OhSewCrafty Blog

The end of October went great, I finished my son’s costume and had two more evenings to work on my Trick or Treat Fairy.

I’m pretty much done with the 3371 in the dress now.  I’m over Halloween now so I’m putting this away until next year.

On November 1, I started my project for “Mervember”, Enchanted Mermaid.

 I worked on her 3 days.  I started at the center and worked down and to the right, mainly.  I did everything I could with regular DMC and then worked on the bottom half of the chart, on the right side (her tail & fin).  She is a big mermaid!  The negative space on the top right is where her hand will be.  I love the colors in this… gorgeous blues and grays.  I’m looking forward to doing some kreinik next time; there is too much in this pattern to leave it all towards the end.

 Titania was a focus for the month, and she got 8 days total. I finished the wings, including kreinik, and her dress with the blended pink DMC.  Then I worked on her upper body, head, and hair, which involved a zillion colors and a difficult section of the chart with / \, and triangles facing both forward and backward, all adjacent.  But I muddled through with the aid of a highlighter. I also added a bit more to the pink kreinik section between her body and wings, to exhaust my spool. Finally, I did some backstitching.   I will be getting the additional Kreinik on December 2nd and I took forward to getting an early December big finish!  

Maiden and the Unicorn was a secondary focus and she got 5 days total (planned additional 2 but Thanksgiving festivities got in the way).  I finished stitching the right side of the top border, and backstitched some of the top border, starting below the right corner and working up and left to the midline.  I also started her face with the 2 main colors there.  What a lovely alien she appears to be without eyes & cheeks!  I also stitched her hair and headpiece, plus I got my gold high luster BF and started working with it, did a few colors on the flag and flagpole. 

The first weekend stitchathon (Nov 11) went to King Arthur.  He wasn’t a focus but I really wanted to make a little progress.  I opted for the full coverage sunrise scene because it’s easier to count stitches with full coverage.  I managed 3000 stitches!  Most are in the tableau but I also did a few skin stitches on their hands and the yellow windows in the castle.

After that I gave 2 days to Fall Fairy.  I was after another page finish for Stitch from Stash credit, so I went back to page 1 and filled in the face stitches.  I decided I’d better do some backstitching; this pattern has a ton.  I backstitched for hours and made a small dent in it, I suppose. I backstitched (some of the) leaves, the tree trunk, branches, and the lady’s sleeve. It still needs more leaves, the butterfly and of course lots for the lady.  Finally, the third page got a small start with the threads I had parked.

I spent 4 days on my Christmas village project, specifically the Apothecary, which was enough to finish!  

Not that it’s visible in the photo, but also did a bunch of gridding across the fabric so I’m ready to start another 4 buildings next year in 2018.  The last few days in my rotation were devoted to Winnie the Pooh but it’s still in progress so no photo yet.

Question of the month: What finishing style have you never tried but would love to do?  I would love to try finishing my work as bell pull. I actually have a finish (Summer bellpull) waiting for that treatment.  But Summer is my least favorite season, and I need to stitch the other bellpulls; who knows when that will be (the patterns are huge!)

My plans for the end of month include a few bonus days TBD.  I may work on Maiden & Unicorn and do some framing.  December will start with Titania, hopefully a week will be enough to finish.  My other big finish goal is Maiden and Unicorn, and will work in small chunks so I don’t get burned out.  King Arthur also hopefully will get a decent chunk of progress.  On December 21 (winter solstice), I plan to start Celtic Winter with a color conversion.  Sometime around Christmas, perhaps after, I’l stitch on Charmed Santa for the Full Coverage Fanatics quarterly SAL.