A Challenging Challenge

The Summer of Love challenge continues. It's not finished. I don't know if it's even close to being finished. I have no sense of how long some of the elements will take to complete. I'm working on the parts I think will be the most time-consuming first, but I keep stitching elements that are taking longer to complete than I expect.

I'm not going to make the deadline for mailing the actual piece, but I still might have a chance to send a photo which can be submitted as late as 15 August (next Tuesday). That gives me 4 more days to stitch. (Yikes!)

Last time I left off with photos of some rather boring-to-stitch daisies. Those daisies are done.

The outlines for the daisies were printed as 1 point lines. It turns out a single strand of DMC floss is about 1 point wide with no room for error. I had to stitch very slowly and carefully to make sure the thread covered the lines exactly. That took extra time. I think I'll use 1/2 point lines next time.

Here's another look at the grey daisies.

I don't usually use magnification when I stitch. I prefer not to especially when thread painting because I like to see what I'm doing in context to everything around it. That being said, I have a new lighted magnifier and I've been trying it out on this project. It's helping with stitching edges that need to be extremely precise and cut-out shapes, but I'm still mostly stitching without magnification.

I also have two new lights that I'm getting a chance to use for the first time. I'm really enjoying them. One is a very wide LED--the light on the left that kind of looks like a spaceship--that sits up above and the other is a small architect's LED lamp--on the right--that I use to come in close to the work. I have no lighting problems at the moment! They're very flexible and move in and out, up and down very smoothly. They remind me of dentists' lights in the way they easily move in and out of the way. 

The aforementioned magnifier--in the centre--has a circle of LEDs that provides even more light.

Enough with lamps and grey flowers, let's have some colour! 

The colour stripes have taken an amazing amount of time to stitch. They are filled with long and short stitching. Making sure the cut-off edges are precise and stitching around various cut-out shapes has been very time-consuming and tedious. I've decided that the designer of this thing is some kind of sadist.

Oh, yeah, that would be me!

This flower is stitched with one of the required DMC threads. (I really like this colour!)

There is not going to be a lot of shading on this piece. I only plan to use it on four elements one of them being this flower.

I hope it's finished by Tuesday, but if not, I'll keep working on it until it's done.

It's going to be yet another interesting weekend.