WIP Wednesday

No more talking about my future plans.  I do believe I jinxed myself.  No cabaret happened, and no quilt show road trip happened.  I woke up, got out of bed and promptly injured my knee.  How the heck do you do that?  It’s a tendon thing, and I had my feet pointing in one direction and turned to put on my wedding ring.  That’s all it took.  This aging process does create some “hard to believe it could happen” injuries.

Frozen peas and a knee brace, and 24 hours of resting helped a lot, and while I was really sad to miss the quilt show, I occupied myself with cross stitching:

 

Lots of progress has been made, and lots of thread changes to the chart also.

First –  I substituted all the thread colors for the nest, and am happier that it looks more natural.  Topaz and garnet were in that nest, and I have never seen a bird’s nest with those colors.

Second –  The colors for the small red flowers along the bottom of the bird nest square are a deeper red.  I love the color red, and the colors called for were more orange than red – which went well with the topaz and garnet nest, but since I changed that out, I changed the flower colors to go with my nest colors.

Third – the dragon fly needed something fun.  I kept the original colors, but changed out the lightest wing color from 2 strands of DMC to one strand of DMC and one strand of Petite Treasure Braid., and am seriously thinking of removing the lightest color from the dragon fly body and doing the same thing – one strand of DMC with one strand of Petite Treasure Braid.

Am I having fun?  You betcha!

My husband drove me to the local needlecraft store – the West, and I hobbled around making a few purchases.  My very first piece of evenweave fabric, the aforementioned Petite Treasure Braid and some Kreinik – which I’ve already decided not to use on this project.

The pattern calls for gold cording to couch around the border leaves.  I just couldn’t use a gold cord in this pretty design.  It was too much a departure from the look I’m creating.  The Kreinik is a great color, but I’m not sure the sparkle would look all that great now.  I’m thinking a nice rayon cord would add a bit of understated shine, and add a different texture.  I have lots of that at home, so will wait till I’m home to sew that step.

If I don’t like that, I’ll look for a fingering weight or thinner brown boucle yarn.  That would look very natural.  Wish I would have thought about that for the nest.  Now that would have added lots of texture and made a nice cozy nest.

You should be able to tell by now that I don’t give a hoot about following the rules.  I’m a firm believer in using whatever textile product I own, or can source, that I think will work well in a project.  Who cares if yarn is used in a cross stitch project?  Who cares if sewing threads are used?  There are some awfully pretty variegated 12, 30 and 40  wt sewing threads on the market, and I own a lot of them.  As far as I’m concerned all fibers are fair game.

Yes, I’m back cross stitching, but hold onto your hats, because I’m going rogue and changing up colors, threads and textures to my heart’s desire.  This is going to be fun, people.

 

Hugs…