One of my goals this year is to complete two or three butterflies from a set of patterns I have had forever.  They ran in several issues of Stoney Creek Cross Stitch magazine in 2007.   I have had them flagged as a project I wanted to complete for years now and during the last few months of 2014 I got the supplies and completed one of the patterns.  There are a total of 12 butterflies, and they were intended to be made into an afghan.  Here is a picture of the completed afghan from the magazine.

I do not intend to complete all of them.  I only want to do a few (maybe 8 or so) and then frame them individually to hang on the wall.  I am thinking simple black frames or maybe dark brown.  But that will be a long way off, so I have plenty of time to figure that part out.

I am stitching on 28-count Monaco White.  I didn’t spend a lot of money on the fabric (bought from JoAnn’s I think) for these projects because I was being lazy and didn’t want to drive all the way across town to purchase from my local cross stitch store.  I normally don’t stitch on 28-count either.  I usually stick to my preferred 36-count but will mix it up with some 32- or 40-count sometimes.

This is a picture of the one that I have completed.  I did make one small modificiation to the pattern.  I omitted the lettering that identifies the type of butterfly which in the pattern, was centered between the wings at the top and bottom. There were also a few backstitch lines that sort of “framed” the pattern that I left out.

 The name of this one is Marsyas Hairstreak.  I just love the blue/green colors!  I had to start with this one because blue is my favorite color.

The next one on my list is the Artemisia/Old World Swallowtail.   The magazine didnt’ have close-up pictures of the finished project – just the afghan – and I can’t get a good picture of it.

Here is my progess after two nights of stitching after work.

Here is what the pattern looks like.  It will end up being mostly black, grey, and yellow.  The blue on the picture is my highlighting the stitches I have completed.  This helps me see where I am in the pattern and helps eliminate mistakes.

But, UGGGHHH!  I noticed that I did not read the pattern closely enough.  I thought one of the symbols was listed as grey, but it is a tweeding of two colors, grey and yellow.  So, I had some frogging to do!  I hate figuring out I made a mistake and then having to undo all that work I just did.   Oh well, c’est la vie!  At least I caught it early.  Moral:  READ YOUR PATTERN CAREFULLY!
 

Here is a close-up of the project after stitched a little more and then re-stitched the frogged area in the correct color.

That’s all for today.

Happy Stitching!

-A