Long Weekend Progress

I meant to post this yesterday but got derailed. Canada celebrated Thanks giving over the weekend. I'd been really looking forward to having three days of stitching. I ended up only having a day and a half but that's okay.

One of the projects I wanted to work was my seminar piece Bearded Iris by Alison Cole. I put in the last piece of felt and cleaned it up a little. I had to take out some cutwork and chipping that was applied with a single thread (we're supposed to use a doubled thread). I also cut out any outline stitches that were showing.

I also put in the last petal. I forgot how fiddly these things are. I'm looking at the overall shape and it looks okay, I just hope I'm able to hide those stitches when I go in to outline the petals.

I finished the leaf I had started in class and plunged all the passing. These are not the regular Japanese passing I'm used to. These suckers are slippery! I didn't realize till I started plunging the other end that I had pulled too hard on one of them and it slipped way to far. I had to carefully pull it out and re-couch it. It did unravel a tiny bit but it probably won't show unless you look at it too closely.

It looks good from the front, but I still have to clean up the back. I'll leave the boring work for the days when I'm too tired for a long stitching session.

I started beading the background on Hanabatake. I had initially started on the lower left corner but felt like I was crowding my beads too much and took it all out. I re-started this time on the lower right corner. They're not as crowded as my initial start but it's still more densely beaded than the original design.

I've decided that I like how it looks and will just keep going. I only hope I have enough beads to do the entire piece. If I thought the leaves took a long time, the background will feel like it will take forever. I've gotten into a rhythm where I stitch a scoop of beads at a time. It's not a huge amount, about 20-30 beads I think. Once I finish those, if I still feel up to it, I would get another scoop. I'll have to keep at it if I want to finish before the end of the year.

Here's a project that hasn't appeared for a long time. It's been almost a year actually. I've been finding that my eyes have been too tired lately. I think it's because of the materials I've been stitching with. I decided to test it out with some cross stitch. Every time I felt like stitching but too tired to work on my bigger projects, I would take out Bramble and the Rose and put in a few stitches. I've been doing that on and off for about 2 weeks and it seems to be paying off. I just might be able to reach my goal of finishing one page this year.

For this week's stitching plan, I want to try to put in some time on Hanabatake between today and tomorrow. Maybe reach the lower left corner?

This weekend is my monthly Japanese embroidery meeting, but instead of a single day we're doing a retreat over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The group is also meeting Monday but I have work, so I will join them at the end of the day. It will be great to play hooky from work on Friday at least and spend the entire day stitching. My plan is to work on the cords that wrap around the bouquet's paper. That should keep me busy and if I get bored I have a ton of twisted thread to make for the stems.