The Short List

I thought I'd share a couple of the projects I have lined up to get started sometime in the forseeable future. You know how that goes - there are designs you love and want to do "someday", and there are those you're planning to do as soon as you can handle yet another ongoing project (in my case, I usually have all the materials gathered into a kit). There's something great about knowing that it's there waiting for you, whenever you're ready to go, isn't there?

I have two projects I'm working on quite a bit right now - Summer Queen and Meeting on the Turret Stairs. I also have Crystal Symphony and Silver Lining's Edith Wolford which are not quite in the UFO status but I haven't worked on them any time in the recent past - my goal is to get back to them and finish them sometime in 2009. So, I'm not quite sure how soon I'll allow myself to start yet another one, but it will be soon :-)

I've always loved Mirabilia's Midsummer Night's Fairy. Last summer, I decided to do Mermaids of the Deep Blue, and ended up buying an extra large piece of Amsterdam Blue linen for it. I decided to go ahead and do Midsummer's on the spare piece. Once I got all the threads, however, I felt that the Amsterdam Blue was too dark of a background compared to the colors of the Fairy. So back into the stash the Amsterdam Blue went, and I recently got a piece of Misty Blue belfast linen, which is a much lighter blue and perfect for the background. I think the only way to really know if a background color is going to work for a piece is to gather all the threads, then hold them up to the fabric to see how it will work. Unfortunately that's a little difficult to do since I shop online for fabric, so a little glitch here and there is to be expected.

Anyway, I have Midsummer kitted up, complete with threads, specialty threads, beads, fabric, ready to go when I finish one of the other Mirabilias that I'm working on. Now I just have to decide what to do on that other piece of Amsterdam Blue - another Mermaid, most likely.

This is http://www.artecy.com/ version of My Sweet Rose by John William Waterhouse. It's one of my all time favorite paintings. I had a poster of it that moved around to several different apartments with me until it just about disintegrated. I have the pattern, but I don't have any of the materials for it as yet - it will just need DMC floss, and I can do it on Aida since none of the background fabric shows.

And last but not least....another Mirabilia, Sleeping Beauty. I attempted to do Sleeping Beauty many years ago - it was actually the first piece I ever tried to do on linen. Simply put - it went horribly. I had no idea what I was doing and I didn't know anyone who could help me with it. I just didn't have the skills at the time to make it happen. I gave up working on it, and goodness knows what happened to the materials, threads, etc - I probably threw them out.

I have since learned how to stitch on linen, which is now my fabric of choice. I still love the design , so I decided to give it another crack. I just got a piece of Fathom lugana by Picture This, which is a hand dyed fabric. Many thanks to Sandy on the Mirabilia yahoo group for pointing me towards that fabric. It's the first time I'm using hand dyed fabric, and I'm really looking forward to working on it.