Bigger fiber projects, and foreign language instructions
Lizzie Kate's 2009 Boo Club banner.
I wish I'd included something for perspective - this came out about 2.5" long.
I had this kitted up in my stash box for quite a long time before I finally got around to starting it. It went together pretty quickly, and then it stalled for months while my LNS dicked around getting me a spool of Kreinik. (Never do mail-order through Ginger's Needlearts of Austin!). I made two fairly significant alterations to the pattern. For one, I swapped out the bland yellow used in the stars for each panel with glow-in-the-dark Kreinik. I tried a couple of different glow in the dark flosses before settling on the kreinik. DMC glow floss is bone white, which I didn't like, and didn't glow enough if I blended it with a yellow floss. I had some unnamed floss left over from a stitch kit, but it was an abhorrent lime green. So I went to my nemesis, Kreinik.
The other thing I did was add candy to the top of the border as well as the bottom. The original pattern just had the checkerboard, but as the pattern is an odd number of stitches wide, there was a weird compensation right in the top right corner. Plus, who doesn't like more candy. But looking at it now, I wish I'd left a little more space between the candy and the words.
Silver Dragonfly
Designed by Nora Corbett for Wichelt.
When he visited at my birthday in November, ebony14 picked this for me to do as my next largish piece I almost feel like this was an example of bait & switch on the designer's part. The picture on the chart shows a very muted, sophisticated, and silver winged dragonfly, and that's what I was expecting to stitch. Instead, the colors are much more in the pastel family, and the blue and pink floss stand out strongly against the metallic Kreinik. I did make a couple of changes: I swapped out the fuzzy Wisper for a black perle cotton for the legs and antennae, and I stitched the antennae to be nominally anatomically accurate. I'm an entomologist, and I know my odonates - they are not fuzzy, and they have short, almost spiky antennae. I hate it when designers do grossly inaccurate insects.
Violets
I picked up this little kit when I was in Japan back in July. It's more traditional embroidery than my usual style, but I liked it, and I had seen lots of violets. And though it is small, it was a fairly ambitious project for me because all the instructions were in Japanese. Fortunately, they were quite well illustrated, so I had a fighting chance of turning out something decent.
I'm not sure what the actual name of the design is, but I believe the designer is Kazuko Aoki. It's a beginner difficulty thing, and nothing special. But I'm proud of myself for making it come out half-way decent.
I don't think that the floss was regular cotton DMC - it felt far too silky, and was very pleasant to work with.
Princess Roll (Or as I call it, the Kawaii Cake!)
This was another of my Japan purchases. I saw (and ate!) green tea flavored pastries several times. And it doesn't hurt that I thought it fell into the realm of so-cute-I-had-to-buy-it.
I was even more nervous about this one because it isn't embroidery, but more 3-d construction. But like the piece above, the instructions were very well illustrated, and the felt happened to be pre-cut. So I was able to put this entire thing together over the course of a 3 part miniseries about Martin Luther. The only thing I didn't get quite right was the whipped cream puff. The picture shows something that's pointed at the top, while mine is pressed inward. But there were a whole bunch of arrows and instructions on that bit that I couldn't follow. But I did eventually manage to shape it into something that looks like a squirt of whipped cream to my fairly experienced eye.
(cross-posted to cross_stitch)