It's cold here!

Central Indiana is in the freezer this week.  We had our first winter weather advisory on Sunday evening and we woke on Monday morning to snow, high winds and super cold temps.  As of this morning, it's still super cold and super windy.  We're in the low to mid 20's with gusts making wind chill drop to below 0 at times. I'm glad this is my work from home week so I don't have to go out there!

I've been feeling less than enthused about the Pink Fairy Vomit than usual.  I'm working on her wing, which is taking F O R E V E R.  So I decided to heck with it and moved on to working on Konstantinople Hamam.  I was having so much fun with it, that I got finished with part 1.  I'm a bad girl.  A realy bad girl.  So last night I made a deal with  myself.  When I get the fairy wing finished, I can work on the first section of part 2 of KH.  I can live with that compromise.  However, my negative side says that will be a year from now.

So, let's see...on my last update on the fairy I was here:

And as of this morning, I'm here



On Konstantinople Hamam, when I last posted I was here:



And now I'm here:



The only thing missing from it are the crystals that go in the inner and outer corners and the center.  Also, feel free to click on the picture to see the artsy fartsy angle photos I took of it.  Cuz, you know...art.

Ok, time to get ready to go earn my paycheck so I can support this habit of textile embellishment!  Keep on stitching, ya'll!

2014 WIPocalypse - November post

Hi, and welcome to my blog about stitching and cats.  I started this as an experiment to see if I would be able to keep up with it and chronicle my stitching adventures.  So far it's regularly fallen low on the list of priorities of things to get done, but I keep plugging away at it from time to time in hopes I get better at it.  Maybe if I join some blog SALs I might be more motivated to keep up with it!

My WIP on the October full moon was QS Butterfly Fae from Heaven and Earth Designs, being stitched on 32 ct Crystal Monet linen from PTP.  I opted to omit the background, stitch the background butterflies in tent stitch and the fae's wings with 1 strand of floss and 1 strand of blending filament.  So far it's been interesting.




And for the November full moon, I'm here:



Over the weekend I was Jedi Mind Tricked in to starting my Chatelaine.  Konstantinople Hamam, stitched on 28 ct Mystic by PTP.  This one is a monster project on my 36" Millennium bars and won't be traveling to work with me.  My plan for it is to stitch it in the evenings after work, weekends and the weeks when I get to work from home.



Sorry about the craptastic photo.  I had it illuminated by my new OTT light - the one with the LED's encircling a 3x magnifier. It really shows the colors perfectly, but it overexposes the picture taken by my iPhone.  

So, topic for the month:  What are your favorite and least favorite materials to use in your stitching?
For fabric, I would have to say linen is my favorite to stitch on.  Lugana isn't bad.  I really don't like Jobelan, though.  I stitched on it once and won't do it again.  It's too slippery and mooshy for my taste.  I haven't encountered any fibers that I don't like to stitch with.  That being said, thus far I have only stitched with DMC floss and pearls, Dinky Dyes flosses and Gloriana flosses.  I really don't like DMC metallics, but Kreinik #4 and Petite Treasure braid are lovely to work with.

I think that's about it.  Stitch on and thanks for visiting!

Fairies. Oh boy...

I've been plugging away at QS Butterfly Fae and hit a snag since my last post.  My plan was to add blending filament (2:1 floss:filament) to the wings on the fairy to give them shimmer. I stitched a fairly good portion of it and started noticing that the stitches seemed to sit up higher than the ones without the filament, and they seemed to be tighter in the fabric as well.  I didn't have any nearby stitches to compare to so I decided it must be my imagination and I continued on to see how it developed.

When I stitched one of the little lines on her wing (without the filament) I realized that yes, in fact, the filament was making the stitches heavier and it caused the plain stitches to have a kind of recessed look to them.  Not quite what I was going for.

So I posted over on a couple of the HAED groups on FB and got opinions about it.  The general consensus was that I should switch to using 1 strand each of floss and filament instead.  I was worried about what it would look like and then I thought, "What would Mary Corbet do?"  So I decided to stitch the bottom part of her wing the new way and see how it turned out.

It didn't come out as I imagined it would.  But then again, I have a bad habit of not seeing the forest for the trees.  While I'm stitching, I tend to really only "see" the immediate area I'm stitching and I was a little dismayed at how much of the blending filament was visible compared to the heavier stitching on the upper wing. It also seemed to be changing the perceived color of the thread it was paired with, but I decided to continue on and stitch a bigger sample with more colors to see how it turned out. A friend looked at it and commented that the test area has a translucent look to it - you can see a little of the fabric behind the stitching, lending it a more delicate appearance. That finally snapped me out of hyper-focusing on just that tiny area and I was able to "see" the whole project again. And I really like the way it's coming out.  So, I frogged the upper wing section!

And now I'm faced with another problem.  I'm really tired of looking at all that damn pink! My fabric arrived for Happy Bat and I keep looking at it when I come home from work, so I put it away in a tub so it won't tempt me.  And then my Ink Circles charts arrived - the 2013 RYO charts - and I keep fondling them and thinking about what color combos and kinds of finishes to use on them...and there's that Mill Hill kit I have...and a couple biscornu kits...and my UFOs...and another gift to stitch after Happy Bat...and I'm really tired of looking at pink fairies...

Of course I didn't start feeling this way till I frogged all that stitching...

Perhaps it will pass...

Oh, hey!  How about a picture?

Halfway done maybe? I don't know. I'm not good at judging that. And because I have that "forest for the trees" problem, I photograph my progress on all my projects at the end of each stitching session and obsessively upload them to Flickr so I can actually see how far I get from one day to the next.

Time to go do something else and stop obsessing over pink fairies.  bleh.