So Close I Can Taste It...

I've finished off a bunch of things that were on the needles, and need to get some Tunisian crochet hooks in for the next thing I want to get cracking on, so in my quest to reduce WIPs, I've gone back to my Art of Disney Cinderella's Castle cross stitch. The little ornaments I stitch are usually only 60% cross stitching and 40% back stitching, so I wasn't expecting to be able to finish it in this attempt. I did finish the cross stitches, and now just need to outline and accent.


Of course, I'm posting this later than I should have, so at this point, I've outlined everything in the castle with black thread, finished the red of Tinkerbell's mouth and am mostly done with the black outlining for her, and just need to do the bronze wand and castle accents, as well as the stars around the fairy dust trail in the castle. For some reason I didn't do those when I was doing the stars in the sky. I've also fixed any errors I've found, an uncrossed stitch here, a missed stitch there, an obviously wrong color stitch that shows up because of the outlining, threads that weren't actually secured when I did them the first time (only the shiny slippery fireworks though), things like that. It will definitely need a good wash, block, and maybe iron when it's done. There's a good number of lines from the hoop and a couple of spots that aren't as clean as they should be, but a dunk in a cool bath with some Soak and then being pinned out to dry should fix that!

The back stitching is going very quickly compared to how fast I thought it was going to be. I suppose the major difference between this one and the ornaments is that the ornaments are so small you're outlining most stitches, whereas with this one, you're not really doing so much. It's going much, much faster than I anticipated. I've been working on this thing for years in fits and starts, and figured it would take another couple of months of working on it to finally get it done. Nope, it's been 10 days since I took that picture, and I may just finish it today! Woohooo!

Then the question will be if I can count it as finished before I hang it or if it needs to be framed and hung first, since technically that's part of finishing, but I don't know if I want to get it framed while in Japan, or maybe I should because we'll be framing diplomas as soon as my new ones get in, or.... Either way, I'll be able to go on to the next cross stitch, and for some reason that makes me happier than the fact that I'll have a finished one. As Lee would say, rolling the rock back up the hill....