Finished - Faith, Hope and Charity

 It is finished and framed. After  12 to 13 years of on and off stitching I finished this design from Heaven and Earth Designs. It is 525 by 393 stitches, that makes 206,325 stitches on 32 count linen over one linen thread. I added gold thread to the halos so it sparkles when it catches the light. I had to re-chart the faces and  pull out and re-stitch some of the hands. The colors were just too dark and looked like mud. I really like the way that Faith's hands turned out.

The back of the piece looks like an impressionistic  version of the design. 

Hummingbird moth and very old UFO

 The Hawthorn and Hummingbird moth is from a kit from Alison Cole. She discovered the moth on a trip to Utah when she was teaching here and said that she couldn't wait to stitch one.

It has dimensional flowers and  leaves in the pattern but I couldn't resist making the moth 3 dimensional so that it could hover over the flowers. Alison's pattern has the top of the moth and the wings. I found photo of bottom of the moth and stitched the bottom and created legs for it. It was a bit tricky  to put it all together. There are a few things that I might do differently if I was to do another one but I am happy with the way that I  turned out. I put a green wire in the bottom so that it could hover over the flowers. Taking photos was hard but I think that you can see the full moth.

In 1999, I took a class at seminar from Judy Souliotis. I worked on it in class but then it got put away for 20+ years. I was looking for a  UFO to work on and pulled it out. It is called Bouquet de Fleurs and is a basket of  shaded silk flowers on white Sha. The purpose of the class was to learn a number of techniques of shading with silk threads. It uses Japanese flat silk, Chinese slightly twisted silk and Needlepoint silk along with several types gold threads. I have improved my techniques over the years and now feel free to add and adapt as I go along if I want to, but stayed close to the original design of this one.