Embroidery

I went out to the Stitcher's Corner yesterday because both Spotlight and Lincraft are absolutely useless for embroidery supplies. They have almost no DMC threads, and the only 28 count even weave stuff they have is just called cloth, no composition whatsoever. Anyway, it's at least worthwhile going all the way out to Vic Park. The lady that owns it remembers me and got all excited when I came in, because she really liked my little pouch. She couldn't wait to see the pattern for this project. Anyway we had a good chat and $50 later I had all the things I need, including a new embroidery hoop. I bought a ridiculously small one for my pouch because it was a ridiculously small pouch. I started working on it last night and here's my progress:

Tada! It took me ages to choose colours, but so far I'm happy with my choices. I also decided to just go over each stitch once like I did for my pouch, because double stitch would just take too long and I got really sick of doing it on that other panel that I never finished. I used two strands for my pouch, but that was silk and seemed to have better coverage than this cotton. I started with two strands, but I wasn't happy with it so I pulled it out and started again with three strands. You can see the coverage isn't as good as my other ones, but it still looks ok. It looks better as I fill in more of the background, so I'm going to keep going like this.

The pattern is bigger than I expected, which is a good thing since that means not so many repeats and not so many chances to get sick of it. My pouch had a really small pattern, and I guess I expected this one to be the same. The gold is three inches from top to bottom. I think it will suit the bigger project a lot better than a smaller pattern.