In my celebratory FoF last Saturday I mentioned that in going through my close-up photographs, choosing illustrations, I’d noticed a missing stitch. Yesterday afternoon, replete with chicken pie and a friend’s delicious homemade lemon ice cream, I decided to put the missing stitch in. And that would be that! Except it wasn’t. Part of this, I fully admit, was just me being fussy. And at some point I will have to stop fussing or I will never get this mounted! But here is what happened.

Having shown off my finished-but-for-one-stitch canvaswork to the friends who’d come round for lunch I re-clamped it into the Lowery stand which for the past couple of days had held my or nué snowdrop, and got out the thread box containing a few left-over threads from my three-year project. Why I kept those few straggly bits of green, brown and blue in the small box destined for my silk shading colours after putting all the canvaswork threads back into their usual storage boxes I do not know, but I was very grateful for my eccentric decision as it meant I didn’t have to hunt through half the craft room to get the right threads. Time to take a close look at the missing stitch and decide what blend was needed. It was then that I noticed More Missing Stitches .

Ignore the purple arrow for the moment, I’ll come back to that one. The orange arrow points to the stitch I noticed when writing the previous FoF. The yellow arrow points to another incomplete stitch which had managed to remain unnoticed. Or – I am inclined to overthink these things – had it been a design decision to leave that stitch without its top cross? Would I ruin the entire look of the thing by completing it? As I couldn’t remember it being a conscious decision the best thing seemed to complete it with the same blend as the other stitch, although in the end I did go for a three-quarter cross rather than the full cross as I didn’t want to cover up too much of the leather tree trunk.

Back to that purple arrow. It points to a stitch that was one of the last ones to be worked; it is slightly isolated, it needed only the top cross, in the photograph it shows as a light green part of the tree, and I happened to have in my needle a remnant of the light green wool I’d used for the more textured stitches a little lower down. I added some blue and worked the top cross. And although I didn’t mention it in FoF, or even admit it to myself, it bothered me every time I looked at it. It is blobby. It is fluffy. It is wrong. And I might as well do something about it. So I did. I unpicked the top cross, which fortunately wasn’t attached to any other stitches, and re-did it in a blend without wool. It is still a little chunky, but it blends in much better with its surroundings.

And so now I’m really done. Really. No more fussiness. Unless perhaps to re-do that stitch once more to make it less chunky… No! No, really done now. Look: the finished piece. At last .