May recap & June goals

May was a fairly productive month for me. My goals were:

• Keep blogging, aiming for 3-4 posts per week. 11 posts / 31 days = average 2.5 /week.
  
• Finish Cinders. Nope. I didn't even pick it up this month.
  
• Finish Winds of Color. Yes!
  
• Start Mystery in a Corner (especially since I have to lead the project at my ANG meeting on 5/14). Yes!
  
• Start the next Jim Wurth piece, if it arrives early enough in the month. I started and finished Old Country!

I also started and finished my exchange piece for the Quaker Quarterly Exhange on the Legacy board. I'm putting it in the mail tomorrow, and will share pictures as soon as it's been received!

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For June, here are my goals:

• Keep blogging, aiming for 3-4 posts per week.
• Finish Cinders.
• Finish Part 1 of Mystery in a Corner.
• Work on WIPs.
• Maybe start one of the GCC's that will be due this fall.
  

I've been feeling like I'm stitching for deadlines a lot recently. I want to slow down a bit, stitch on what I want to do, and enjoy it. That's why my goals are pretty vague this month.

Dodecagon presentation

In response to my last post about finishing another of Jim Wurth's ornaments, both Mary and Cynthia asked what I was going to do with all of the dodecagons. I really had no idea about final presentation when I started doing these. They're really a tad bit too big to use as regular ornaments, and I'd like to display some all year.

Somebody in my ANG chapter is also doing these, and she came up with the idea of making them up as individual ornaments, then hanging them in a frame, allowing for them to be switched out seasonally. See?Thanks for the idea, Lynne! I'm adapting this slightly. Lynne's frames were black with a black background. I'm going to have the framer leave off the craft paper on the back of the frame and provide me with several suede mats so I can customize the background. I haven't quite figured out what frame to use yet. I'm going to start by having a few of the ornaments made up. I'll find a good frame for them after that. I think I'll have 2 of these frames, but I don't yet know where they'll go in my house!

Happy Dance: Old Country

Here is Old Country, the latest in Jim Wurth's Dodecagon series. It's one of my favorites so far! The color palette really reminds me of Eastern European needlework, so the name is perfect. Also, I love the "string art" stitches, invented by Jean Hilton, but used wonderfully in this design. It's impressive that Jim has managed to use multiple large stitches while making them part of a whole instead of "fighting" each other.

This evening I'm working on my piece for a Quaker exchange. Unfortunately, I won't be able to show my work on this until it is received by my exchange partner.

Old Country progress

Just a quick note before I head off to work. I'm making good progress on Jim Wurth's Old Country! This is a fun piece. I love all of the large stitches that are quick to do but add a lot of interest.

A big happy dance: Winds of Color

Here she is! Winds of Color, designed by Elsa Parrish.This piece was a lot of fun and included many challenges. The last challenge is to decide whether or not to leave the metallic streaks in the hair as they are or to make them thinner. These are done in the old spooled DMC metallic, in which 1 strand is made up of three plies of a thin metallic thread. I used the entire strand, but I need to put it aside for a bit to see if I want to change it to only one ply. Opinions are welcome!

Thanks to all who left birthday wishes and who have encouraged me in the progress of this piece!

Update: I did end up reducing the number of plies of metallic in the hair. It's a bit hard to tell from the photo, since the flash picks up on the metallic, but it looks a lot better in person. Thanks to all who voted for this! And a big thank you for all the lovely comments!

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!