A new designer

I am really excited for my friend Akshay, who has taken the plunge and published his first cross stitch design under the company name Smitten by Stitches. It's currently available for sale at Fox & Rabbit while Akshay works on creating a few more designs with an eye to opening an Etsy shop in the future. Some people are doing a blessings sampler SAL, though I didn't discover it in time to participate since it's supposed to be started and finished in January. I love playing with one color designs, so last Friday I pulled some floss and fabric that I thought would look good together:

Of course, then I had to stitch enough of it to see how they all came together, and I am pretty happy with the result so far:

Aside from the Threadworx floss, the remaining colors are from Cottage Garden Threads, specifically their Daydream collection. While I've had some of their threads for a while now, this is my first time using them and I am really enjoying them; they have a nice feel, and I like the rapid color changes in the variegated skein. I'm looking forward to playing more with this design this week, though Merry Merry will most likely be my main focus.

I spent Saturday and Sunday stitching on Merry Merry, though not a lot on Sunday because the urge struck to work on cleaning up my craft room (i.e. organizing WIPs and putting stash away that had been piling up over the past six months or so), so I spent several hours doing that. I'm making good progress on her though, and it's almost time to extend the Qsnaps:

The chart calls for Mill Hill treasure 12162, which is a medium snowflake, but when I went to place it in her headpiece I found that it was too large to fit in amongst the surrounding beads. I looked at the model photo on the Mirabilia site and it looks like that one actually goes over the bugle bead to the lower right of it. Here is the best fit I could get with that treasure:

Luckily, I had a 12161 treasure in my stash, which is a smaller version of the same snowflake, so that's what I ended up using:

I'm stitching mine on 32ct fabric, so it's possible the treasure might fit on 28ct, but if it doesn't fit I would suggest eliminating that bugle bead to the lower right of it, or using the smaller version.

I'm planning to fill in more green on her dress this week, attach some more beads to the finished area, then extend the Qsnaps and maybe start some of the white underskirt--I have a feeling that's going to be less fun to work on than the rest of her, so I might try to intersperse that with parts of the rest of the dress.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!