Snowflakes Fly

Here is my Snowflake Sampler.  It is available for sale from http://www.patternsonline.com/

This time, instead of making up the snowflakes as I stitched, I drew them on graph paper.  Since I wanted the snowflakes to be reproducible, it was much easier to graph them first and stitch them second.

The only thing I didn't design in advance was the bead placement.  It's much easier deciding where they go on the actual stitched piece instead of a pictoral representation.

One of the hardest things about designing your own sampler is deciding on colors.  I started with 2 doodles.  One on off-white linen in light blues and one on lavender with white and darker blue snowflakes.  It was a hard decision, but I finally decided to go with the off-white and light blues.  The result is low-contrast snowflakes.  I now think my model should have been in the higher contrast colors. 

Whenever I decide to go with the safer colors I end up deciding that the wilder colors would have been better.  Whenever I throw caution to the wind and start with the wilder colors, I often wish I had gone safer route.  But, every once in a while I love my color choice and wouldn't do it any other way.

Here is my wilder color scheme.  Actually, it's not all that wild.  I turned it into an ornament.  Which one do you like best?  If I stitch them again, I want to find a dark blue linen and stitch them all in whites.