You know, I think in all the time of my stitching butterflies I've never actually done a monarch? They're always faux fantasy colored ones or other species. So here is my first monarch, from Mill Hill's spring collection. This was a three-day project that I took with me to work and quite enjoyable. At first I was pretttttty suspicious of it, since the flowers were SO cartoony next to the glorious butterfly, but as I went on the colors from their sample photo and the colors I was actually stitching were different enough that I was 1) surprised the sample photo was so off and 2) quite pleased with the outcome.

But then it was my turn to take photos of my finished piece and, wouldn't you know it. None of the photos were coming out right! All of my straight-on, full-image photos were too much shadow, not enough contrast, blurry, and even if I overcame one of the problems absolutely 0% of them showed the rainbow color on the body beads. So I finally settled that I would just post one of the sideways shots meant to accompany as a glamour image, it shows enough of what's going on to be worth it.