Monday, March 25, 2013

Beaded Logan: First Post

I currently have an overdue Christmas present for my sister.  I have already "given" it to her but it is not complete.

I know I've mentioned my adorable nephew before, well, when this project is completed it will hopefully look how my nephew did at the age of 4 months, the actual picture I'm using is to the right.  He's even more adorable now at the age of 2, but I'm his aunt, I'm a little biased.

Now, I think I should explain this a little further.  Growing up our mother had two pictures, one of my sister and one of myself, both at the age of about 1 year, or was it 2?  A family friend painted them and my grandparents framed them.  I thought how cool would it be to do something like that for my sister with my nephew.  Well, I can't paint all that well, so I decided to bead it.

This is created by weaving together different colored beads.  One row is done at a time working down the pattern.  I stopped working on this for a while because I didn't like the way he looked at me.  Seriously, the chart I made for this, his eyes looked eerie.  Well, I've decided to suck it up and hope it looks much better in actual beads than in the computer generated version.  I love the program I used to make the pattern, but sometimes the colors can be a bit off, but that's to be expected.

Here's where it was at when I "gave" it to my sister:
Progress as of September 2, 2012, 22 rows.
Now for the last few days' progress:
Progress as of March 24, 2013, 62 rows.
Progress as of March 25, 2013, 85 rows.
Project Stats:
Pattern: Beaded Logan, 4 Months Old
Original Artist: My Sister and Brother-in-law :)
Pattern by: Me!
Started Beading: November 1, 2011
Beads: 11/0 Delicas
Thread: Silamide
Percentage: 29.5% complete
Rows: 85 of 288 complete
Beads: 6,375 of 21,600 complete

I know most, if not all, of my readers are cross stitchers, so I decided to explain this a little bit better.  To the right is a close up of the beading so you can see the individual beads a bit better.  Each bead is added one at a time and sewn into place with a thin thread.  The whole picture is 150 beads wide, but each row has 75 beads, so while the whole project has 288 rows, it's only 144 beads tall.

Below is my "workstation".  I recently got some new tables to work off of so beading has become easier.  The beads come in the tubes that you see laying on the tray.  It's actually a tray for laying out necklaces and bracelets, but it works perfectly for my purposes.  I line up the beads one row at a time in the groove at the bottom of the picture.  The flesh tones are near the bottom and the background colors are in the triangular trays toward the top.  I have no idea why the round furniture pads are on there... ignore those.
I'm currently using 8 colors in the project, 4 background colors and 4 flesh colors.  I think there are 10 more colors in the chart.  I say "think" because I don't remember and the graphic chart I made was one of the things lost when my hard drive crashed.  Luckily the word chart survived so I didn't have to recreate it.  I am planning on putting it back into the program, but that is going to take quite a bit of time.

I'm working on this during the day, and I think I'm going to do some crocheting at night.  Considering practically everything else on this website has been cross stitch, the next few posts are going to be dramatically different from normal.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Transcendence: Ninth Post - Page 23

I've been working on Transcendence quite a bit.

He finally has part of his left hand and a few more of his butterflies here:

And finally the greens are in!  So here's the entire row finished!

YAY!  I'm so excited.  He's looking so awesome.  This is the first row I've completed in any HAED.  Next I'm going to go up a row starting with page 13 then work my way right.  But I have a few other things I really need to work on before I should continue with him.  I'll be posting progress on those projects as well.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Transcendence
Original Artist: Adele Sessler
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: March 7, 2012
Fabric: 20ct. Black Lugana Evenweave
Floss: DMC 2 over 1
Percentage: 19.18% complete
Pages Stitched: 6 of 36 complete
Stitches: 27,487 out of 143,296 complete
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42

Monday, March 18, 2013

Transcendence: Eighth Post - Pages 23 & 24

I did go back to Transcendence and started working on pages 23 and 24.  I was trying to find a good place to post mid pages.

Page 24 only had about 300 stitches and 9 colors so I decided to do all of those colors first and finish off the page.  So page 24 is complete and page 23 is a little over 60% complete.

I'll take a picture of the whole row after I complete page 23.
Project Stats:
Pattern: Transcendence
Original Artist: Adele Sessler
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: March 7, 2012
Fabric: 20ct. Black Lugana Evenweave
Floss: DMC 2 over 1
Percentage: 17.92% complete
Pages Stitched: 5 of 36 complete
Stitches: 25,672 out of 143,296 complete
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42

The rest of the page contains a lot of different colors so it will probably take a bit of time with so much changing of threads.

Yesterday I went and ordered three of my projects to be framed.  When I get those back I'll post their final looks.

Monday, March 11, 2013

You Are Never Too Old: First Post

I found another free pattern created by Jennifer Aikman-Smith of Dragon Dreams.  This time it was on the Kreinick website, so most of the pattern is Kreinick thread.

Sometimes I think she has some sort of insight into my life, especially with this one.  Considering I still have my teddy bear since I was 5 years old, making this seemed like a no brainer.  Of course I do have to change the color of the bear again.

I went with a dark mottled fabric by Picture this Plus called Dusk.  I stitched the green first:

I did most of the rest of the dragon:

Now time to add the teddy bear:

Project Stats:
Pattern: You Are Never Too Old
Pattern by: Dragon Dreams
Started Stitching: March 7, 2013
Fabric: 28ct. Dusk Cashel Linen
Floss: DMC 2 over 2, or 1 over 2 Kreinick #4 Braid
Percentage: 65.22% complete
Stitches: 1866 out of 2861 complete

I can't seem to find my gold braid at the moment, so I can't finish up the scales on the dragon.  I'll probably have to wait until I get back home, I didn't put it with the rest of my braids, so it has to be floating around my place somewhere.  I'm going to go to the border at the moment, then I might work on something else.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Little Snap Dragon: Fourth Post - Complete

Little Snap Dragon got enough love to get finished.

Here he was about a week back with most of his wings completed:

Here he is completed:

Project Stats:
Pattern: Little Snap Dragon
Pattern by: Kustom Krafts
Started Stitching: January 11, 2013
Finished Stitching: March 6, 2013
Fabric: 14ct. Khaki Aida
Floss: Kit Floss 2 over 1

I'm not sure what I'm going to do next, if I'm going back to Transcendence or not.  I might do a quick small project.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Her Special Place: Second Post

I got a little derailed on my projects.  After finding the chart for Her Special Place I had a desire to work on it.  So I did.

I believe I have finished all of one of the colors.  You can see her basic outline.  I'm still thinking about what color I'm going to do next.  I don't know if I want to continue with her skin or focus more on her hair.

But in the immediate future I'll go back to Little Snap Dragon.

Project Stats:
Pattern: Her Special Place
Original Artist: Selina Fenech
Pattern by: Heaven and Earth Designs
Started Stitching: October 16, 2012
Fabric: 28ct. White Evenweave
Floss: DMC 1 over 1
Percentage: 6.28% complete
Stitches: 4,059 out of 64,595 complete