Celestial Dragon, page finish!

My stitching bug is back and in full force, helped along by the fact that work is slowing down a bit so I've been working normal 8 hour days instead of 10-12 hour days! Put together all this means more stitching!

Before:

After:

 There is lots and lots of Kreinik in this piece, and you can just barely see the border that will surround the whole dragon, all stitching in 032 Kreinik. Once all the cross stitch is done there's also a crazy amount of backstitching, a couple of french knots, and beads galore! By the time I'm done I'm going to need sunglasses to look at it it will be so shiny!

Not that I'm complaining.

Happy stitching, everyone!

Celestial Dragon 2

These last 10 hours on Celestial Dragon have just crawled by. It's the busiest time of year at work - everyone wants to close their financings NOW. Which means I'm working 6-7 days a week. And I am TIRED. So this took a long time.

Before:

After:

I'm doing all the stitching first and then will fill in the backstitching, beading, and french knots, but that won't be for a while. If you look REALLY hard on the right side, you can see the sparkly thread border. Those purple and periwinkle "whiskers" are also in sparkly thread. Hard to tell, but it's there.

I am so, so exhausted from work right now, and so burned out. I went up to the partners on Friday and just told them I need some time off in January to recharge. They told me to go for it, I put in my PTO request, and started planning out all the lazy days I would spend in my PJ's. Then I thought to myself, for kicks, how much tickets to Iceland cost at that time. So I checked. And I almost died. $300 roundtrip per person, direct flight from SFO. Impossible. So I told H³. Who told me we had to scoop those tickets up.

So I'm going to Iceland with H³ for the third time in January for a week! Everyone has their favorite place on earth they would go in a heartbeat. Mine is always Iceland.

I can't wait.

Happy stitching, everyone!

Celestial Dragon 1

I finished the first ten hours on Celestial Dragon last week, but then was caught up in Halloween costume-making and didn't get a chance to post. But, the costume is done, the Halloween party at work was a success, and now I can go back to stitching.

So here it is, the first ten hours on Joan Elliott's "Celestial Dragon"

Some things you can't tell from the photo:
- It's stitched on Picture This Plus "Meditate" (28 count, 2 over 2)
- SPARKLY THREADS
- There will be lots and lots of beads

It's a fun and easy quick stitch, divided up into four pages so I'll keep going until I have the first quarter page done. There's four or five different colors of Kreinik in the whole pattern so I'm hoping those will show up eventually. There will also be two different colors of beads, but I'll stitch those in at the end along with the french knots and backstitching.

I mentioned working on my Halloween costume. Well, here it is. The great reveal (for those who haven't seen it on Facebook):

That's me in there. And if you don't get the reference, click here for a hint. The costume was H³'s idea, but I didn't get started making it until about three days before the work party. Whoops. The robes and gauntlets are made from scratch and underneath, to black out my face, I'm wearing a black morph suit. Suffice it to say I freaked the hell out of everyone at work, made them quite uncomfortable, and had a great time doing it. Most people didn't know it was me.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween. And happy stitching!