Winds & Wurth

Thursday evening, I finished the dress in Winds of Color. If you'll recall, I didn't like the transition to the really light pink in the bodice of the dress. I thought that the fourth section from the top was too light. I raided my stash, and found I had another skein of this color that was a few shades brighter than the one in the kit. (For the record: yes, this was DMC. There can be differences between dyelots.) I also found a "better" (for my purposes) skein of the color for the top-most section in my stash, too.

After I fixed the dress, I started the lady's hair. I had my doubts at first about the colors: a bright blue and two shades of mauve. After I started, though, it made sense. The blue is around the edges and in a few places in the middle, showing where the dark sky is showing through the less dense areas. The lightest mauve is used for highlights, and everything else is the darker mauve, which actually turns out looking like a brown with violet-red undertones.

The hair is all stitched in french knots. As I've said before, I like french knots. Unfortunately, I've discovered that stitching mass quantities of french knots triggers my early-stage carpal tunnel syndrome because of the twisting motion used in making the knots. It took a while for it to flare up at first, so I was able to get quite a bit done. After about an hour of stitching yesterday, I started to get the familiar tingling in the thumb, forefinger, and ring finger of my right hand. Being right-handed, loss of feeling in these fingers means I can't continue to hold the needle. This is not very conducive to stitching progress! I had to start alternating between this project and another: one length of thread (sometimes less) on the hair, one or two lengths on the second project. The picture shows where I left things yesterday.

I can hear some of you asking: what was the "other" project? After running some errands, DH and I came home to a perfectly-timed package tucked inside the garage: the latest in the Dodecagon Series by Jim Wurth! Old Country is a combination of orange, red, purple, and dark green. Orange is not one of my favorite colors, but with this combination, it looks great! I was able to stitch quite a bit on this last night. The center area stitched up very quickly! The picture definitely does not do this piece justice. There are lots of metallics, and the sparkle doesn't show up in the picture!