Summer Dream progress

I've been on vacation this past week, and I've enjoyed spending a bit more time stitching. I've also been working on stitch study posts, starting to sell off a bit of excess stash on eBay (see the link on the right sidebar), and shopping for nursery furniture and other baby items.

Most of my stitching time has been devoted to Summer Dream, the EGA GCC by Luan Callery. As I mentioned previously, I'm changing some of the colors. The original piece has a pink lily and a pink butterfly and pink stripes on the bee. It's just not working for me. I've decided to change the butterfly to a monarch, since I always enjoy seeing these beauties flitting through my yard. Of course, the butterfly shape traced onto my fabric is not a monarch. I haven't quite figured out if I'm just going to change the colors to the oranges of the monarch, or try to draw a monarch outline over the shape on the fabric.

In the meantime, I've purchased wool for the lily in shades of yellow to orange, and I've stitched the bee with yellow stripes (what a thought!). Here is Mr. Bee. The stripes are cleverly made up of bullion knots, made just a tiny bit longer than the width of the body so they stand up a bit from the fabric. Oh - and his wings will come later! :-)


I've also been working on the larger leaves at the bottom of the piece. Instead of the Paternayan wools called for in the instructions, I'm using the leftover Medici wools from Fantasy Remembered, the companion piece. Medici is bit thinner than the Paternayan, but the colors are a pretty close match. The difference in thickness meant that I needed to do a few more rows of outline stitch to fill in the leaves, but I think it's working out well.