April Wrap-Up

Amazon April was excellent since it resulted in some serious progress on Ganesha.

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May Memories, which commemorates something from the past, will be devoted to my oldest WIP, Ganesha. The more things change XD.

Goals for April:
1. Catch up on TAST and The Great Escape. No.
2. Work on Ganesha. Yes!
Pipe dream: Finish two pages of Ganesha Hah! No.

Unexpectedly This Month:
1. Finished Elemental Dragons.
2. Started and finished Christmyth Wyvern.
3. Started and finished Christmyth Giant.
4. Started and finished Christmyth Mermaid.
5. Started and finished Christmyth Salamander.
6. Started No Late Knight Snacking.

Goals for May:
1. Work on Japanese Octagon Box.
2. Work on Ganesha.
3. Finish No Late Knight Snacking.
Pipe dream: Finish Japanese Octagon Box

A Christmas Dozen

I present the entire set of Christmyth freebies by Dragon Dreams.

I'm a tiny bit more partial to the unicorn, pegasus, phoenix, griffin and mermaid. Anyone have any favourites?

Quick Finishes

My new finish isn't my new start. No, it's my other new start. The first is No Late Knight Snacking. I'll get back to that soon and I should be done in maybe less than 10 hours. But I wanted an even quicker finish.

So, Christmyth Giant:

Title	Christmyth Giant
Designer	Dragon Dreams
Start date	April 25, 2012
Finish date	April 26, 2012
Total time	3 hours
Fabric	14 ct white perforated paper
Floss	As charted

And because it was right next to the giant, I also finished off the Wyvern. A wyvern is different from a dragon in that it has two legs, whereas a dragon has four.

Title	Christmyth Pegasus
Designer	Dragon Dreams
Start date	December 18, 2011
Finish date	April 25, 2012
Total time	2.75 hours
Fabric	14 ct white perforated paper
Floss	As charted

I'm actually going to go and backstitch the hippocampus after my coffee.

I've had some questions about Ganesha: He is available through PINN as a kit. There are several more religious charts as well. I believe that HAED also has a Ganesha chart, but I have not looked further into that.

Grey Weekend

This month's IHSW was devoted to Ganesha and I managed to fill in more of the grey.
Ganesha
14ct white aida
I thought I'd share my thread sorter for this project since I'm very pleased with it. I don't use thread sorters because I'm too lazy, I just rewind the thread on the bobbin. But about 3/4 of the symbols are blends and it's way too much trouble trying to keep track of them. So this:

It's just a piece of 14 ct plastic canvas with the key taped to it. It took two tries to get the key sized to the right size so that one symbol=one square. As I said, I'm very smug about this XD.

I'm also a bit bored with all (16!) of my WIPs so maybe I'll start something small today...

April TUSAL

It's a bit blue for this month's

That's Bluebell by Nora Corbett presenting this month's orts, which feature a ton of blue frogging. That's from How Does Your Garden Grow (In The Dark)? I grabbed it out, realized that the called for number of strands was too thick, frogged everything, stitched one hour and then switched to Japanese Octagon.

The Fine Art of Fudging

Japanese Octagon Box Panel
32ct white lugana
See those octagons? They're all wrong! And it's a combination of several factors.

First I stitched one octagon and then I stitched the rest looking at the first one. Several of you are already shaking your heads.
Then I went ahead and filled all the spaces with Rhodes rectangles.
Then I did all the black stitches for one lantern counting from the octagon.
Then I stitched one row for the second lantern counting from the octagon and rest counting off of that row. (With me so far?)
Then I realized that the first and second lanterns were not the same.

Going back to check where the mistake was, it took me a while. I had stitched an extra line for one of the boxes on the octagon. What was mean to be a 2x2 square for a bead had become a 2x3 square into which I'd stitched a Rhodes. The whole octagon was wrong.
Having stitched and filled in six octagons I'm not crazy enough to frog them.

Instead there will just be extra space around the lanterns and bonsai trees, and that Rhodes will replace the bead. In fact, I'm toying with replacing all the beads with floss. From what I can tell they only appear around the octagon and near the top frame...

And it's only the six frames because that fits in my Q-snap without any moving. So I'll probably finish off these panels before I get to the last two.

Herculean Work

Amazon April, aka largest project. Stitch count-wise I think I might have some bigger projects, but physical size-wise Ganesha takes the cake.

And now that I've finished off Elemental Dragons, He is also my oldest WIP. With this picture I have now stitched more on him in this month than I had in the last two years.

Apparently starting those HAEDs have given me a better handle on how to handle serious confetti. Since He's fully gridded I'm going with a combination block by block and cross-country.
It doesn't look like much change since last time, but I've finished off all the black and a good chunk of the background.

A Change

I dragged out the sewing machine a few days ago and cut into one of my favourite fabrics to make a holder for my colour pencils.
It was supposed to be a 24 pencil holder and I did all the calculating and cutting correctly. But sometime during stitching something went wrong. (I probably used the wrong seam size) But it's all good since I ended up with 25 slots XD

I'm very pleased since this worked out with a minimum of fuss. Maybe I'm getting better at this sewing thing?

Sadly I can't remember the exact tutorial I used (I apparently forgot to bookmark it), but there are tons out there on how to make these.

Farewell to the Oldest

Lousy pictures ahoy!


I actually finished off my oldest WIP! Why was it a WIP?

*FLASHBACK IN FILM NOIR STYLE*
It was January of 2009. I had only recently discovered the online world of cross stitch. That's when they appeared. Four designs by Dragon Dreams. All gorgeous and they begged me to stitch them.

So that's what I did. I finished off all the DMC stitching and then I realized that each part had 2 Kreiniks each. This was in the early days. I didn't have any Kreiniks. I didn't want to buy so many for such few stitches. I decided to wait until I collected enough through buying them for other patterns.
*END OF FLASHBACK*

On a yen, I grabbed the dragons and checked my stash. While I still didn't have any of the required metallics I had enough relatively similar ones that I could fake it.
I realized the folly of going with a black fabric when I doing the backstitching. The dragons are almost fully outlined except you can't see that! Also, see that faint silver swirl in the water of the third dragon? That's the exact same colour as the blue in the belly of the second. Crazy how much the colours around it make it look so different.

Title	Generosity/Elemental Dragons: Earth, Air, Water, Fire
Designer	Dragon Dreams
Start date	January 06, 2009
Finish date	April 08, 2012
Total time	63 hours
Fabric	28 ct black lugana
Floss	DMC as charted, 415 for the border
	Kreiniks 001, 003HL, 009, 015, 031, 684,

Progress Is Progress

And we actually have the appearance of my "real"

project today!

Ganesha hasn't seen a needle since 2009! And this is how he was then

I decided on a two pronged plan of attack. An hour of tackling the boring background (which stitches up pretty fast) and two hours of the main design (which is a confetti filled monstrosity that does not seem to progress!)

Setting the Scene

I finally got caught up with parts 10-13 of The Great Escape. It's all background all the way. I had no idea that I'd fallen so far behind.


The Great Escape
28ct white Jubilee, DMC 317, 318, 413, 414, 415
The only new stitch was the Star Flower stitch, which is that giant square stitch on the left. It's a modified Jessica stitch and was easy to stitch.

Some of the straight stitches (the grasses) are ridiculously long. I stitch this in-hand and it was such a pain trying to make sure they had a decent tension!