A Princess Finish!

Hooray! My daughter's birth sampler is FINALLY FINISHED! Lol now that she's 3 and all... I put in the last back stitch last night and took pictures this morning when I had enough light. So here it was before the backstitch:

And here it is now, all stitched up :)

It always amazes me the detail that backstitch can bring to a piece. I love it :) And here is another picture so you can see it a little closer and see the sparkles in the fairy wand.

Yay yay yay! I am not really one to finish things usually, so the fact that this is now my 2nd finish THIS YEAR is pretty awesome :) 

Or, I guess it could technically be my 3rd finish, because I made a biscornu for my mom. I really don't think she will look at my blog before her birthday on Monday, so here are my pictures of that:

She told me once that her favorite color is October - basically fall colors. I found a variegated thread that was very 'fall colors', so I worked up this biscornu from an adaptation of this blackwork pattern. If I had done the whole pattern on each side, I think it would have been too big. I also discovered that the 'evenweave' fabric I bought for it (packaged as 24 count evenweave) was not very even. Just the small amount I did was not completely square - over 40 stitches, or 80 threads, there was a noticeable difference in height vs. width. Normally not a humongous deal, but when you make a biscornu the pieces need to be square in order to fit together correctly. I was able to make it work, but now the rest of that fabric will have to be used on something other than biscornu. 

In other news, I never really thought I would try a humongous chart like HAED or Golden Kite or anything like that, but then I found out about Tilton Crafts. I like their particular selection of charts a lot more than HAED, and I found one that I really like and would go beautifully in my music room... :) 

Well I am going to go try and figure out the other part that I want to make for my mom's present. Hopefully I can do it fairly quickly so that I can get SNOW WHITE READY TO STITCH!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!! :)