SS Planet Dragons MC: First Post - Page 1

For those of you who aren't familiar with with Heaven and Earth Designs, SS and MC stand for Supersized and Max Color.  First off, I would like to say I swore I would never to a supersized chart.  They take too long... and I just don't stitch that fast.  Well that was until I saw that someone had requested this chart not only supersized, but also with max colors.  So this chart is 999 stitches wide by 571 stitches tall and contains 239 colors.

So it may come as no surprise to you that I love fantasy so stitching dragons is a no brainer for me.  However, what you may not know about me is that I love astronomy.  So this pattern puts two of my loves into one piece.  And Pluto is included!  <3 Pluto!

For this I actually requested the kit from HAED.  I had two reasons for this.  One; if I had to buy all the colors in skeins it's possible that there would be two different dye lots and that could make it look bad.  If I'm going to spend so much time on this I want it to look right.  Two; it's ALOT of floss in lots of different colors.  I thought having them do it would just be easier.  Lucky for me when I requested this kit there was a 20% or 25% off, I can't remember which, sale going on.  And the kit was ready to order long before the sale was over.

One thing I will say about the kit is it's very nice.

Kit Box

Opened Kit Box

It comes with a wooden needle holder and the needle.  I also got a blue and green needle threader, which are the perfect colors for me, even though I still haven't used it.  I also ordered 5 Bohin needles because many folks on the HAED Facebook page just loved these needles.  Most of the floss is on rings attached to laminated cards, I was putting it back in the bag at first, but that became rather tedious, so it's no longer in it's plastic bag.  The four colors with the most floss are in the second bag, they are still in that bag, correction, one is sitting on top of the bag, the other three are in the bag.

So I started this at the end of May, I couldn't keep myself from starting it.  I started stitching with the Bohin needles.  While nice, they did not work for me as well as I had hoped.  I went back to my DMC size 28 needles.  They are flimsy and the eye does tend to warp, but they're thin, and when you're using one thread that's helpful when trying to finish the thread off by running it under the stitches on the back.  I'll probably give the Bohin needles another try when I work on 14 through 18 count fabric.

On to the stitching.  I was a bit worried on doing a Max Color chart.  I wanted to do this one max color because of all the different colors in the planets.  I thought with more colors they'd be closer to the artist's color, and it would look better.  My apprehension was on the background.  Would the colors be added to the background and make it ridiculously filled with different colors, or would it be decent?

I was happy with the answer.  The first page only contains 20 colors, 16 of which are actual background colors, the other 4 are in the tip of Mercury's wing.

I took pictures one color at a time for a bit.

One color:

Two colors:

Three colors:

Four colors:

Then I just got carried away and just finished it off.

The bottom unstitched bit is the beginning of Mercury's wing.  I'll do that when I get to the page below it.

Pattern: Supersized Planet Dragons Max Color
Original Artist: Rob Carlos
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: May 31, 2016
Fabric: 25ct. Magic Guide
Floss: DMC 1 over 1
Percentage: 1.37% complete
Pages: 1 of 78 complete
Stitches: 7836 out of 570,429 complete

The next challenge from HAED is parking a full page.  Blech.  At first I was going to skip this one, but I realized if I did that it would be the opposite of what the challenges are for.  To get you to try something different.  If you try it, you might like it.  I'm going to do page two of this pattern for the challenge.  I picked that because I wanted to take baby steps into parking, page 2 only has 11 colors, so I think that's the best way to approach it. And thankfully they're allowing lightly feathered pages.  I think mine qualifies as light feathering.

Wow, this ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.  I don't know when my next post will be, but I'm going to try to catch up.  I have much more to blog about.

Welcome to the Jungle: Second Post - Framed

Alrighty.  It has been a while...  So I've been busy, I'm starting a new job tomorrow!  Yay!  So hopefully now I'll have more time for crafting and I'll be less tired.  Who knows, the new job might kill all my desire to craft... I really hope not.  My craft room will get lonely if I don't craft.

Moving on.  I have tons of framed items to share.  Today I'm going to share Welcome to the Jungle.  This was for my youngest nephew.  We framed it the same way we framed his brother's so that was really easy.

Here we go:

I was at my sister's house when I took this and my mother was there too, so they decided we should take a picture with Kellan next to his cross stitch.  We told him to sit by his picture...

 ... Apparently we should have been more specific.

So we told him to sit next to the picture.

Much better.

And of course the eldest didn't want to be left out so we took his off the wall and took a picture with him next to his.

My mother actually stitched this one, but I did frame it, so up on my blog it goes!

The boys are 2 ½ and 5 ½ in the pictures which were taken about a month ago.  They grow so fast!

I have a few things to blog about, I just don't want to stop working on things long enough to blog.  Also I'm starting to work off of my iPad instead of my laptop, so before I'd already have the laptop on and would just blog, now I need to turn on the laptop, and it's much easier to just continue stitching.  I'm going to work on another long overdue post.  I'll see you again soon!