Thursday, January 25, 2018

Rahenna vs Dragonfly Tile - round ???

I have no idea how long I've been working on this, so who knows how many rounds of battle have been fought. Okay, that's a lie - apparently this is closing in on almost FIVE YEARS as a WIP, which is about four years too long. Sigh.

The last time I shared a picture of Beaded Dragonfly Tile, it looked like this:
(And yeah, I know the pictures are hideous. Photographing anything on black fabric is incredibly difficult so this is the best I can do!)


And now it looks like this! I'm working around the inner border and naturally, I did the lily pads first because they only have four colors instead of a billion. I'm slowly adding the flowers and working on the specialty stitches in the outer border, too.


Closeup of my disgustingly ugly Jessica stitches for the lulz. I'm trying to tuck the last leg of the larger stitch under previous stitches so it's a smoother circle, but I think I'm doing something wrong, because they all look terrible. At least they're consistently terrible...

Maybe I should only be tucking under one thread instead of two? I'll have to try it. I'd have to redo them all but whatever, this project has already taken almost five years soooo... :p


Yeah, my eyelets suck too. I can never get the holes to open up evenly. I'm not going to try and redo those ever because they're always horrible and honestly, they're good enough to my eye. And that's what matters. :3

Well, it's a challenging stitch but certainly not boring! I'm having fun with the struggle, haha.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Poppy - finished!

Oops, I finished last week but I've been slacking on posting. Here's Poppy!




I made a few changes as usual:
- used a deep red-brown instead of DMC brown in skirt
- changed white in wings to DMC 1 (pale grey)
- changed silver metallic on hip to red metallic
- matched style of beading on top curls to bottom curls more closely

My next project is Beaded Dragonfly Tile by Chatelaine. As suspected, adding fabric to the edges so I could put it in a larger q-snap has made a huge difference! I wouldn't say I've made a ton of progress simply because it's a slow stitch, but there's definitely obvious visible progress now. I'll save that for my next post, though. :3

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Small giveaway! DMC color cards

It's been a while since I've done a giveaway, sooo...

I have two older, used DMC color cards. One is the standard printed card that includes everything but the 35 newest colors, and one is a lot older, but it has actual thread samples of 360 colors.

The printed one was my regular use card for a long time and it's in pretty good condition. The other one has some wear and it's really out of date, but it's nice for actual thread reference.


I'm giving away BOTH to one person!

Giveaway rules:
- US addresses only. Sorry, but international shipping from the US is insanely expensive. :(
- Comment on this post and clearly state that you want to enter!
- Please leave a link to your active cross-stitching blog in your comment. (Doesn't have to be on Blogger, it can be Wordpress or Tumblr or Instagram or whatever, but you have to be an active stitcher who posts progress pics somewhere. I want these to go to someone who will use them.)

Giveaway closes on January 26 and I'll announce the winner on January 27. If I receive more than one valid entry, I'll use a randomizer to choose the winner. :3

~~~

Currently pending for rosey175/ishkabibble!

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Poppy - almost there!

I really need to post more often. Poppy is almost finished - just needs the rest of her wings, then hair, beads, and backstitch!


As usual, I made some small changes. The front of her dress (her hip) was originally silver, which made no sense to me, so I changed it to red. I also changed the white in her wing to DMC 1 (very pale grey) to suggest translucence, since you can see her dress through the wing. I might add a bit of blending filament to help it stand out just a bit more from the background fabric.

Overall I'm very happy with her and aiming for a finish this week! :)

Monday, January 08, 2018

Raven - finished!

Well, that was fast once I stopped dragging my feet!

Here's Raven by Nora Corbett, stitched on a beautiful piece of Belfast from Fiberlicious in the color California Dawn. I feel like I got lucky with the placement of colors on the fabric because I was able to put the purple areas at the top to accent the sky. :D



I made some changes to the thread colors because the original threads mixed blue-toned and red-toned purples and that's a huge nope. Mine are all blue-toned. I also replaced a couple of the beads to use random stuff from my stash.

Oh, and I also made her head bigger because it was hilariously tiny. I think it's still too small, but at least she doesn't look like an alien anymore.

DMC changes:
154 to 29
156 to 340
550 to 32
743/3078 blend to 744 (I hate one-off blends in a pattern that doesn't have any others - just pick a color that's between the two! Why does every Mira pattern have one pointless blend?)
413 to 832 (Grey backstitch for skin? NO THANK YOU)

bead changes:
02056 to 02014
10019 to 02028

Next up is Poppy, who has a much bigger skirt than you'd expect. Haha. :p