Halloween SAL with Leonore and The Gang - Week 1

Leonore wanted to do a Halloween SAL using The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery's Halloween Spooky Sampler.  Leonore, Nancy and Carla are going to stitch a square per week starting last week. The rest of us girls are going to stitch whatever we choose AND SO CAN YOU! How? Read more here: Halloween SAL with Leonore and The Gang
(please note I shamelessly stole the title and the above paragraph, with a few changes of my own, from Carla's post as she wrote it so well <3)

I am not the biggest fan of the cute style of The Frosted Pumpkin, though I do admire what people stitch of theirs, it's just not my style, so I decided to do a couple of things from the Just CrossStitch Halloween special.

I am planning to do the owl from the cover, the crow on a pumpkin (I was sure it was a raven!) from page 80 and the Halloween Days sewing basket from page 88-90 if time allows. There are several other patterns that strike my fancy but I'm pretty sure I won't have time to do them too.

Over the last week I started working on the crow as the threads and fabric I'd ordered had arrived and I was keen to start something small and not green between all the green dots I have been doing for the Fob a Month project, which came so soon after all the greens of the August ornament. As my luck would have it the first colour I had to work with was green - of course lol. Fortunately it was a dark green so it was a very different green.

I am using The Gentle Arts threads for this, in the recommended colours but I'm not stitching in rows as I didn't want stripy effect one usually gets from doing this with variegated threads. Instead I'm stitching in circles - first doing the outlines and then filling them in, which causes the more blotchy effect you see in the photo, which I personally prefer and find more natural looking. It is of course slightly more time consuming than just doing rows and may well use a bit more thread but for something small like this when I've bought the threads specially, I don't need to worry that I'll run out of thread.

I am going to complete the next bit of the polka dot set before going on to do the monthly ornament which is due on Friday and then I shall be able to work on this again - this is the downside of this being a for fun project as it's the first to be set aside when deadline stuff happens.

Till next time! And don't forget: it's not too late - you can join in too!