Dragonflies Whisper Update

And here is my final update after this long hiatus, I have finished the first page and stitched a good chunk of the second page on Dragonflies Whisper, a design by Ching Chou Kuik charted by Heaven and Earth Designs.

Not a huge lot to see yet but the first tree branches have started to appear, as well as the outline of the moon. If you'd like to see what the finished piece will look like, take a look at the WIP tab at the top of this page.

Dragonflies and Sea Babies

Time for a little update, so here is Dragonflies Whisper (3 over 1 tent stitch on 25ct lugana), after about a week of stitching:

Here is what it will look like when I finally finish it a gazillion years from now:

Then last night I realized that my friend Dani will be arriving in Ireland for a visit with her new baby boy in exactly a month, and I still hadn't started on the birth record I promised myself I would do to her! She did a her nursery in a nautical theme so I ended up chosing the Sea Babies birth sampler  by Stoney Creek:

Here is my start on it, stitching 2 over 1 full cross on 22 count hardanger fabric:

I am going to have to drop all other projects and focus on this one exclusively in order to finish it before her arrival on July 25th as it is almost 30,000 stitches...

In stitches,

Maud

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