see in the picture, but there are six colours: white, black, blue, dark turquoise, turquoise, and light turquoise. You can see on the bottom that they've got the turquoises fading into the white, with the lightest turquoise next to the white. At the top though, the pattern has the middle-turquoise next to the white fading into the dark turquoise, whereas on the picture on the box the top uses the light and medium turquoises. Not that big of a deal, but I prefer the colours on the box, and there wasn't enough of the light turquoise left to just go ahead and copy the box anyway.