Catching Up

Coming back from Labor day weekend and I really wish I had one more day off. I took the opportunity to catch up on some of my long neglected WIPs because...my runner is finished!

I finished the hem on Friday night, but didn't get around to washing and ironing it till Sunday. And obviously by the time it was ready, there was no good lighting for pictures. Crossing my fingers for some good natural light in the living room. I want to take pictures of it against the dark wood of our coffee table so that the drawn thread portions really pop out. In any case, I'm so happy that it's done and I have plenty of time to arrange a drop off for the exhibition.

Finishing on Friday meant I had the rest of the long weekend to work on other projects. I was tempted to start preparations for the goldwork piece I'm starting this month but realized I never printed the instructions. So instead I devoted all of Sunday to my JEC phase 1 bead embroidery piece. I was able to finish all of the flowers. What's left now are stitching those leaves. That should keep me busy. They don't take as long to stitch as the flowers (each flower takes about 30 minutes), but there are a lot more of them.

Before

After

By the way, those extra beads I bought? It turns out they made a mistake with the shade of topaz. I ordered an extra hank of garnet, light topaz and dark topaz. The two bags on the right are the dark and light topaz they sent. What they sent as my dark topaz was in fact the light topaz. The dark topaz is the one on the left which is much darker. I did run out of light topaz but I was very lucky that I had enough of the darker shade to finish all the flowers. Otherwise I would have had to contact the JEC and place another order.

Monday was all about Hedebo Enchantment, my piece from this year's EAC Seminar. I decided to concentrate on the filling squares and finished all of square # 3 (the one with the doves eyes) and started square # 4 (this one looks like a '+'). I've been sort of avoiding the problem child which is square # 2 (the one at the bottom left corner). It was really annoying to stitch in class so I will have to do them in between working on the border. Right now my aim is to finish before the end of the year. I'm going to try and stitch on it at least two or three times a week so I can meet my deadline.

Before

After

So all in all I had a very satisfying and productive long weekend :) Did anyone else get any stitching done? Aim for this week is to photograph my runner, work some more on Hedebo Enchantment and setup my goldwork piece. So hopefully I will have another update for you at the end of the week.