The Plan Unravels

The PLAN had been to switch back to the Holly and Hearts Sampler on Thursday and, with luck, have a second finish in January. But I just wasn't in the mood to search for a tiny error in the back-stitched tracery that, though tiny, threw off the entire symmetry of the row. So I kept going with Tracery Dragons since that was moving along quite nicely with barely a frog in sight. Oh, there were a few teeny frogs involving the removal of a dozen or so misplaced stitches, but nothing major. So instead of having another finish [the Sampler] for January, I have made more progress than expected on a WIP. Not a bad trade-off. Who knows, maybe I'll even manage two finishes in February: the sampler and the dragons. Here are some before and after photos to demonstrate just how much progress has been made. [Note to those unfamiliar with Teresa Wentzler's designs: if you try to stitch her designs in a rational order, working steadily in a consistent direction, you change needles every 2 or 3 minutes. For TW, a large color block tends to be a dozen or so stitches and though her designs are pretty solidly stitched leaving little bare linen, that solid stitching is made up of multitudes of confetti stitches and quarter stitches. The end result is spectacular but the process is complicated.] So here is how things looked on Wednesday evening and the second shot shows how things looked Saturday evening. I even managed to complete one of the dreaded roses without too much trouble. I am trying to decide if I want to pause when I have completed the left side of page one and switch to doing all the back-stitching and the specialty stitching. It always give me a great deal of satisfaction to see the design come alive as I go. It keeps me motivated. And without the defining back stitches, a TW piece tends to look like an impressionist painting viewed out of focus.