Monday, August 01, 2016

Ghost Story - Update #2 & monthly goals!

Ghost Story first because she's more of a success story than the goals, haha.

Last time she was just a blob of a new start... now she has a head, an upper body, and one arm! I'll be finishing up the lantern next, then moving on to complete her other arm before working down the massive tattered skirt. :)

I changed up the colors of the backstitching - the skin outline was very orange (DMC 356) and while I like that color for backstitching Mirabilias, it was really harsh against all the very light colors in this piece, so I went for a grey-brown (DMC 839) instead. I also used different colors for her eyebrows, eyes, and lips, because I'm an annoying perfectionist. :D


I plan to go back and redo the "darker" skin color in her neck/face eventually. I can barely tell the difference in real life, so I'm going to replace the darker color with the deeper peach you can see in the center of her hand. I'm not quite up to frogging and restitching yet, so I'm going to let it wait a while.

I also plan to redo the backstitching around her eyes... her left eye especially (right side of the pic!) ended up looking weird because the stitch got pushed into an odd position by the existing stitches beneath it. But I think I'll wait until the end, maybe, so there isn't any risk of me handling the fabric too much and messing it up again. I dunno if I can handle her weird face that long, though. :p

Also might want to give her some sexy collarbones, heh heh. :p
Or how about an ear? I bet she'd like to have an ear...


And now, the monthly goals.

So here's what I wanted to do in July:
- finish Bride's Tree Ornament 7 - YES
- complete half of the Beaded Dragonfly Tile border - NO

I'm gonna be honest... Beaded Dragonfly Tile is a real pain. Yes, even with my 25 cent needle parking station. I'll let it sit on the back burner for a while again, because I am seriously in love with Ghost Story right now and everyone else has to wait!

Going to try a slightly different style of goals for August:
- blog about progress once a week
- blah blah Ghost Story progress blah :)
- no craft/stash shopping

And with all the crafty shopping that happened around/for my birthday, I'm also banning stash shopping for the rest of the year, or rather, putting a major restriction on it!

The rule is: If I want something, I have to go buy it in person.

Which immediately eliminates my worst problem, which is hand-dyed fabric stashing. And let's be honest, online shopping makes it way too easy to casually pick up whatever looks interesting. I'm fortunate enough to have two LNS-es within a reasonable distance of my home, but they're far enough away that I won't be doing any casual shopping there. (I hate driving, haha.) And if I need DMC, I can grab it from Joann while running other errands.

So there we have it. I'll report on this goal monthly as well! :)

5 comments:

  1. Your progress looks good - and I love the edits you want to make to your piece. I'm forever changing colors, especially backstitching or making other anatomical edits. My poor Mirabilia Fairies would have all had raging sunburns if I hadn't done something ;)

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    1. I love changing colors and making little edits to patterns to fit my vision for them. :D Backstitching can really make or break a piece, so I'm super picky about how it looks. I just need to figure out how to work a reasonably decent ear into the pattern...

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  2. Your Ghost Story is looking great and I am sure she would appreciate an ear!
    I like your idea for curbing the spending. That would see mine drop to zero as I no longer have an LNS. Stitch From Stash really helped break my spending habits though, as does reporting every month on my spending.

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    1. Yeah, I saw that you're still reporting in even though Stitch from Stash has ended! I like seeing that sort of report and honestly should have kept up with it myself too. I've definitely improved, but we tend to go off the rails a bit around birthday time (our birthdays are less than 3 weeks apart) and then I'm making faces at the budget for a while...

      My ultimate goal is to save "fun" spending for special occasions like birthdays and Christmas only. I don't need the thrill of buying whatever I want, whenever I want... my stash is more than big enough! And this goes for nail polish too! :p

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  3. Awesome progress! Maybe you could frog her eyebrow and then restiych it after you're done with her :)

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