Lavender and Lace Celtic Spring 4: add beading to the cross stitch, and it’s finished!

I’ve reached the point now with the ‘Celtic Spring’ design from Lavender and Lace where I only need to add beading to the cross stitch, and it’s finished! This one has taken me about 80 hours of cross stitching, so far, I reckon. It has a much larger area of cross stitch than the Celtic Autumn that I made a few years back, so either I am getting quicker at stitching, or I have mis-counted the hours this has taken me, as the ‘Celtic Autumn’ one took me about 90 hours altogether, I think.

This is ‘Celtic Spring’ with all the cross stitch finished. Nice, but definitely ‘missing something’.

So, I spent seven hours adding all the beads! I used a polyester cotton sewing thread to attach the beads, in a similar shade to the fabric – a light greeny-beige. This is so that I don’t have to keep changing my thread colour when I add different colours of beads – I can do the whole lot with one type of thread. You can hardly see the thread when all the beads are attached, anyway. I don’t use a beading needle, as they drive me mad when I’m trying to thread them, so I use a number 10 ‘betweens’ needle (for quilting, usually) – one of the John James ‘big eye’ ones.

There’s a good mix of shiny to matte beads in this design, which gives it a special quality.

The top of the panel, in particular, is heavily beaded.

I had been keeping this white plaster-effect frame for several years, just for this project. I bought it in Wilkinsons, for just £8!! I think it really sets off the purples. I mounted the stitching over the backing board supplied with the frame, but didn’t use the glass that came with it, or it would have squashed the beads. I used a layer of 2 ounce wadding under the fabric, to pad it a bit, and laced the fabric over the board with Perle 12 thread.

Here are my Celtic Autumn and Celtic Spring designs together, finally.

I don’t plan to display them like this, usually, though. My long-term plan is to have all five of the Celtic Ladies stitched (one for each season, plus Christmas), and display the relevant one for part of each year. That might take a while to get them all done, though, so for now, each one will be displayed for six months each.

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Lavender and Lace Celtic Spring 3: completion of the cross stitch

I’ve been going into overdrive on this ‘Celtic Spring’ design from Lavender and Lace for the past couple of weeks – and this week I’ve reached the point of the completion of the cross stitch (there’s still hours of beading to do, though!).

I can’t seem to capture the correct colour of the fabric in my images – it’s Prairie Grain 28 count linen, and it’s really quite a greenish shade, but it keeps coming out beige in my pictures! But it does make a very good contrast to the purples in the design in real life (I’m using the called for fabric).

For the back half of the skirt, I decided to stitch all the purple first, and then fill in with the gold thread. This took me ages, but was quite therapeutic to do.

Then, with the front half of the skirt, I stitched all the gold thread first, to see if that would make it easier to count out the design. Half way through, I decided that it didn’t help doing it that way, but I was stuck with it by then  😦

But when both halves were stitched, they did look lovely!

I then went back over the design and did the small amount of backstitch – mainly around the face and hands.

Now I’ve just got the beading to do, which should really make this design pop!

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