Noel, II

Before I show today's progress in stitching Noel, I want to remind everyone that I pulled the metallic fibers for stitching the ornaments from Needle Nicely's bag of leftover metallics from years of stitching models.  This is particularly noticeable in the dark blue I used this week in stitching the first blue ornament.  The metallic I used is actually much darker than what I would suggest to a customer, but I had an almost full spool of it.  So I restrained my instinctive move to a more medium blue.  The real disadvantage in using it for a project like this is that its darkness makes it difficult to discern the outlines of the stitch I used.  But life goes on!

The blue ornament is stitched in two shades of Balger metallic using the Diagonal Scotch stitch.  What a pain to try to match up.  I was thinking as I stitched it that the world wouldn't know if it wasn't actually precise, so don't beat yourself up about it.  Sometimes people worry too much about aligning the individual stitches in a larger stitch.  You may know it isn't exact, but will the average person be able to detect it?  I think not.  It isn't that I'm promoting sloppy stitching, just not to overthink a situation.

I started stitching the ribbon using Very Velvet and the mosaic stitch.  There again, I knuckled under to noncomformity when I stitched the inside of the far left ornament loop--if I had stuck with the set-up repeat of the mosaic, the stitches inside the loop would have been all tent stitch.  I opted to stick in one mosaic with a few tent stitches.  I think the average eye will be fooled.