OhSewCrafty Blog

Here’s my start of Spring Fairy by Joan Elliott.  I confess, I jumped the gun by starting her March 23, just after I finished her companion, Winter Fairy.  So I got a head start (the plan was to work on Spring Fairy during the April-June period.)  The floss toss:

I started at the center, worked on the bottom right quadrant and also into the top right for a bit to the top of the skirt and into the wing, then across the bottom and back up to her waist.  Picking the fabric for this was a challenge.  The model is on pink, but I really wanted to stitch her on green.  Green just says “spring” to me.  Eventually I settled on Purely Primitive belfast by Silkweaver (old).  Purely Primitive seems to be a neutral brown in most online pics, but this piece is a delicate green.   The fabric color is off in the pic below (imagine her on the fabric above), but you can get an idea of all the little details… egg nest, ladybugs, snails, bluebirds, mushrooms, brown bunny, yellow foxglove, and butterflies.

This project stitches up quickly, or maybe it was just my yearning for Spring.  It didn’t take much time to reach the 50% mark, so I picked up Royal Holiday.  The before shot:

This piece can be a challenge between the dark green and sparkly fabric and copious amounts of Wisper thread.  I am not much of a fan of working with the stuff but I do like the effect and find persistence is the key.  I do all the surrounding areas first to make the counting a bit easier, and then develop a slow rhythym, working with several short lengths, consecutively, until the area is complete.  I have also found that working under a big window in the natural light of morning makes a huge difference.  I don’t get to enjoy this often as I’m otherwise engaged most of the time, but it makes the rare morning that much sweeter.  So you can see I have made quite a bit of progress and I feel that finishing this year is within the realm of possibility.  Still to be done is the upper part of her cloak and her head.

For next month, I would like to work on Rose Fairy.  She would be the last of my 2013 wipocalpyse cross-stitch projects to see any action this year.