And even more progress...

I mentioned that I made some progress on my Castle. Well, I finished all the backstitching on the rocks under the castle! Yay, now I still need to backstitch the base of the spines on the dragon but I also need to cross stitch the rest. I decided to concentrate on the foot of the dragon and his tail. And every now and then I'll move around to the rocks around the bottom of the tail. Eventually I'll be done. October is so busy - every weekend is planned for and I'm mostly out of town! But I'm hoping to finish it in November sometime so I can get it framed for myself for Christmas. I have a more current pic up in my album and one more close up of the backstitch on the rocks.

As for the old model, I took it out and finished everything I had instructions for. I emailed the designer and she responded. However, there's still more work to be done on the designing end so I have to wait. If she's not in a hurry to get this design published then I can hold onto it for as long as I need to.

As for the new model, it turned out that the piece of fabric that the designer sent was too small for the design size. Then she decided that the design size was too large and adjusted it to fit down onto the size fabric that she sent. A couple of days after this discussion (via email) I got to meet her in person. What a lovely lady! It was great talking to her about this design and other things. She gave me a whole new packet of this design and she included 3 packs of needles. (How generous!) And I love the fact that she wanted the model on linen with silk thread used. She started me with 1/2 skeins of Kreinik silk and there was one color missing. (She didn't have it in stock.) She's definitely going to send me more and I need to keep track of how much I'm using so hopefully she will state that on the design specs. (It's useful information for when you're kitting up a design.) I also asked about a deadline and she'd like it to be done early/mid November for a show. Well, I've got a really good start on it in just 4/5 days and I've already run out of the first color! She's already got more silk in the mail to me but this design is going amazingly fast. I've increased my evening stitching time by an hour or two this week and I can see it increasing by another hour in the coming weeks. If this design continues to move quickly, I can see it being finished by the end of October!