Mr. Frog Came to Visit

This weekend I had a visit from Mr. Frog. I'd been working hard on Grace for the last two weeks and made great progress. I put in the short stitch holding on the kimono and was getting the majority of the foundation done.

I had some doubts but thought I was doing well, until I sent a progress picture to my teacher. See, I put in all the short stitch holding on the green foundation but there were a few areas that didn't look quite right to me. I figured maybe it was because of where I put in my temporary holding stitch.

You'll have to click on the image to get a bigger picture but you can clearly see my short stitch holding. These should sink into the foundation and become invisible. After discussing it, it was decided that I should take it out and see if it was doable without damaging the foundation.

The frogging happened from the back. I was never so grateful of how picky (and anal) I am with my stitching. Because I put in my stitching consistently going from left to right, it was very easy for my to remove all the stitches (including knots).

Since I was there, I decided to also take out the short stitch holding on the upper part of the body. Being a picky person, I knew I'd end up redoing it anyways as I wasn't a 100% satisfied of it either. It took all day but I'm happy to say my foundation is still good and I'll be able to make a second attempt. We had a nice group discussion on how I can do a better job, and here's a few things we decided:

• my temporary holding stitches will be put in 5mm apart (I initially had them at 8mm)
• short stitch holdings will be 1cm in length. I initially had them at 8mm but I think the stitches were too short, making them more angled than they should be
• there will be at most 3 columns of temporary holding stitches on the narrow part of the kimono

At the end of the day, I had enough time to start the temporary holding stitch.

Since Mr. Frog was visiting, I decided to extend his stay for one more day to work on the Contrast Color Wheel. Remember that weird green? It turns out the color was right but it was in the wrong section. After reaching out to Jen Goodwin, we quickly realized I had an extra green.

I really should have listened to my instincts. The lighter green looked nothing like what it should in the image but I figured maybe it was lighting. This meant I needed to remove all the light green as well as the darker green.

The unpicking although not fun was painless as the back of my work was neat. I could remove some areas without disturbing what needed to stay in.

I spent all of Sunday unpicking, with a little bit of time at the end for some stitching.

So after a whole weekend of unpicking, I was quite happy to see the back of Mr. Frog and I hope I won't get another visit for a long while.