Laraine's Pink Orchid Pin

I tend to stay away from talking about personal matters, but this one I'm going to mention.

My sister's mother-in-law was just recently diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer.  Every year there's a breast cancer walk in Fashion Island in Newport Beach, California, and my sister has put together a team.  Somehow I was able to get the day off and will be able to run & participate.

For anyone who's interested here's the website:  2015 Komen Orange County Race for the Cure.  I know this is something that affects most if not all of my followers.

Now my reason for posting.  I decided to make an orchid french beaded flower for her in the classic breast cancer pinks.  She loves orchids and I did make her a previous orchid, a moth orchid, which can be seen in one of my earliest posts here.

I started on it Wednesday night and put all the beads onto the wire.  Here's an in progress photo I took as I was putting the beads on the wire.

That's pretty much everything I need, the beads, the wire, some wire cutters, scissors and hemostats, and the iPad, it has the pattern on it.

I went to my parent's house today to help with the race packets and finished up the flower there.  Here are the five large petals.

Apparently at this point my mother was wondering how it was going to possibly look good.  I think she used the adjective hideous when she was recounting her thoughts before I started assembly.

I forgot to take another picture with all the parts, so here it is done.  I took two pictures, one on white so you could see the pinks better, the other on burgandy so you could see the flower better.

It looks better in real life, I think I need to get my sister take a good picture.  I glued it into a boutineer (I'm not sure this is spelled correctly) holder I purchased at work.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Cymbidiun Corsage (changed to pin)
Flower Design: Dalene Kelly
Started: Septemeber 23, 2015
Finished: Septemeber 25, 2015
Beads: 11/0 Czech Seed Beads
Wire: 26 ga. Artistic Wire

Okay, there we go, on to the next project, whatever that may be.

Ophelia: Ninth Post - Pages 9 & 10 (2)

Okay, warning: I got VERY picture happy.  I did a small project, which I need to post about.  A gift for a family friend, so Ophelia took a little bit longer to finish than I thought.

So this time I was finally able to keep myself on track and finished all the darkest colors on the left hand side of the two pages.

I found her lips.  Good.  Without them I could only think of Pac Man when I looked at her mouth, and she seemed a bit deformed.  Now she's looking much better.  Her eyelids are also starting to take shape.

I think it was around this point that I started doing colors from the least stitches to the most.

And one color left to stitch:

That last color is finally in!

Finally, here she is looking quite beautiful:

I was afraid that after doing her face the rest would be rather anti-climatic.  But I'm actually finding I can't wait to see how well her clothing turns out after seeing how well she's looking so far.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Ophelia
Original Artist: Jonathon Earl Bowser
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: August 15, 2009
Restarted Stitching: January 1, 2015
Fabric: 25ct. White Magic Guide
Floss: DMC 1 over 1
Percentage: 17.69% complete
Pages: 8 of 54 complete
Stitches: 59,873 out of 338,400 complete

I really should put her down and start working on Christmas gifts.  We'll see what I actually end up doing.