Saturday, July 09, 2016

the toughest border...

Finally made some good progress on Beaded Dragonfly Tile, which hasn't come out to play in almost a year. I'm devoting the rest of July to this small but exceedingly complex beauty, and I wonder just how much I can get done in the next three weeks...

The last time I posted about Dragonfly, it looked like this:


I made a little more progress after that, but I never posted about it since it wasn't all that much. So some of the progress shown below was done about a year ago, but I still feel like I got a fair amount done over this past week!


I quickly realized that this project was going to head right back to UFO land if I had to keep threading needles every three stitches (seriously, those flower buds in the border have about 12 different colors in them!), so I made myself a needle organizer.


This is pretty much the cheap and crappy version of the expensive Pako brand needle organizer. Sure, it's ugly, but it was practically free! I just wrote the key on a piece of foamcore board, cut it to size, and removed the posterboard covering along the left side. (Just cut through the posterboard layer with something like an exacto knife and peel it off.) I still have to change colors every two seconds, but at least I'm not spending over half of my stitching time threading needles over and over!

This project is still a massive pain and honestly, I wish the border was different on each side instead of having to do the same tedious pattern four times in a row. But I'm not giving up SO THERE. :p

3 comments:

  1. What a beautiful pattern! I love your DIY thread organizer because yes, patterns that have a million color changes can be a brain drain!

    Good luck! It's going to gorgeous when you finish it :)

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  2. This is such a gorgeous design but the colour changes look like a serious headache!
    The needle holder is inspired!

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