Actually Finishing Things

So, last summer I started stitching a gorgeous rose from Eline Pellinkhof's book Stitch & Sew Home.

 

I started working on it in June and in July I wrote that " I just need to finish the butterfly and finish filling in the background"... and here it is about eight months later and I'm only just getting round to getting it done!

After the initial rush of excitement of working on a project it can be easy to neglect it and never actually finish it. In this case I'd stitched most of the design and had got "stuck" on the final steps because a) stitching lots of white was much less interesting to stitch than watching the pretty rose design appearing, b) I couldn't decide what colour floss to use for finishing the butterfly and c) I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to stick with my plan to frame the rose in a hoop.

Picking it back up again this month I chose a floss colour for the butterfly within about a minute (maybe I have bought more floss since last summer??) and took only slightly longer to decide "to hoop or not to hoop".

Instead of adding some extra greenery to make the design work in a hoop I opted to unpick some of the background stitching I'd already added and stitch the original square background. Unpicking the stitches was fiddly work and took an absolute age, but it was worth it to get this project out of my WIP pile and closer towards being actually finished.

In Eline's book the design is for an embroidered cushion...

... but as I've stitched mine on a much smaller scale, I'll be making a mini cushion - maybe a lavender scented one?

First up: finally finishing stitching this pattern!