Finally getting somewhere with the Bridge

I've finished the foreground of the Golden Gate Bridge despite the hiccup with the shades of green. With three green shades sprinkled amongst each other I don't think it is apparent at all that there is a minor colour difference between two areas of DMC3051. So the problem wasn't really a problem at all.



Closeup of the green area

Since I finished the foreground I've been working on the buildings on the other side of the bridge. This is where I've got small numbers of stitches of many different colours. Rather than keep threading my needle with a new colour I've been keeping the one colour and moving through the pattern doing as many areas of that colour as possible. Because it's harder to see any progress towards completion this way I now realise this is why this project has been seeming to take so long. I think now it's about 80-85% complete however so the end is in sight!

Last night I went back to doing some of the cloud areas in the sky. I made a small error near the end and decided to take a few rows out and re-do them. I'm working with DMC775, a very light blue. The threads I'm using are from a plastic spool in my mother's DMC box which I inherited. It's wonderful to have this collection with all of the DMC colours (excepting some of the newer ones) organised on labelled spools. The numbers on the spool tags are in her handwriting which makes it even more special. It's funny, my Dad was going to give the box away to a friend of hers after she passed away until I asked him if I could have it. It's a wonderful keepsake of her for me especially as she was such a craftswoman. She was also, however, a smoker and a heavy one especially towards the end of her life when the Alzheimers really affected her memory. She would light up a cigarette, forget she was already smoking one and light up another one. She nearly started a fire at least once when she put a lit cigarette in a plastic waste basket full of papers. When I first brought the DMC box home every time I opened it I would smell her cigarette smoke. This definitely brought back memories of her to me. I go into all this background because number 775 was stained due to the cigarette smoke. I didn't want to throw it out though so the other day I washed the thread with liquid detergent. Most of it lightened up. The one length of 6 strands that didn't I threw out.





My mother's DMC box--the box opens on 2 sides and both sides are full of DMC spools



The threads for this project organised into snack bags on metal stationery rings

I'm now close to finishing two of the five items in my rotations--this one and version 2 of The Fabric Collector. So now I can begin to think about what other projects in my stash I'd like to do next. It's exciting to be getting through projects like this! More on this later.