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.