Redbird Sampler Really Finished!

This finish was not without issues.

When I shared this photo on Friday, a reader left a comment telling me that there was an error in the chart and one of the flowers in the arbor had been left off. She was absolutely correct. If you look on the arbor over the buildings, the second flower/leaf set from the bottom on the left has a missing coral colored flower. As I’ve done before, I thought . . I will just go over the green stitching with the correct color and not have to rip any stitches out.

With the green stitches behind the coral stitches, it made the coral stitches on that one flower look too dark. I told myself I could live with it . . no one would ever notice. I knew I would notice and I knew it would bother me. Why put this much time into something and not do it correctly?

The problem is that I couldn’t remove just the five green stitches that were supposed to be coral. I had to remove enough to have a tail on each end that I could bury so I ended up removing that whole leaf and just a bit of the bottom leaf. That gave me enough floss to tie off on each end, then re-stitch the leaf and stitch the coral flower.

The next issue . . see the four flowers – one on each side of the aqua baskets and one on each corner at the top? The bottom left one has leaves around the peach colored blossom and the other three do not. The reader who wrote me about those explained it but I was thinking she was talking about missing leaves around the arbor. I counted and re-counted and I had the right number. I wrote her and said “you may need to draw me a picture!” She was so kind. She took my photo and circled those four flowers. Then I looked at the chart and only the one flower is charted to have leaves and then I looked at the photo on the cover and only one flower has the extra leaves. I do think the flower with the leaves looks better but only that stem comes up in the middle of the bottom so adding leaves to the other three would mean lopsided flowers, or ripping them out and re-stitching them. Nope, those three will just look like flying lollipops instead of flowers!

The extra threads around the edge are leftover pieces of floss and I marked where I want the frame to be. I will measure from left thread to right thread, that will be the width of the frame I order. Same with top and bottom.

That’s it for now – Red Bird Sampler is finished until a frame arrives and I can get it framed.