TUSAL & IHSW: a finish and a new HAED start

Once again this month TUSAL and IHSW collided, but this time another very important event added itself to the jumble mix: my baby turned 2 years old today! Happy birthday Noah, you are and always will be the light of my life!

My TUSAL jar this month has quite a diversity of colors in it with lots of metallics from Lily of the Valley, Red Dragon bookmark, and gridding.

Speaking of Red Dragon: this is the ''secret'' project I was working on for hubby's father day. He loves dragons and his favorite colors are red and silver, so I combined it all in Dracolair's Red Dragon Bookmark. I stitched it as charted, except that I backstitched the whole design with Kreinik instead of DMC in order to incorporate the silver. It came out pretty good but very hard to photograph...
On a side note, never again will I stitch something from Dracolair if all their patterns are like that. Out of all the symbols used, every single one but one was a blend of two colors (one of the reasons why I won't stitch TWs), which I could have coped with for such a small design, but the worse part is that most of the chart was fractional stitches, in quite a few cases a single cross would be comprised of 4 quarter stitches in 4 different blends. Enough to drive somebody bonkers and IMHO unnecessary...
There it is in all its blended, fractional, blinged out glory:

Hubby's verdict: ''it's nice, but it's kinda hard to see what it is''. *sigh*

Anyway, once I finished it, I moved on to gridding in preparation for a new HAED that I have been itching to start, Dragonflies Whisper by Ching-Chou Kuik. I've been wanting to try tenting in order to speed up my stitching and hopefully manage to make a dent in my HAED wish list in this lifetime, so this project is the first one. I did some tests and it looks like 2 over 1 tent on 28 count would provide the coverage I like (I hate when the fabric shows through), but of course I didn't have a piece of 28ct big enough.
Patience is not my strong point when it comes to stitchy stash and I couldn't wait until receiving some fabric in the mail so this one is 25ct 3 over 1 tent.

Ireland is a needleworker's nightmare when it comes to stash :(

Happy stitching!
Maud