Just tied off the last knot on my big nature piece

I know that feeling of finally stepping back after months of evening stitching. I spent last winter on a thread painted kingfisher, probly three months of long and short stitch on the body alone, and I ripped out the wing gradient twice before I gave up and let the blend be a little rough. Funny thing is, that wing is now my favorite part because it looks like feathers catching light instead of a smooth printed gradient.

The needle pokes are real too. My thumb pad stayed numb for weeks after finishing mine, and I started wearing a leather thimble on my middle finger after that project because I got tired of the little holes.

One thing that helped me with muddy color was switching to fewer strands and layering instead of blending everything in one pass. Two strands of DMC, stitch one shade, then feather the next shade into it. The transition gets soft without turning into that murky in-between color. Might be worth a try if the green ever bugs you enough to revisit. And agree on stopping the fixing loop around a certain point. Past a while you're just moving thread around and losing the joy. Mine still hangs with a knot buried in the reeds that I pretend is a cattail seed head.

I read your post and felt a little pang of envy at the letting-go part. I'm the opposite problem entirely. Last year I did a crewel piece of my grandmother's garden and I spent so many evenings unpicking that by the end I hated every stitch of it. There's one leaf on the rose bush, maybe an inch across, where I reworked the shading six times. Six. It looks fine. Nobody who sees it would ever notice. But I burned out on the whole project and it sat in a drawer for months before I could face blocking and framing it. These days I've made myself a rule: three tries max on any section, then it stays. My current piece, a heron in a reed bed on linen, has a knot hidden under the wing that I've decided is a character trait.

What strikes me is the mantel detail. Four months of evening work deserves a proper spot where you walk past it daily rather than it living in a pile. Mine hangs in the hallway so I catch it every time I go upstairs, and on the bad days it quietly reminds me I can actually finish things. Enjoy the green break. My hands remember the needle pokes too, that odd little bruised feeling across the fingertips that takes a week to fade.

Congrats on getting her up on the mantel. One thing I learned the hard way with my hoop finish over the fireplace, the afternoon sun coming through that window faded my blues on one side within a year. Mine sat a foot from the glass and now it's got this weird half-shadow thing going on. If your light hits that wall at all, might be worth checking her in a couple months. I just rotate mine now and then and it slowed right down.

Gotta push back on the idea that the ripped-out-and-gave-up section ends up being the favorite part every time. I think that only works when the piece has a subject that forgives rough texture, like feathers or bark. I rushed the blending on a moth wing once and left it rough on purpose, and it never grew on me, it just looked like I got tired. A gradient on a wing either reads as light or it reads as lazy, and mine was the second one. Maybe it depends on how close the viewer stands. Did you actually like the wing from the start, or did you talk yourself into it after it was too late to fix?