January Bookmark and Blackwork

 In the latest slot of my ten hour rotation I had two new starts. First, I decided to stitch up the January Bookmark from Magical525's Bookmark of the Month SAL - I want to try and stitch all twelve of them so I have a couple of small but usefull gifts come Christmas! The January edition features a nice colour gradient of snowflakes in different shades of blue, a little silver backstitching (I used DMC Lighteffects instead of the called-for Kreinik) and a vers interesting shape! Here it is all nice and finished, and I'll talk a little more about the unique finishing (which isn't all that visible, but was fun!) in the next FFG post.

The whole thing took me 9:05h, including the finishing, so I had a little time left for another start before getting back to my focus piece - and what a fun one it was!  After hosting a comparatively small Blackwork SAL last year, the 2020 Edition is a little more ambitious. Not only is the pattern much bigger, but there's also a lot of potential to make it your own. Firstly, Magical doesn't just give us one pattern - there where different layouts available at the beginning, such as squares, rectangles, octagons and, my favourite, plus-shapes. Then she gives us a number (four, in this case) of blackwork patterns each month, and we can go about and fill in our layout as we want. I chose to start in the upper left corner, but you can go about it any way you like, chosing to do bigger or smaller bits of the patterns you really like or don't like that much.
Magical also doesn't tell us what colours to use, so I had to get a bit creative...and boy, did I get creative! First I thought I was doing to use some hand dyed fabric...or hand dyed floss...or maybe both? but then I suddenly remembered that piece of chocolate, 18ct Aida I had left over from starting The Puppeteer, and suddenly I had all that visions of glorious autumn colours...off to the floss box I went, and here is the result:

I chose four colours for the patterns, one orange, one green, and two yellow/goldish ones, plus one (a dark gold) for the layout. I might pick up a few more colours as I go along, but for now I am happy with these five. I'm adding the layout above the finished blackwork, so I'm only stitching lines when they are 'surrounded' from both sides, and I'm doing the layout in two threads and over two squares to make it a little bolder and stand out from the blackwork. I'm so in love with this, I think it's my favourite project at the moment, and I can't wait to work on it more in February!

This part took me 2:46h, so it's back to one of the focus projects for now. I decided to stick with Lady Justice, but made a deal with myself that I got to start on a new area of the paper (actually not a new area, but filling in the missing parts of the lower half of the patterns with colours I haven't used yet) so I won't get bored!