Bullion Rose Practice

Cynthia Gilbreth has been doing the cutest project with a ton of bullions, so I have been feeling for a while now that it is time for me to master this stitch!  I have always felt that it was the most impressive, and most intimidating stitch.  I have done them in the past, but if they turned out it always felt more like a strange fluke than something I had any control over.

This week I've been practicing them again, and today I finally got it all together into a reasonable rose:

My first one!  You can see that the very last bullion came unwrapped a bit at 12 o'clock, but overall I am very pleased with it (and myself!).  So I finally felt empowered enough to get back into my Cottage Garden UFO, which is a design by Kris Richards from Inspirations 53.  This is how it looked at the beginning of this year:

This has been a UFO for several years, because I ran into some problems and couldn't think how to fix them.  I freehand copied the design in pencil directly onto the fabric, and you can see that the bottom edge slants up to the right.  The pencil also rubbed off as I worked, so I was going to have to redraw the rose bush that goes in the space there beside the hydrangea.  You can see it in the original from the magazine:

I was stressing about that rose bush, partially because of the bullions, but also because the design seemed weird to me.  There are purple hollyhocks woven between the roses, and I just didn't like it.  I wanted a little more definition between the foreground and the background.  The pink daisies in the lower left corner had the same issue.  I decided to move the hollyhocks to the back, the roses to the front, and remove the pink daisies entirely.

I had already decided in February to redo the orange daisies as well, which I had made too small.  I did the rosette stitches in the tree back then too.  So this is how it looked this morning:

I have made tons of progress since then, which hopefully I'll show you tomorrow!

Debbie Bliss Paisley Sweater Errata

I have been knitting up a storm:

This is all brand new knitting since the last post.  I started over from the beginning.  Now there are two complete reps of the zig zag panel, and there are exactly four in the piece, so I am halfway.

I am pretty sure there was an error in the instructions for the top of the paisley motif.  The instructions for Row 45 read "P5, C3FP, C2BP, p15."  They should read "P6, C2FP, C2BP, p15."  That's what I did, and this is how it looks:

If you followed the printed instructions you would start the cable too soon, and it wouldn't finish to a clean point.

I think I saw this pattern republished in a Debbie Bliss magazine, and I don't know if they fixed the error in that.

It is a pet peeve of mine that Debbie Bliss never provides charts for her cables or lace.  If she had, this error would have been avoided!

This week I also upgraded to the new Corel Paintshop Pro X4 photo software.  I am finding it easier to use than the X3, and much less buggy.  Plus, the manuals that come with it are better, so I finally figured out how to use the text tool properly.  You will be seeing labels on my photos from now on!  It is a good deal for $40.