It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a frog...on Slow Stitching Sunday

It's a bird, no maybe it's a plane, no it is definitely a frog - grrrr!!! Okay perhaps it is cosmic payback for beginning another new project when I should be attending to one of the numerous items I have already started, but I don't ever remember frogging as much stitching as I have done on this graph. This is the first installment in the 2012 Loose Feathers series by Blackbird Designs, entitled Wild Berries. This is how far I got since Tuesday.

Now I love the border and it was easy stitching. Then I decided to stitch just a little bit of the big black bird. And the big black bird has made me say very bad words. You will notice that he doesn't have any legs at the moment. He did have legs on Thursday but I thought I was off, so I frogged them. I put them back in on Friday and I was still off. I frogged them again on Saturday and haven't attempted them again. And then there was the problem with overdyded floss. The bird is mostly GA Onyx and Tin Bucket. My Tin Bucket is almost identical to my Onyx so the bird looked like a big black blob. Grrrr!!! So I frogged the Tin Bucket and tried DMC 413 which still seemed too dark and too much like the Onyx and too flat, so I frogged it. I went to DMC 414 - too light- frogged it. THen like Goldilocks I hit on the just right combination of using one ply of DMC 413 and one ply of DMC 414. Not too dark, not too light, not too flat and not too similar to the Onyx. I think I have it figured out.

Here's how it should look when it is finished.

Before I got the graph I was thinking that I should stitch them all on the same kind of linen. But looking at the back of graph where the first 6 pieces are pictured I can see that a variety of different linens were used. So I found a lovely golden yellow piece of 30 ct. linen in my stash. Somewhere there is a bag with a label that tells me what it was but I can't find it at the moment.

So that's my contribution for Slow Stitching Sunday. I should probably put this aside and go back to my AoTH houses but I want to stitch on this some more. I think the alphabet will cause me a lot less problems....at least I hope so.

Happy stitching-
carol fun