One week and four pages complete!

I have procured a camera so yay!! I can take pictures again. Be warned, I have some catching up to do today, so there will be a few! Except for the English Whitework Sampler, I forgot to take pictures of that!! I suppose I could take some now...

Okay, first the finishes. You may remember I had almost finished Sabrina a few weeks ago but ran out of beads. Well, here she is, beads and all. I wish I'd been more on the ball when I started her and done her hair darker. Audrey Hepburn was certainly not a blonde... but oh well. She's stitched mostly in DMC, the two waterlilies that were suggested I replaced with stuff I had here - the dark pink is Carrie's Colonial Red, and the green is Sassy's Olive Branch. The fabric is a solo from Silkweaver on 32 ct Jobelan, and though the picture doesn't show it well, it's mostly light pink but has spots of light blue, light purple, and light yellow through it.

This is Bluebell. She was an incredibly quick stitch, only taking four days from start to finish. I almost stitched her in HDF, as I had most of the conversion colours, but when I pulled the DMC to do an eyeball match for the colours I was missing I noticed the suggested colours were way off - in some cases 3 shades lighter than the original - so I just used the DMC. She's stitched on 32 ct Little Boy Blue Belfast linen - although in the picture it looks white, it's a very light blue

This little beauty is Turkish Delight by Ink Circles. It's stitched in 2 limited edition HDF colour - Delphinium and Ocean Pools and they're soooo gorgeous. This picture really doesn't show them off at all. It does however, show that my piece of Kingston Linen isn't an evenweave. That's not actually supposed to be an oval, it's a circle. But I still love how it's stitching up. It's 55 ct - yes, 55.

After a day or so with Turkish Delight, I wanted something with specialty stitches, so I worked on The Needle's Prayse English Whitework Sampler. It's stitched mostly in perle #12 on 40ct graziano linen. While it's really fun, and really beautiful, trying to pull eyelets and four sided stitches on Graziano linen is a nightmare. My fingers were actually beginning to ache after a night with this one! If you've never used Graziano, it's a wonderful linen, and great for cross stitch, but it is an incredibly dense weave, so it probably wasn't the best choice for this piece. But it is really beautiful and I'll keep working away at it. It's so very hard to photograph though!!

After that I decided to start a new Mirabilia (don't know why I've been on such a big Mira kick lately) and started on The Petal Fairy. I got quite a bit finished before fabric for AL arrived actually. I decided that I wanted to stitch her wings in silks with the metallics so I'm using Eterna for them and it's stitching up really beautifully. Pictures really don't do these threads justice, they're just so shiny. I'm using 28ct Floba for this piece - and I wish they still made this stuff. You can get it in 25 ct still but they don't make the 28 anymore. I have enough left to stitch The Bliss Fairy as well.

And finally, after one week and a busy Easter weekend with not a whole lot of stitching, I am finished four pages on Antique Lace. Actually after last night's stitching session I'm done the border down to the bottom too. I'm really playing with textures in this one, I'm using the HDF premium for the cross stitches, regular for the pulled backstitches, and perle #8 for the rhodes and eyelets. Hoping to finish the last two pages on this left section by the weekend, then the fun begins - the middle section is pretty densely stitched, so I'd imagine it will take a lot longer to complete.

And now off I go to answer some emails, go for my walk (as long as the rain holds off) and then stitch some more. :)