After NaNoWriMo,  I took December off from writing. Cleaning up the basement inspired me to pick up one of my other hobbies: needlework.  Needlework used to be one of my very favorite hobbies, the one I did all the time, but something that requires the use of both hands doesn’t fit well with a baby in the house. Now that my youngest is 2, though, I can start picking it up again.

I have a bazillion works-in-progress and to-be-started projects (that’s only a slight exaggeration) and for the first few days I was actually frozen while choosing what to work on.  So many choices!

I settled on Misty Morning Vineyard designed by Martina Rosenberg (formerly Weber).  It was originally released as a “Mystery” project, meaning that a new piece of the chart was revealed each month over the course of am entire year.  So when I started the project, I had no idea what it would look like. Talk about a leap of faith.

(BTW, that year was 2003.  And this month was probably the first time I picked up the project since then. Hah!)

I forgot to take a picture before I started stitching on it, but this is how it looked after a few days.  (I’d finished the 2nd and three side with the trees, and the purple row of boxes on the upper left.)

Here’s what it looks like today, January 1st:

Here’s a close-up of the peacock. It’s intense, let me tell you!  Each stitch in the peacock’s body is a quarter of the size of the stitches in the rest of the piece.  It’s called over-one stitching, and while it is slow and intense to stitch, it allows for more color and detail than the standard over-two stitching.

I’m stitching Misty Morning Vineyard on (I believe) 32ct blue linen. Wedgewood might the official color, I’m not sure.  The threads used are a mix of Thread Gatherer Silk N’ Colors, Needlepoint Inc Silks, Caron Collection Waterlilies and Wildflowers, Rainbow Gallery Petite Treasure Brain, and Anchor Marlitt.  There’s also a lot of beading in the final step.  This is luxury stitching with all those silks. 🙂

And, also, expensive.

Sometime between 2003 and now, I lost one of the Thread Gatherer Silk N’ Colors skeins.  You can’t just walk into Joann’s and Michael’s to get silk thread.  I had to special order it from the local needlework shop (they had every color except the one I needed, of course.)

Eight dollars. For a single skein of thread. *faints*

But it’ll be worth it in the end. Here’s a picture of the finished project, stitched by Jane from Illinois: (though our centers are different)