Remember the Stitching Bug? It has thrown up a couple of … problems? dilemmas? Both sound far too serious, really – one is nothing more than a glitch, and the other an opportunity to have a closer look at ladybirds!
The glitch is a rather disconcerting difference between my red perle #5 and perle #8. Disconcerting because both are DMC 321, and you’d expect them to be the same; but the perle #8 is noticeably darker. It’s not easy to show in a photograph, but here is a picture of some Kloster blocks (#5) and woven bars (#8):

Heigh-ho, there’s very little I can do about it except buy them again in the hope they’ll be a better match, which I am not going to do. Anyway, it may be caused by the difference in texture between the two threads, in which case the difference would remain however many skeins and balls I bought! I shall console myself with the thought that it could be considered clever shading in order to suggest the curvature of the beetle’s wing cover. Some people may even believe it.
The other problem concerned some red eyelets which I had charted between the head and the body. The head consists of Kloster blocks and eyelets (leaving some small patches of white), and I put similar eyelets in the larger white squares between the black head Kloster blocks and the red body Kloster blocks. But when I had completed the head and the body, I wondered whether they were really necessary. Somehow it looked right without them. So off to Google to find some close-up images of ladybirds, and what do you know, there is white both in the head and right at the neck end of the body! My stitching bug is truer to life than I had imagined.