What I've been doing...

This week I have been making myself this little pretty ! 

She is from a lovely Christmas design named 'The Magic' by the talented French stitcher,  now designer,  Nataliejo - L'Atelier Perdu. The chart was one of my few purchases whilst I was not stitching and I have been longing to find time to do it. Having missed stitching it ready for Christmas, I have just used part of the design and re-jigged it about a little bit as I wanted to mostly stitch the girl,  who I have called Miss Mimi :-) I have given her a face as she did not have one, she needed her red lipstick on for when she meets up with her boyfriend. I also made her shoes into ice skates to go with my small winter display.
She is very tiny, smaller than these pictures,  so I wanted to do a tiny finish to suit her.  Hence the floss tag or whatever it could be called ? It is pretty anyway :-) I used silk ribbon to cover the little curtain ring and an antique crystal bead. It looks nice on this and sparkles like a frosty icicle.

For the back  ( picture above) I used the two cute rabbits sitting in the snow.  I was very good stitching a reverse side seen as I (or rather my eyes) had had enough doing the front. It was worth it though as I love the result. Being VERY out of stitching practice,  I found this a total challenge to use the 2 very pale colours 1/1 in artificial winter lighting as my eyes had ?  perhaps got out of the way of zooming in as well as they did! It must be that as I do not need glasses and have 20 - 20 vision. It could be I have changed my light fittings recently which now only have tiny fairy light looking bulbs, not 'proper' lightbulbs as my old ones had? Anyway whatever the reason I struggled with those 2 very pale shades.   The white was the most difficult!  I abandoned the listed white,  the stitches seemed to look thin and spindly and seemed to blend away to nothing on my linen as I was trying to find the stitch before.   I used WDW Icicle instead which was a 'little' better to use for me and my naked eye.  

Before I go,   I wanted to show you the lovely buttons my Mum 100% hand made and put on the card,  she did them for me as one of my surprise Christmas gifts. I just love the little label she used :-)

Here she 'Miss Mimi'  is again as I am proud of myself for sticking with it, I love 1/1, it looks so delicate.  I still may stitch the whole design sometime as it is so cute with the little presents and the tiny finish for it will be adorable.  Hopefully now I have got over the first hurdle I may be cracking away at my 1/1 and get a sampler I started years ago 1/1 on 40ct finished?  Then again I may leave that until the summer and light days :-)) 

Designer: L'Atelier Perdu

Design: The Magic 

 One over One 32 ct Lambswool linen 

Threads as listed apart from WDW Icicle and GAST Cranberry as I didn't have WDW Holly Berry.

 Link to designers blog to the left on my blog list 'Nataliejo' 

Thank-you for visiting, have a good week !