Belle Fairy Tale Dress

She is completed! I am really pleased with how she turned out. The stitching to embellishment ratio was a lot better for me compared with the ribbon bouquet I did earlier this year: I finished the ribbons and roses all this morning (and a bunch of that time was waiting for the Fray Check to dry).

Some close ups:

Belle Fairy Tale Dress

And we're back! The afghan was really throwing off my groove, and with the sparklies for Belle in the mail, I figured I'd take a break for a bit and go play WoW for a bit.

Well, my package arrived this week, and I've been putting in some time getting the backstitching and beading completed. Next step, she needs to be washed and ironed, and then the finishing touches with the wire roses and ribbons. I'm kind of worried that they won't turn out well, but I guess I won't know until I actually try, so we'll have to see!

Belle Fairy Tale Dress

All the DMC crosses are done! Now I just have to wait a couple of weeks until my shinies show up to finish it off!

In the mean time, I've decided I'm going to make a baby blanket for a Christmas present as well, so I'm going to get on that.

Belle Fairy Tale Dress

Three more colours down:

I'm so glad that I counted right for the distance to the light swirly under-skirt section. I believe the bodice section is done now but for beads (and a short bit of back stitch).

That darker gold colour under the poufs makes that bright yellow not look so out of place. Still a little odd, but I can see now that it's probably going to turn out okay in the end.

There are only two more DMC colours left on the dress (white and yet another yellow-gold), then the last four colours are on the rose, and that should work up pretty quickly. I really should have gotten started on the next colour today, but I spent a bunch of time playing WoW (read the Blizzcon news, and got excited enough to play around on some trial sub-20 toons).

Belle Fairy Tale Dress

Three DMC colours down, nine more to go. I have a feeling I'm going to be finishing off the regular floss sections before my specialty threads show up. I mean, if I get some good stitching time in this weekend, I could maybe even finish them off before Monday.

Those bright sections underneath each of the poofs, they don't look quite right, but they're going to be the shadows underneath the ribbon sections, so they'll be more or less covered? Hopefully?

Pretty Princess Dress Up!

So I don't have much to show for this past week as I was transcribing The Guardian into the computer so that I could run it through the Traveling Salesman program... and then doing a bunch of work on said program so that it could handle quarter stitches (wheeee!). I started working it cross-country like I had started so many years ago, and after a couple lengths of thread I was like Nope! So I spent a week drawing on the computer.

Anyway, now that that's done I was going to start finishing the dragon, when I finally decided to pay for the Fairy Tale Princess Dress Up set of patterns from Brooke's Books on Etsy. I've been eyeing them for a while, but I also finally had a reason to start on one (Christmas present!), and since they were on sale for 50% off for the set, I picked them up.

So I started working on Belle:

That's the first (biggest) colour down, and there are actually not that many colours in this one, since her dress is just a big mass of yellow. The Mill Hill beads and Kreinik threads are currently on order and will apparently be shipped in about two weeks (since the red hot wire wasn't in stock atm, but they're going to order it in just for li'l ole me!), but that should leave enough time before Christmas still to complete and then finish the piece. It should look so sparkly when it's done.

Speaking of finishing, the Inspiration Dragon Slayer piece is currently at Michael's to be framed. We'll see how that turns out, but the guy I ordered the frame from seemed to know what he was doing. Custom framing is pretty expensive though: I think I'll have to figure out how to do it myself for the future (except for Hidden Harbour, which I've promised will be done professionally, since it's such a huge time investment).

Also, sweet dollar store find:

Just in case you can't read the sticker on the corner of the kit, that says $4... for a Dimensions Gold Collection. And one that's on my Christmas wish list to boot! I've already started transcribing the pattern.

Huh, I should probably be updating my queue page. I don't think it's currently accurate.