A Stitchy Week

Hello my quality readers,

This week was spent mostly on cross-stitching with the time split up among three different projects with a fourth looming on the edge. I finished a bead dress at the beginning of the week so, quite naturally, we'll start there.

The bead dress was one that was suggested by me by my friend Nancy when I did the Bead Soup dress a few months ago (still for sale!). She had showered me with compliments on the different designs I've done but settled with the Mermaid being her favorite. She suggested a white or cream with the confetti along the top and bottom. Since then the idea had been working itself out in my head while I worked on Alicia and the latest two bead dresses, I really wanted to do it, but wasn't sure about the final look.

Between her suggestion and now I had the opportunity to go to Sedona and buy up some confetti beads, already prepped and ready to be beautiful in a project. This was very helpful for me in that, unlike the Bead Soup dress, all of these beads would be uniform in size and finish.

I didn't push myself to the finish line like I had on just the previous dress of green and gold. Instead I split my work into two days and proudly finished at the same eleven hour mark the mermaid dress now takes.

Curse you, velveteen backdrop!

The butterfly continues to plague me with its framing instructions, but thankfully now it is finished and just needs proper photos. The good news of all of this is that I now know how to make that gold twirly edging perfectly every time. The bad news is that for some reason I have another pattern like this that's a tiger instead of a butterfly and I'm not terribly looking forward to getting to that one.

The other "large" project I have started is the one I picked up from my cousin in the beginning of June: a glorious peacock with metallic gold detailing and all sorts of pretty half stitching. Here's what I saw when I unpacked it:

It's everything that I expected to be in it; paperwork, fabric, two lumps of thread, and the preview picture. So I started prepping the project as any stitcher would. I found the center of the fabric and marked it with some extra One G from the confetti dress above, ironed it, and then put it in a daring 7-inch hoop. The hoop really does go all the way to the edge of the fabric so I'm hoping it won't doom me in the end. I sorted all the colors and made them into little loops since I'm missing a thread sorter deal in this kit. It was only now, after all this work, that I became aware that there wasn't actually a pattern included in this kit. Yep... all that work already, and nothing to actually start with.

I hunted online for the replacement pattern and found one. This is both good on my end because I don't have to buy a replacement and sad because it means this pattern is obtainable without purchase. That's the internet for you I suppose. The next hurdle is that the downloaded pattern has its key in DMC thread codes, where as the kit's color codes are in Dimensions codes. Insert a really heavy sigh right here, because I had to go through and find out the DMC to Dimensions conversions, write it all down, and make sure my colors actually match the downloaded pattern. I ended up having to "replace" three color codes since the conversion didn't match what was on the chart. It didn't help matters that "light blue" Dimensions 6017 converts to both 794 and 809 DMC (the chart has it labeled as 597). All of that now out of the way, I could finally begin. As of this posting I am four and a half hours in.

The other project started this week is a secret and so I will leave you with this I-had-to-convert-all-the-Anchor-codes-to-DMC-codes picture and mysterious mysteries.

The project that isn't pictured is a potential project for Stitchingpirates's contest. I'm not sure if I'm going with a flag bookmark or a very fancy dress!

Until next week,

Ashley Mae

Pinky