I reaaaaaally love to stitch butterflies. This was my "work during work" project throughout January, where I bring my stitching with me to H&R Block and stitch between answering the phone or greeting clients. There's no wifi at work so my attention is fairly undivided, makes for excellent stitching progress.

I feel like I've forgotten a lot of what I wanted to say about this piece. There's changes allllll over the place, from the color of her lips to the entire placement of a butterfly, with lots of the usual little color placement changes that I do. The significantly noticeable change I made was adding Kreinik sparkles to every butterfly and to the moon on the frame. The butterflies all have a layer of 032 Pearl over them to help them really POP against the darkness of her hair and the rather plain half-stitched background. The celtic-y knot-y moon has 014 Sky Blue layered on it for the same reason. Though the 014 is considered blue I think the result in this piece is much more a silvery feel which is awesome for a moon anyway.

I ran out of 032 Pearl at one point during this! It was terrifying. I had just ordered rainbow thread for "The Earth Laughs In Flowers" project and didn't realize my stash on 032 was so low. Nuhhh! I didn't want to spend more on shipping a second time so while we were in the city anyway running errands I detoured to the Joann's Fabric Store and, well, you crafty people know... Joann's doesn't have a very great Kreinik selection. Luckily of the three colors they carry 032 was one of them! So I saved myself on shipping and bought two more spools since I use it pretty frequently.

DukeWaxeye was a champ and sat through me whining back and forth on whether or not to add some gold Kreinik to this piece. I know, right, I hear you asking me, "why is it even a question to add sparkles or not?!" Well. It's because I'm not sure what parts needed sparkles added. I know that the gold right on her brooch and this little clasp on the bottom could've probably had gold added, no problem. But then there's, like, yellow dots on her cuff, and the yellow lines, and there's purple and red gemstone-esque things too, and I just got too worked up trying to figure it out. I decided every butterfly sparkling and the moon is pretty satisfactory and to not overload it with too much texture.

Near the end of this I kept whining to myself about having to do the leaves in her hair. Like, I wanna do buttttterffffliesssss, not leaaaaaavvvveeeeess. Then my brain went, "Let's do a wreath next!" and I said, "Wow that sounds like a totally reasonable idea, let's do that."