Tales of Wonder: First Post - Complete

I decided to do another quickie, and I knew it wouldn't take me too long so I just took pictures and decided to post when it was done.

This is Tales of Wonder by the designer of Dragon Dreams.  It appears to be a sampler made for the The CARON Collection to showcase their floss.  This is a free pattern to download off of Caron's website, the link is below to the actual chart.

I've decided to stitch this on the same color fabric as Lost Dragon Sampler, this also has a very similar theme to that piece.  I also have two more pieces that will also use this fabric, Fairy Tale Sampler & A Damsel's Dozen, all samplers by Dragon Dreams.  While the first two I've done deal with believing the last two deal with what makes a hero.

Here we go, this is where I started:

I finished up all of the words and special stitches first.

I was a little disappointed in the green, it didn't seem to have much variation in the color, but there's only one line of it.  I also made a tiny change, did anyone notice?  I made the "O" in "Once" larger than all the other "O"s on the project.  Two reasons:  First, the line was one stitch short of being perfectly centered.  Second, I wanted to make the line a little bit more special and felt the larger "O" made it demand more attention than the smaller "O"s.

Next up, the little guy: 

You can see the variation of the green a little bit better.  One disappointment was that the two greens called out in the chart were very similar in color.  They are both in the dragon.  If you can convince yourself there are two colors you can see it.  This chart is over 13 years old, so I'm wondering if the colors didn't change slightly since it was created.  Looking at the stitched sample, I'm pretty convinced that's the case.

And I finished the castle this morning.  All done!

And I did one more minor change.  I added back stitching around the windows.  I started doing it per the chart, but they just seemed to be getting too lost in the castle.  As soon as I back stitched the first one I knew I was doing the rest.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Tales of Wonder
Pattern by: Dragon Dreams
Started Stitching: February 8, 2013
Finished Stitching: February 9, 2013
Fabric: 28ct. Legacy Cashel Linen
Floss: Caron Waterlilies & DMC 2 over 2; Caron Wildflowers 1 over 2.

Because this is my blog I'll just let you know my thoughts on the threads.  I think this was a great little sampler to do in order to learn about the different threads they offer, Waterlilies and Wildflowers.

Waterlilies:
This is a 12 stranded silk floss that comes in 6 yd (5.5 m) skeins.  Overall, I love these.  The tread is so smooth, and it lays on the fabric almost identical to DMC floss.  It's very easy to work with.  Anything you can do with DMC you can do with this.

Wildflowers:

I'm not so much in love with this.  It is a single strand of cotton 36 yd (33 m).  One thing I did really like with this floss was that it's just one really long strand.  That makes it much easier keeping the blend looking correct on the piece.  I think the golden squares look really nice.  However, this is a thick thread.  You cannot use it for back stitching, unless you want a really thick back stitch.  In my opinion the thickness of the thread is equivalent to three strands of DMC.  This would make it difficult to use it with anything other than 14 ct (or 28 ct over 2) fabric.

To the right is a close-up of the castle.  The grayish-purplish-blueish color is Wildflowers, as are the trees.  You can click it to see it larger, but I just don't feel the the floss lays as well as I'd like.  I kinda do like the way it looks on the trees.  (For reference:  The dark blue is Waterlilies and the dark brown is DMC.)   I think it looks fine for this and I'm not going to frog it all, but in the future I would replace the Wildflowers with the closest thing I could find in Waterlilies.  At least in cross stitch.  I'm sure there are other projects where Wildflowers would work better than Waterlilies, and I'd be happy to give them another go.

Well, this post ended up being longer than I anticipated.  And please remember this is just my opinion.  Now I'm going to run home and grab some green thread for the lovely Samurai!