Fern Gully x Avatar?

After the last post, I was sincerely worried that the fairy was going to turn out some mutant creation reminiscent of Fern Gully meeting Avatar. (I didn't date myself by knowing that movie, did I?!)

Thankfully, not so!

I spent most of the 3 days over the weekend stitching. Completing a decent portion of page 4 and getting a good enough portion of the fairy done to have an idea if the finished piece is going to be hideously misshapen or not.

Fairy - Page 4 & 5 19-Apr-2015

She looks pretty in proportion from here, and I'm loving the detail of her wings. So delicate looking and pretty!

What I'm not loving is stitching with the Kreinik again. Sigh.

See the Kreinik is thicker than one strand of floss, so those areas look raised. I didn't mind the effect on the lily blossoms. I'm not sure how I feel about it on the Fairy herself. So far I'm just attempting to keep the stitching very taut to flatten it out that way, and it seems to mostly be working.

The finished piece likely isn't going to be inspected quite as closely as it is while I'm working on it. So as long as the Kreinik looks decent I think I'm just going to leave it. Although, for Treasure Hunt I'm nearly certain I'll have to split the Kreinik or tent stitch it.

I also had the brainstorm to offer this to my pregnant sister who was looking for a girly birth record. There are many cute ones out there, but not many that are predominantly feminine. Which I suppose makes sense, since you may start stitching one when you don't know the sex of the baby, or you just won't be finding out the sex since it's a gift or whatnot.

I can just see it now;
Here, have this pretty princess pink birth record for your baby boy ...  Er ...

Anyway. I offered Lily up for my sister to turn into a birth record if she likes. It would be pretty easy to just stitch in the date/name and other details in the gap between the fairy and the flowers. She's got something she is working on as well, but thinks Lily will be prettier and will decide later. (I'm assuming based on how much she likes her finished product.)

Now that I have a deadline for completion, it was just as well I spent most of the weekend getting page 4 done!

WiP 19-Apr-2015

I don't think it's looking half bad, and the detail/delicacy is very pretty! This makes me almost happy that I did go with the no BG version, since the one WiP I've seen of the original version has significantly fewer shades and looks much more pixelated and not as pretty (imo.)

Trucking along

Still working away on Lily!

Pages 1-3 are complete. Page 6 has some significant progress, and I've started stitching page 4 to start working on the fairy, not just the flowers. Fairly happy with my progress so far considering I'm just working on it for a little bit at night after 9 pm.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm not so sure on the dimensions of the fabric. The squares should be square. They're not. They're rectangles. Taller than they are wide. So the design is "stretched" taller than it should be. Hopefully this doesn't significantly affect the look of the finished piece.

Not sure if it's the fabric, or the frame I have the piece on. Likely a bit of both I'm thinking. The weave of the fabric is a little loose and it's quite soft compared to Lugana. Then to keep the fabric taut to stitch it is stretched more "up and down" vs "side to side" due to the rolling frame.

I did notice this when I was gridding the fabric, but I turned a blind eye to it. Fingers crossed that that wasn't an epic mistake. If it was, well that's what nieces are for right? (not quite a non sequitur - I'll gift the finished piece to one of my nieces!)

WiP 18-Apr-2015