The Guardian

Before backstitching...

And after! It is finally done! It's still wet (I rinsed it to wash the marking pen out), but I'm not going to be able to iron it until I can find my iron! I also need to have a go at it with some actual cleaning solution, since it's got stains on the left and top from being neglected for so long. Next I'm going to be working on either Provence Market, or Elegance... not sure which, I'll probably leave it right down to the wire which one I'll pick up next.

Have some close ups (for some reason the castle just didn't want to come into focus properly)!

The Guardian

It's hard to tell, but there are 1600 extra stitches on the second picture compared to the first one. There were three colours that were half stitches, but then they're crossed with one strand of white. So I went and did all three of the base colour half stitches, then combined them and ran them through the algorithm so I could do all the white crosses in one go. The first picture is from before the white crosses, and the second is from after.

Three colours left, just under 3k stitches!

The Guardian

Only sky colours left now! Except for a little bit of blue/purple in the wings and tail, the dragon's done, and the castle's done, and the grass and cliffs and heather's done. 

There are 7 symbols left, and one of them's a big one. And three of the symbols I have to do twice: they're half stitches, that are then crossed with a strand of white. At least the big one I don't have to do twice!

The Guardian

14 colours left! The end is in sight!

The bulk of the blue and green on the underside of the front wing is filled in, and it looks pretty good. With the shading you can already see the feathers, but of course there will be backstitching. Like, a LOT of backstitching in the area.

The Guardian

Huh, only 19 colours left. Apparently I got through more than it felt like. 

I can't wait for this one to be done, not because I'm not liking it (though it's not really my favourite colour palette I admit), but because the stitch direction is backward to my normal, and I'd like to be back to doing everything in the same direction!

The Guardian

Just finished one of the 1k+ colours today, there were only two left after the border. The dragon's really starting to come together now, since a lot of the gold colours have been getting done. The back wing's defined pretty well now too, though it's still pretty holey. 

The sky's going to be fun once I get there, there's just big swaths of the same colour: out of the seven colours with the most stitches, six are sky colours. I'm looking forward to it!

27 colours left to go, or 9482 stitches!

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.

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!

Twilight Silhouette and The Guardian

First off, Twilight Silhouette progress.

Couple more symbols are done, getting close to the end of this one!

So we moved this weekend, and in the process of unpacking stuff from storage, I found a couple things that I thought were lost!

I think this guy was my second ever cross stitch that I did. I'm almost positive that my first-one-ever is definitely lost, but I'm glad this guy was recovered. It's a Dimensions kit called Frederick the Literate.

This is Teresa Wentzler's The Guardian. I thought this was lost a while ago during a car cleaning, but it turns out it was just in storage!

There are a couple problems with this one, the larger of which is that it's FULL of partial stitches, and my pattern analyzer is currently hard coded with one stitch per grid-square. I'd have to switch up a chunk of the pattern-to-data logic to accommodate, park it, or continue cross country as I started.

The second issue, though smaller, is that apparently at some point in time I switched which direction my stitches go in, and this piece is backward to my normal direction. I just know I'm going to get at least some stitches wrong.

Also, it's quite dirty, and I'm not sure if I should clean it before finishing it, or clean it all at once after. It's not like the dirt's going to come off any easier if I do it now vs later (it's been probably at least 10 years since I touched this), and that way I can get started on it again faster!