Monday, April 27, 2020

Only one model in the house!

I finished up Mirabilia's MD172 on April 17th, and it was approved and sent back to Wichelt last Monday, which is always a good feeling. Even better is that I now only have one model currently remaining to stitch, though it is a rather large one for Rosewood Manor. Last year I took on a bit more than I was comfortable with, and felt like deadlines were looming larger than I would like so it is nice to have cleared my "work" table of all but one design. This model will probably take me well into July, so I have asked Wichelt not to send me anything until at least the end of June and I feel considerably lighter than I have for some time.

I spent the weekend after I completed the Mirabilia working on the Duchess of Rouen for myself, and I finished her massive hair:


After all that white and gray it was a pleasure to make a start on the colorful flowers in all that hair:


I'm remaining up to date on the temperature SAL, which currently looks like this:


Looking forward to a new high temperature square any time now...

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

At last!

Last fall I was working on a large Mirabilia design, and as she was finally released today I can share some pictures. This is MD169 Princess Elliana, and the one word that most came to mind as I worked on her was "glorious":









She uses about 60 colors of floss, including all 35 of the newest DMC colors, and she took about 10 weeks to stitch. I took progress photos about every two weeks, so here is how she developed:






The fabric is Wichelt's Peaceful Purple, and it is really perfect for the design. Usually I would be thinking of a hand-dyed fabric for a Mirabilia, but if I stitch this for myself I would use the recommended fabric. It's a gorgeous color, similar to DMC 3747 but maybe a tad darker.

This is the one that had quite a few errors in the chart (so many colors probably made it difficult for the graphic designer to convert Nora's hand drawn chart into a computer program), including one I didn't catch until it was almost done. The large purple roses had an incorrect color, a dark pink, and they were a bit of a pain to fix because I had already beaded most of them, but they ended up looking much better. See if you can spot the change:



I really want to stitch this one for myself as she is probably one of my top two or three favorite Mirabilia's to date, but for now I'm going to finish the current Mirabilia model (which should hopefully be done by the end of the weekend) currently scheduled to be released in October.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Monday, April 6, 2020

Kringles progress

I decided to take the weekend off from work stitching and bring out Kringles for a little love. I had every intention of stitching the entire roof first as it's probably the least fun part, but I just couldn't stay away from one of the windows!


I'm using the recommended materials but I'm also adding some colors and switching a few colors around, so we'll see how that goes. I think I'll try to continue doing one section of roof followed by a window because that roof is pretty intense!

My Carolyn Manning temperature SAL has started to get more colorful now that April has arrived. Those first few really nice spring days are just so amazing, and knowing that all the good days are ahead is wonderful.


Now I can get back to the model feeling refreshed after a weekend off, and hopefully make good progress this week. I'm hoping the newest Mirabilia will still be released on the 15th so I can share some pictures, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see how Wichelt being closed will affect their timeline.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!