July 2, 2008

Today was a great stitching day! I worked on Butterfly Garden until about 5am and almost finished it. I had two mistakes and had to do a consider-able amount of frogging on the vine, though. As usual, I was determined to get back to where I was, pre-frog attack, before I would go to sleep.
Unfortunately, I had to take out the entire vine on the bottom because I worked it counter-clockwise from about the middle of the top, and of course my mistake was all the way on the left side of the bottom. Somehow both sides were correct; it was just the top and bottom that I goofed on. This is the picture I took before I went to bed.
I pulled it out of my bag to work on it at dialysis and decided I needed a second opinion about a choice I was contemplat-ing in stitching it. On the model, there is a varigated border around the vines and flowers that surrounds the motifs in the center. After conferring with Debi over the phone today, we both reached the same conclusion about that border: It works on the model because the only varigated part was the center medallion, so it ties that in; it does not work for my Butterfly Garden because I used the varigated for the flowers, the center medallion, and half of the motifs around it. The way I did it looks very delicate and pretty, but if I were to stitch the square border, it would look heavy and overpower the rest of the design. So this is my second full finish in my Dinky-Dyes Stitch-Along with Debi M in California and my twenty-eighth of 2008.

Here are all three finished pieces of my Dinky Dyes SAL with Debi: Southern Stars (L), partial Terra Australis(Top R), and Butterfly Garden (Bottom R)

I laid out several charts and had my favorite dialysis technician pick my next piece to work on. His choice? Mount Coot-Tha by Dinky Dyes. I only had three minutes until my treatment ended, but that gave me enough time to mark the center of the fabric with one of my marking pins. Regrettably, that's as far as I proceeded with it today. Tomorrow is another day! There's always tomorrow! (Okay, so now I'm stealing from Gone With the Wind, I admit it)