ginormous (well, for me) fairytale embroidery

So I am a total embroidery noob. I've done pockets on a few pairs of jeans and a pouch for my brother that I embroidered last year, so this was kind of me biting off more than I could chew.

Whenever I wanted to use something other a straight stitch or satin stitch, I had to get out this 1970's embroidery guide that was a hand-me-down from my mom, and stare at the thing for 30 minutes before I figured out what their stupid drawings meant.

I intentionally didn't keep track of my hours, because I didn't want to know. Wink

But let's just say I went through a whole season of Gilmore Girls DVDs (maybe a season and a half) while working on it, plus many, many hours on top of that. I started in November and finished in (eep!) July.

I was intending this as a Xmas gift for my mom, but after 7 straight hours of embroidering on Xmas Eve, and many hours of work still needing to be done, I realized that wasn't going to happen. There wasn't much embroidery from January through the middle of July, but I busted my butt in the end because I wanted to finish it for my mom's b-day on the 25th.

This is what I used as my (quite literal) inspiration:

It's from "the Golden Book of Fairytales," a book my mom had when she was a kid and passed down to me. She says she likes this particular illustration the most (though all of them in the book are really amazing. I'd frame them all.) because the girl looks like me (it doesn't). For a while, she even had a crappy scanned and printed copy on the wall, which is what gave me the idea to do this in the first place. The artist's name is Adrienne Segur and the illustration goes with the store "The Seven Crow Princes".

And this is the result:

I did it on muslin... a noob mistake, I think, since it's not very sturdy and did wind up puckering a little.
It's about 11" X 17", which is pretty close to the illustration in the book.
Once the embroidery was done, I used colored pencils to paint/color the blank spots that were too big to fill in with stiches.

More photos here:
uncolored: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/gandalfhascoolboots/Picture366.jpg

before frame: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/gandalfhascoolboots/Picture368.jpg

more close ups:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/gandalfhascoolboots/Picture379.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/gandalfhascoolboots/Picture378.jpg