Santa has his sweater and socks on

Well, the suspense is over, for better or for worse, Anne Stradal's design called "The Morning After" is all stitched.
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After struggling with my decision as to what to stitch for Santa's sweater/shirt/underwear, I decided to use some Kreinik Tapestry #12 braid #032 (pearl color) doing a simple basketweave stitch. It solved my problem with the "white thread" issue to some extent. I also wanted a lighter sweater under his coat. Sure hope Santa did not catch a bad cold because of it :-(
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After that came the suspenders in braided knitting using a dark green thread, followed closely by his socks using green for the toes and heels and white for the soles. I decided to keep his socks rather simple since I had given him a more sophisticated sweater by using that metallic thread.
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I had forgotten to add some gold metallic thread around the number 25, so corrected that little oversight.
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I also stitched the rug in horizontal diagonal cashmere and then completed the floor in front of the carpet.




In future projects, I will need to give a lot more consideration to the fact that if I want to change some color(s) like I did with the pure white for winter white, it will have some impact along the way, mostly as in this case, I wanted to make sure that Santa did not look like he had a dirty beard by using some pure white next to it, so I need to take this into consideration from the get go, which I did not really do and boxed myself in because of it. My initial goal was to put some color in his sweater which would have taken care of that little detail, but could not see very well how I could do that taking into consideration Santa's surrounding. The metallic thread I used was the best compromise I could think of. It is hard to tell by looking at the photo but when you look at the finished project in person, you can see more what I mean.
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I now feel like taking a little break from all the needlepoint I have been doing recently and do a little embroidery and then will return to it with Santa's wife. Hopefully I will have learned something with Santa and not box myself in again, but sometimes the learning curve is slow, so will see :-)
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Pierrette =^..^=