Christmas Challenge Big Finish

Friday evening I had finished the stitching and began working on the beads that would be the "lights".  Turns out, once I was almost done stitching the beads on, these beads were ridiculous and looked seriously stupid. Ever ripped beads out of a project before?  I have and it's not fun and a little dangerous for surrounding stitching.

One episode of Numbers later, I had the beads out and I was digging furiously through my beads to find the right ones in my stash. FINALLY, I managed to find four primary colored beads that would work nicely and I began AGAIN to attach the beads.

The IHSW Saturday Hangout started up and all of us, Krystal, Magical, Nancy and myself, had technical difficulties.  No  mic, no sound, one minute there and one minute gone, feedback, echos, and delayed conversations.  Then we found that we could reduce some of the bandwidth and help our cause by taking ourselves off of HD settings which are automatic for the Hangout.  Even with all of that, we all did a monster amount of stitching and chatting and laughing.

Krystal has started keeping a "stitch count" which is interesting.  I pointed out that this was taking nerdiness to the next level.  I'm still struggling with keeping time on my stitching.  I don't know if I could keep COUNT. She is amazing for doing it that way and will probably start a new trend!

As always, the Hangout is a wonderful gift and I LOVE seeing my GF's and being able to talk to them. Before you get into questioning me about my having "friends" in the real world, I'll have you know that Leah was here in Nerd Central Command digging through my various stashes in search of "stuff" for her projects. Not only did I have my girls online, I had my girl in person.  

And now................

Christmas Challenge Finished 65 hours of stitching

I took about a thousand shots to try and get the beads to sparkle for the camera but to no avail.  

If you look at it here everything sparkles and it's LOVELY.

I love it.  As I told Leah today, I'm not going to make it into an actual wall hanging until later in the year because I really have too much going on right now and don't want to botch it all up by going too quickly.  Also, I want to actually have the quilted part quilted so that will take some time as well which I don't want to do right now.

Krystal gave me a good idea to take some kind of close up shot to show off some sparkle, so I gave that a try and came up with a "from the side" shot.

Still not as sparkly but does show some shine.  Up close that satin floss looks lumpy, but viewed normally it looks great and gives the Christmas light cord some texture which is what I wanted.

Now that this is done I can begin my small project of Stretch the Magic Dragon.  We discussed beads and such for the borders today and I'm still "creating" the thought in my mind for those.  I have an idea that will certainly give me a little of what I want, but you will have to wait and see how that goes.

Fabric for Stretch

Here's hoping my fabric for English Cottage Sampler comes in next week, and if timing is right, I will be done with Stretch and can finally begin this slightly intimidating project.  Nancy worked diligently on her Cindy project while Krystal hammered out almost 400 stitches while she was with us, Magical made some serious headway on her Tile piece and Leah found some bits and pieces for future projects.  All in all,  it was a very productive day if I do say so myself.  

HURRAH FOR IHSW!!!