I’ve been waiting to share my progress on Winding the Skeins with you until I got the first woman’s face stitched. When it was part-way done she looked diseased or something, but now you can really see her. I have a little left to do on her shoulder, and the sky on the right needs to be stitched. Other than that, I’m nearly done with page two! Most of the sky stitching remaining on this page is metallic, and since I’m just doing a tent stitch with that stuff—a full cross stitch is too thick over one—it’ll go fairly quickly so long as I have the rest of the sky stitches done first.

There are a few dark stitches on the left side of her face (our left) that I’m unhappy with. They’re too dark, and really draw attention to themselves. I’m considering taking them out and replacing them with thread a shade lighter or something. We’ll see. I hate frogging over-one stitching. The stitches are so tiny… I now have 14,185 stitches—11.3%—of this pattern completed.

In other stitching news, I splurged today and got a copy of Teresa Wentzler’s Needle Guardian from Patterns Online. This little dragon just cracks me up, and since I’ve been unhappy—to say the least—with the needle book project I started eons ago, I treated myself. I’ve been getting the urge to do another TW piece lately, and Annette had this on her blog recently, so this pattern release came at a perfect time.

Mirabilia has shipped her new November Topaz Fairy to retailers. She’s the first monthly fairy to come out in quite a while. Yellow again, though. I like the flowers. If I had a small daughter or niece or something I might stitch this one for her, but I don’t, so I’m off the hook. But why couldn’t she have done an amethyst fairy for February, or a garnet fairy for January, or… ? Why does everything she designs these days have to have so much yellow? Gag me.

Knitting bit

On a completely different note, I was wandering around in Ravelry yesterday and found a link to a site (Ingen Konst) that has pictures of all of Elsebeth Lavold’s patterns so you can see them before you buy the books. They even have a nice little retrospective about Elsebeth. The site is in Sweden, but don’t let that scare you. They have a U.S. English version, so you can read everything easily.