Here Be Dragons: Third Post - Framed

Here's the second half of Compass Rose Dragon, Here Be Dragons.  So, except for the specialty cut around Compass Rose Dragon, I framed them the same.

And that's all I have for this post.  Much shorter than Compass Rose Dragon.

Compass Rose Dragon: Fourth Post - Framed

So this will be a little bit longer than a single picture with a framed piece.  As most of you know, I worked in framing and many people I framed for don't know about a simple option, so I'm going to show you really quickly.

Most people know when you frame and mat items there's a white 45° bevel on the edge of the mats.  But what most people don't know, is you can make it so the white doesn't show, it's called a reverse bevel.

On this piece I wanted a reverse bevel on my mats, however, the chop shop didn't cut them correctly so I have the two different options to show side by side:

Regular Bevel

Reverse Bevel

I thought the white from the bevel was too bright with this piece, I thought it looked much better without it.  Especially since the mat colors are so dark.  You can't even tell the middle mat is green on the first picture, or, at least, I can't.

And finally it's all put together with the frame:

And that's it from me this post.  I have actually been working on stuff, I just haven't gotten far enough to actually post anything on them.

Seashell Treasures: Second Post - Framed

I framed my mother's seashells at the same time as Kellan's name.  So I have that one to share with you today.

This really isn't that great of a picture.

The top mat is kind of an off white shiny looking mat.  The next one is a dark burgundy, and the bottom is a lightish pink, probably the one closest to its true color.

I decided to take a picture of where it's hanging.

The top mat looks closer to color in this picture.  But I just figured the mahogany frame would make more sense in context.

Train Kellan: Second Post - Framed

This is going to be short and sweet today... Or probably just short.

So here's the framed version of Kellan's Train themed name:

We just framed it exactly the same way as we had framed Logan's.  Everything's the same, the size, the mat colors, the mat widths, and the frame.  So nothing really exciting here.  Now just to wait for November for him to open it on his birthday.

Punch of Color Girls 4: First Post

I had mentioned this picture on my blog, a long time ago.  I honestly don't know when.  I had liked Hannah Lynn's designs, her choice of bold, bright colors against the stark black outline.  I had wanted to work on one, but none appealed to me enough to actually take the time to stitch it.  Until I found this one, Punch of Color Girls 4.

She's a little bit like me, a tomboy.  It looks like she's wearing overalls, like a boy, and looks like she has just about the same amount of paint on her as she does on whatever she was painting and doesn't seem to bothered at all.  However, she's still girly, which I find myself being from time to time.

I actually started her a while back, November of last year.  I decided I was going to do her all at once, extreme cross country, pretty much the opposite of what I did on my last post.  So I started with all the black and just started stitching...

and stitching... Ohh!  I found an arm!

and stitching... and... hair...

...and stitching... a hat!

...and stitching... more hair (she definitely has more than me)...

...and stitching....

There she is!  I did most of the bottom right hand corner after I finished page 2 of Planet Dragons.  I thought I had taken a picture just after I'd finished her eye which is where she actually sat for quite a while, but apparently I hadn't, so there's a big jump between the last two pictures.

I'm thinking I'm going to do the white next, which is over 20,000 stitches.  You might not see her again for a while.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Punch of Color Girls 4
Original Artist: Hannah Lynn
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: November 8, 2015
Fabric: 28ct. White Evenweave
Floss: DMC 1 over 1
Percentage: 12.51% complete
Colors Stitched: 1 of 89 complete
Stitches: 8,839 out of 70,631 complete

Hmm... now what am I going to work on?

SS Planet Dragons MC: Second Post - Page 2

As I mentioned in my previous post I was going to do the HAED Facebook Challenge #3 with Planet Dragons, and it was the dreaded parking.  So here's how it went:

My first picture, showing the fabric before the challenge, you've already seen this, pretty much, in my previous blog.

We were allowed to do the whole 10 stitch row at a time, which made me happy since I'm pretty paranoid about the 10x10 squares becoming visible when I stitch, one of the reasons why I preferred cross country stitching.  I use a hoop and decided to keep my threads on the needle since I figured re-threading could cause more damage to the thread.  I immediately made a mess.

By the time the whole row was done, I'd made an even bigger mess.

But I told myself I would do this and maybe see if I began to like it the more I stitched.

So here I am at the halfway point.  By this point I've realized two things, one, it's not very easy to park with a hoop, I couldn't really extract my hoop from this project to work on anything else if I wanted to, and I like to take my hoop off each night after stitching.  This picture shows the one time I did completely remove the hoop.  And the second thing I'd realized is I REALLY don't like parking.

The hanging threads are constantly in my way.  Either they're trying to get trapped under the threads I'm stitching or they're hanging down right where I'm trying to stitch.  I've seen many parkers with multiple needle minders to keep things organized, however I own absolutely no needle minders.

I was having one heck of a time trying to get this done and stay motivated to work on it, but with the hoop trapped on the piece I could either take 20 minutes extracting and reattaching it, or just finish the thing.  I can't explain how happy I was to get to this last row, when I could finally put the ends of the threads where they belong.

And finally done!!

No more random threads sticking out, everything clean... hoop removed.  I'll call it a success.

An interesting note is that when I normally stitch I go from color with the most stitches to the least, I did it the other way around here.  I did the least amount of stitches in the row, then finished with the most.  I think I did this to try to get most of the threads at the bottom of the row and more out of my way.

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: 2.7% complete
Pages: 2 of 78 complete
Stitches: 15,382 out of 570,429 complete

Now that I have actually tried parking I can honestly say it is not for me.  I'll stick to my cross country, except for any other challenges that may come along.  So now my hoop is free and I'm going to finish off part of another project really quick.

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.