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Wow, it's a gorgeous design!!
Fantastic

As requested, here's a pic of The Guardian after it was framed. There are 3 mats: light green, a skinny line of bluish violet & wide neutral gray with a gold frame. The room I intend it for is a future nursery where the walls are brown under the chair rail (visible in the background of this pic) and above the chair rail, the walls exactly match the green of the mat & bring out the green in the stitching.

And thanks for all the great feedback!!! It means a lot. It probably took me the long 7 yrs to complete it because I'm new at cross stitch & didn't start small like I should have! So there were months & months where I spent almost all of my free time stitching, but then it was put away for months. The celtic knot border took me a year to get through cus I was SO ready to be done and the border was so tedious...and a LOT of backtstitching!

I feel your pain! I stitched a very similar knot border for the T Wentzler 'The Storyteller'. It was not joyful - but so worth the doing! Even worth the frogging, and the endless backstitching. And your knots are more complex than mine. And I'm a reasonably competent stitcher of some years! To undertake that design with no experience is either awesomely courageous or the height of folly! But you did it! You should be proud!

I jumped in about the deeper part of the shallow end of the pool, not the deep end of the deep end, like you!

Check out my gallery to see The Storyteller if you like.

Leonard - your storyteller is awesome! Very detailed in every part of it - the dragon, the storyteller & the amazing border! I have two other TW dragon charts (The Minstrel & The Fortunate Traveller) and now that I know all the work required, I'm flinching at starting one of them so soon. So far I'm working on easy halloween designs for cards & will probably do some xmas ornaments, but I know the TW stuff will reel me back in eventually!

7 years? Is that all? I've been working on my Fantasy Sampler for over a decade!

Getting there slowly.

Yours looks wonderful framed! Well done on completion! You're inspiring me to have another go at mine...

"The Guardian" is stunning. Well done!
I have "Egyptian Sampler" by TW waiting to be started. It sounds as though her works are challenging.
Don't worry about the time it took to do. My current project is only a small one on 18 count, but it has tons of confetti stitches. It sat untouched for 5 years. I'm determined to finish it before starting anything else. I think my reluctance stems from the fact I'm not totally happy with the way it was designed. Sometimes I'm tempted to give up on it altogether.

This is such a breath taking piece!!! The 7 years were well worth it!!
Faith

Another fan of TW here. Your finish is stunning and shows how worth while it is sticking with her designs.

JA Fan wrote:"The Guardian" is stunning. Well done!
I have "Egyptian Sampler" by TW waiting to be started. It sounds as though her works are challenging.
Don't worry about the time it took to do. My current project is only a small one on 18 count, but it has tons of confetti stitches. It sat untouched for 5 years. I'm determined to finish it before starting anything else. I think my reluctance stems from the fact I'm not totally happy with the way it was designed. Sometimes I'm tempted to give up on it altogether.

JA Fan - TW designs are mainly challenging due to size, her fondness for speciality stitches, quite a bit of confetti and multi-coloured backstitch. They are however fun to stitch

You should be so proud! This is beautiful!!!! Lots of work!

msufly wrote:Leonard - your storyteller is awesome! Very detailed in every part of it - the dragon, the storyteller & the amazing border! I have two other TW dragon charts (The Minstrel & The Fortunate Traveller) and now that I know all the work required, I'm flinching at starting one of them so soon. So far I'm working on easy halloween designs for cards & will probably do some xmas ornaments, but I know the TW stuff will reel me back in eventually!

Ah... for a second there I wondered who Leonard was! But no, I'm not Leonard Cohen! I wish! Understandable you think that's my name, and that I'm male, with Leonard as my avatar.
But I'm female, my name is Teresa (a name I hate, so I'm Fljots, please ), I'm a HUGE fan of Leonard Cohen (singer, lyricist, poet, novelist and musician, who is now about 77/78 and still working!).

And thank you very much for your compliment on The Storyteller. It has pride of place on my living-room wall, beautifully framed, imo, by my local framer.
Do stitch your other Wentzlers! They will eventually be lovely heirlooms for your family, and you will have the joy of creating them and admiring your finished work!
But yeah - smaller pieces in the meantime are the way to go!

Fljotsdale - sorry about that. I realized my error later on as I read other threads.

helbel - get that fantasy sampler back out! I think one of my big probs was that I "binged" on stitching for a few weeks and then I needed a break cus my wrist on my upper hand hurt & I needed to see the chiropractor from leaning over it...so just try for a steady amount of stitching. I've read the UFO thread and even though I don't have any UFOs, I think that's a great way to keep up on a piece, or keep it in rotation with other pieces like people do here.

JA Fan - It's true that TW pieces have a ton of confetti stitches & complicated backstitching...there's a major flaw I made in my Guardian that glares out at me when I look at it but I managed to blend it in so other people (who haven't seen the pattern) can't tell. Doing the confetti stitches, I'd try to do all of one symbol in a small area, but if I later discovered that I missed a stitch of a symbol I'd already done, I'd fill that hole with another color (that was next to it, for example) and no one is the wiser! Once I started the border & saw how complicated even it was, I wanted to it out and just do a simple border but my stubbornness won out, even though it took me a yr to do the border.

Thanks for all the support everyone! I'm loving this site! I just finished 7 halloween cards (will upload pic soon into my gallery) so now I have to decide what to do next - something halloween themed or an autumn sampler for the house, or something xmas themed. Plus I just bought the recent Joan Elliott xs collection book and I really like some of her designs in it as well.

it's lovely

msufly wrote: Fljotsdale - sorry about that. I realized my error later on as I read other threads.

No probs!

msufly wrote:there's a major flaw I made in my Guardian that glares out at me when I look at it but I managed to blend it in so other people (who haven't seen the pattern) can't tell. Doing the confetti stitches, I'd try to do all of one symbol in a small area, but if I later discovered that I missed a stitch of a symbol I'd already done, I'd fill that hole with another color (that was next to it, for example) and no one is the wiser!

Me too! I have so many misplaced stitches in The Storyteller!!! Specially on the wings. Hehe! But no-one can tell, so it doesn't matter!

msufly wrote:Thanks for all the support everyone! I'm loving this site! I just finished 7 halloween cards (will upload pic soon into my gallery) so now I have to decide what to do next - something halloween themed or an autumn sampler for the house, or something xmas themed. Plus I just bought the recent Joan Elliott xs collection book and I really like some of her designs in it as well.

Look forward to seeing more of your work.

fab picture. It looks great congratulations. I completed her Rapunzel design after ------ years. I really did not have enough experience of cross stitching to start it but kept picking it up as I was determined to finish it. Hope you enjoy the forum.

That is just gorgeous, and the mats are perfect, what a great combination!