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.

Twilight Silhouette

It is done! Before and after backstitching:

There's a lot more fairy dust after the backstitching. There were a lot more French knots than I thought going into this. I didn't think there were quite that many French knot stars.

The French knots actually weren't that bad. It was the blending filament that was the worst. It was trying to curl up on itself, so it would knot easily when being drawn through the fabric, but it also needed three strands at once, which meant both that it was even more prone to knotting, and the three threads always wanted to sit in the needle at different points because of the curling. I ended up doing one strand at a time, and just doing all the backstitching thrice.

The black backstitching I did the same thing with, but for a different reason: most of the black was one strand, but there were a couple places where it used two strands (the sparkles) and four strands (the curls on the wing tips). I didn't want to have to come back and lock down a new set of threads, so since there were so few places with more strands and they were so close to where the single strand stitches were supposed to go, I just did those with the single strand as well, just going over the stitches multiple times to make up the weight.

The difference in colour in the black cross stitches worked itself out, so I'm pretty confident in saying that the thread faded from me handling it. Unfortunately - though the cross stitches now match - the black half stitches were done a lot later and weren't handled near as much... and they're a lot darker still. I'm hoping washing the piece evens everything out.

Also, I'm sure I've probably missed at least one blade of grass (it was hard to keep track as I went), but oh well. It's done. I'm not going back now. So there.

Twilight Silhouette

All the black's done now, we're down to the last four symbols, then the backstitching. I'm getting to the point now that I'm starting to think about what I'm going to do when this one's done. It's currently a toss up between doing the next section on Elegance of the Orient, and getting back into Hidden Harbour. I'm leaning towards Elegance, since I've got marker on that one, and I'm slightly worried about it not washing out if I leave it too long.

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!