Tag Archives: mermaid

New Stuff

Christine, your comment about crazy stash acquisition made me smile… since going off the Wagon Challenge at the end of ’05, I’ve been a bit crazy myself. I haven’t always fully confessed, but needless to say, I haven’t stuck to that ‘goal oriented’ plan I had 😳 My latest temptation was the SB&B Easter Sale, and I’m waiting on a couple of The Cat’s Whiskers charts, Enchanted Mermaid, a Drawn Thread chart and some mesh bags. I think that’s it!

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Anyway, all guilt aside – first off today, a new fabric I dyed up recently. I adore this. It’s a fat quarter of 28-count Lugana, and I dyed it with Mirabilia’s Midsummers Night Dream in mind. I have just plugged it into the fabric viewer, and it does look lovely with that design, but there’s a number of other Mirabilias it looks great for too – oddly enough, Enchanted Mermaid is one of them. I never envisaged a purple for that design.

I have a bunch of other white fabric just waiting for inspiration to strike – 2 FQs of Quaker (my personal favourite), 3 FQs of Cashel, and 2 more of Lugana. I also have a piece of Belfast I dyed but hate the results of, so I’m going to try over-dyeing that to see what I can acheive. Hopefully, if I get a bunch of satisfactory fabrics out of this lot, my desire for stash expansion will subside a little!

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Next is my newest start – yet another Mirabilia – Mermaids of the Deep Blue. I seem to be going through a very definite Mirabilia phase at the moment 🙂 I’d estimate there’s about 20 hours put into this so far, though I didn’t record times so far. There’s two weekends away worth of work in it, put it that way. I’m stitching this on hand-dyed Babbling Brook Jobelan – my first large piece on Jobelan, and I like it more than I thought I would, actually.

Cha Cha Cha

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At last! 😆 The curse of the Winter Queen is broken, and I have finished a Mirabilia design, almost 8 years after buying my first two charts. Finn was pretty insistent I finish it this morning, which was nice. I discovered he had ulterior motives though. As soon as the last bead was in, he decided I had to do ‘a yellow mermaid’ next :yuk: lol. Think I’ll distract him with his Noah’s Journey piece instead.

I’m pretty chuffed with this achievement. Not only is it my first finished Mirabila, but my first finished piece on my own hand-dyed fabric. I couldn’t get the sparkly picture I promised (how hard is sparkle to photograph?!), but hopefully the tweaking I did brings out the colours reasonably well, although the fabric has quite subtle patterning, and is also tricky to photograph well. Rest assured, she looks wonderful, and I will hopefully go in and choose some framing materials early next week. In the meanwhile, I’m just going to continue cha-cha-chaing around the room :giggle:

So Close, Yet…

Aaaargh, beading! I reneged on my decision not to use the invisible YLI thread again, which is not helping. You may notice I didn’t achieve my goal of finishing WFS in my school break – I returned on this Thursday just gone, to acquaint myself with my new units, Usability Engineering and Web Database Applications. (The latter requires a large group assignment, to which I say :yuk:, but otherwise it should be a more pleasant semester than last.)

But back to WFS – a HD is definitely nigh. By the end of the week, all things being equal (read: “if I ignore studying for the rest of the week” :giggle: ). I finished all of the beading on the top half tonight, and some of the tail fin is already done. I must say, despite my frustration with it, the beading on this is a lot more enjoyable than that on Celtic Christmas, which just got plain tedious after a while.

Really, really glad I switched out the Mill Hill beads for delicas, they look great. They have a squarish profile compared to the rounder MH beads, but I prefer to stitch them at an angle, which gives them the illusion of being curvier – it works for the strings of ‘pearls’, anyway.

After I finished tonight’s effort, I sat Her Gorgeousness in the light for a while and just gazed upon her glory. I really can’t wait to show her off… I’m going to have to try and get some photos that show off the sparklies.

My Mermaid, She Grows

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You have no idea what I had to go through to bring you this simple image. I quite forgot that my laptop was recently rejiggered, and was therefore missing all crucial software. Dagnammit. Anyway, feast your eyes. As usual, image links to a closer look. (Hmmm… gotta tweak my javascript that does that though – the windows aren’t opening up exactly as they should…)

Have sorted out the beads to my liking. The best pale blue delica I could find in my stash is still a little bit too close to the fabric colour, but the better size means they don’t disappear quite so much. The substitute I have for the cool darker peacock-blue beads is not quite as nice, but should still work really well. Now I just have to hope I have enough beads! A-beading-I-will-go…

Can’t Talk – Stitching

So I know you’re all on the edge of your seats waiting for that picture I promised! But to tell the truth, that ‘little bit of braid’ I had to stitch was almost the whole darn lot of the emerald #4 braid. I decided to wait until I’d finished it to get a picture, and, well, it took a whole darn lot of time. I don’t normally have an issue with stitching braid, but I’ve never stitched so much at one time (except on Celtic Christmas, where I used Petite Treasure Braid, which is a dream compared with Kreinik). Thank goodness for Thread Heaven and my needle threader, or I would have cursed more than I did! Anyway, the braid is finished now, but I’m too tired to get a picture, and besides, it will look better taken in daylight. So you’ll just have to wait some more… meanwhile, you can go check out Mindy’s HD of the same design, if you like 🙂

Oh, I also started the beading – I attached 30 or so beads before I decided they’re all coming off and being substituted. The petites are too small on my 28 count fabric, and in addition, the pale blue beads totally disappear on the colour. I’ve got a sizeable Delica stash, so I’m going to have a dig in that, and hopefully come up with some substitutes tomorrow, and begin beading in earnest. Fingers crossed I can still get this finished before next Thursday (back-to-uni).

Yes, this is a stitching blog!

And to prove it, here’s a glimpse of my current favourite WIP… which is somewhat like a parent saying they have a favourite child (although in my case, the latter would be less contentious 🙂 ) At any rate, this lovely, albeit headless, mermaid is Mirabilia’s “Waiting For Ships”. No beads attached yet, but I’m nearing the end of the regular stitching. Part of the reason she is so special to me is because she is the first piece I’ve stitched on one of my own hand-dyes. Also, I think she goes very nicely with the Ocadia blog theme I’m currently featuring 🙂 Image links to a closer look.
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And just in case you thought I was done singing the praises of WordPress… wrong 😆 This post illustrates the use of categories. Categories filter the posts by topic. Select the Stitching category to see only stitching-related chatter. Further, select the Works in progress, or Finished sub-categories, to see only those posts. (Though there are no HD’s yet – perhaps I’ll post some retrospective finishes in the near future).