I stitched like a fiend last week and did indeed finish up the regular cross stitch late Sunday night.

じゃんじゃあああん！She’s done! (ish)

Of course finishing the regular cross stitch doesn’t mean she’s done. And I wouldn’t even let myself sleep after finishing that. I had to immediately start on the backstitch and do some of the vines. I love backstitch. It goes much more quickly than the cross stitch and it’s like instant gratification. It just makes everything pop and look even better.

This is what I ended up stitching Sunday night.

Sorry for the poor lighting. Lamp-lit pictures are’t the best.

Since then I’ve been stitching away. I finished all of the outlining of the vines and flowers and of Mirabelle herself except for a little of her dress on the right that I can’t get to because of the frame. So now I’m left with the designs on the top and bottom. Sound familiar?

Today’s state of completion.

I really love the effect of the silver and black threads, but those designs are challenging and time consuming. There’s no clear linear way to stitch it, so I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to waste thread going here, there, and everywhere. That’s also going to take me the longest time to complete. I’m about halfway across the top, but the pattern repeats inverted on the bottom.

The top border.

I also have to finish outlining the pattern on the bottom. I started it, and I’m hoping it gets better. It uses a lot of half-stitches and they’re a little hard to follow. Also it doesn’t make the design pop as much as I thought it would, but it might be because it’s not finished.

Here are a few close-ups of some of the finished work. I’m pretty certain I can finish this in the next week. After that I’ve sworn I’m going to take a week or two hiatus before starting another project, but it seems like the second I finish one I start another, so we’ll see. Until then!

Climbing flowers on the left

Mirabelle’s face.

I am still slogging along with this beast, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

I took a slight detour and worked on another mini project for part of the week. I finished it and I’ll post pictures next week. I made it for a friend and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. I also successfully made last week’s birthday castle into a card using a lot of double-sided tape and a few pins (thanks for the suggestion Cross Stitch TV!)

It was actually a lot easier to mount than I thought it would be.

Finished birthday card

As for Mirabelle, I am too lazy to remove her from her snap-frame, so the edges are cut off in the photos, but I managed to work up the left side with the peach border and run it alllllll the way across the top. The awkward size of the frame—11×17 means I’ve literally stitched upside down and backwards to try and work comfortably. At least the project is making me feel like super woman.

Where I am in my quest to finish the top border.

The border along the top isn’t quite as bad as I thought. With a few more X-Files episodes (yup, I’m rewatching the series while I stitch this) I think I could get it done.

The bottom work. The right side is smushed under the frame, but I got it all finished.

After that it’s just filling in the bottom, which is feeling more and more doable. I filled in all of the darker green, and all of the single vertical rows, so I have the big empty space where the flourishes of light green and light brown go and then just the solid brown and light green that flank the dark green. I’ve so got this. Hopefully by next week I’ll be doing the backstitch.

The end table my cross stitch took over.

That funky silver and black thread. It’s the one marked █

I haven’t even opened the backstitch diagram. I have no idea how much I have to do, but I know it has some intricate parts with a really interesting silver and black thread.

Until next week!

I always feel like I’m not getting anything done, so I’m hoping these posts will illustrate the contrary. I’m still working away on the bottom part of the piece. I’m dreading doing the border around the top and sides because I have to count so much to get there which means a high probability of an error, so for the moment I’m ignoring that and just working wherever I feel like on the bottom.

Excuse the pictures. I am without a phone, so they were taken with my iPad and they’re a little washed out and not very sharp. Maybe next week I’ll break out a real camera or test out the camera on the iPhone 6 that should be arriving soon.

The entire cross stitch of “If Only” to date.

I was trying to finish the bottom left corner. For this project I purchased a Q-Snap style frame (though an off-brand because my craft store didn’t carry the “real” brand). I’ve never worked with one before and, while I like it because you can get great tension, I find that I often get the cross stitch into it crooked. The size of this piece is such that an 11 x 17 inch Q-Snap (off brand) frame gets part of the stitched-piece pinched in it. So I was trying to finish the left hand side so that I could set it in and forget it for a while and maybe finish the right side so it doesn’t matter if either side gets pinched a bit (I put felt in between the plastic and the stitching). I think the real brand makes a 1-inch extender which would be perfect. Since I have 2 more projects this size I intend to do it may be worth looking into.

Close-Up of the area I worked this week.

I desperately want to take a break from this and start on a little carousel horse, but I’m afraid if I switch projects I won’t pick this one up again, so expect to see more brown and green filled in next week. Hopefully I’ll be able to fill in the band and maybe a bit of the right side. Any progress is good progress in my book.