Heart Tuffet Contest Stitching

It’s time for another contest from Thea Dueck of The Victoria Sampler for the members of the Victoria Sampler Yahoo! group. This time the design is called Heart Tuffet and the deadline to submit a picture of your finished piece is April 1st. She always gives us plenty of time and I inevitably leave mine until close to the end.

I chose the overdyed floss, two coordinating colors of DMC (though the design only calls for one coordinating color) and fabric before leaving for San Francisco. I even got to start on one side of the piece while we were there. I just realized that I didn’t add the four beads called for in the design. I’ll have to take a good look at it, but I don’t think I want to clutter up the piece, so I may skip them completely. We’ll see; it may take a little experimenting before I come to a decision on that point.

I have mostly decided on a finishing technique for this one and it’s one that I have never done before, so this should be interesting. I have my own ideas of how to do it, so I’m not going to troll the ‘net for instructions. I’d prefer to wing it. I’m anxious to see if some of the ideas I have for this will pan out. As long as I don’t completely destroy the stitching in the process of monkeying around with the finish, then I should be in good shape. I should have the finish done by the end of the weekend.

Oh what, you’d like to actually see the stitched pieces? 😉 As usual, I had to fiddle with the colors in Photoshop. The thread colors are pretty close, but the fabric is a little off. It’s actually Ray of Light lugana, which is a pale yellow.

Here’s the top:

And I reversed the color scheme for the bottom:

I already know that I’m not going to win, based on a few of the photos that have already been submitted to the contest, but I’m hoping to make at least a respectable showing. Besides, it’s a good excuse for me to stitch and get something done; it’s not really about winning for me.