Herb Wreath

I have officially opened into the center of the wreath! In theory, that means that I should be using less threads at once, and each row should speed up slightly (hopefully). Two of the three bees are now done, as well as a good chunk of the butterfly. I'm looking forward to starting the big yellow bow, which I might be able to start on the bottom of before it's back to work on Wednesday!

Tree Frogs

Brought a small kit with me on Christmas, decided to get one last finish before the year ends. The bright colours were fun, and once again I'm reminded just how much backstitching brings out the picture.

Herb Wreath

One week's worth of stitching down and wow, I really need to zoom out more often because there's a lot more done there than I thought there was. Still going to take a bit to finish this one (it's almost 200 stitches tall and wide), but it might go faster than I'd originally estimated.

It's also been a while since I've stitched on 14ct, and my stitches feel HUGE. I'm trying my hardest to lay the stitches nicely, but there's always more whitespace than I like between the threads.

The pattern though. I think the printing is almost 20 years old. There are mistakes (you can tell because it both doesn't make sense and looks different from the picture on the cover), stitches under diagonal backstitches are hard to read a lot of the time, and THERE ARE NO GUIDELINES AT THE 10's!!! I ended up scanning it in and drawing guidelines on in paint in order to transcribe the pattern.

I think this kit's out of print unfortunately, because it's part of a set and I wouldn't have minded making the set (and I might have been able to request a more recent pattern print that was a little more readable).

Robin Redbreast

He is done!

And with plenty of time before Christmas.

I'm going to try to find an appropriately-sized oval hoop for this one for finishing.

Robin Redbreast

When I'm stitching, I'm so close to the piece that it doesn't look the best: I notice every little inconsistency between stitches, and the light I'm using doesn't help as it really makes it obvious where the threads aren't lying at precisely the same angle (read: all of them). I've got to remember to zoom out more often like this so that I can actually see the picture!

When I first tried out this method of stitching from a text file, I was able to stitch about 10 pages in a day. I think I might be getting faster at it though, because yesterday I managed about 14 pages, and it wasn't even a full day!

We're also almost done with this one, I'm hoping to have it done this week sometime.

Robin Redbreast

Got a good chunk done this weekend, and all the orange is officially finished, which means I can take it out of my pile of active floss to make it easier to find other colours!

It feels like I didn't actually do that much (only 24 rows!), but then I compare the actual pictures from the before the weekend and after, and it turns out there's a lot of picture in 24 rows!

Robin Redbreast

All the orange/red on him is done (I'm pretty sure). Now we've just got the bottom half, which is kind of uninteresting compared to the top. Oh well. Pretty sure I'm still on track to finish before Christmas, as long as I don't keep getting caught up with knitting projects!