The last of the RR Bands

I have mostly finished my EPIC RR.
And by mostly, I mean that I've finished stitching my bands for everyone else.   All I need to do is stitch my band on my RR (which I'm half tempted not to do, actually, though there's plenty of space).

First, I finished Melanie's RR.
Melanie's had more traditional elements on hers, and was a very, very long and very skinny RR.  I think she mentioned that she was going to turn it into a table runner.   I had a few inches left at the bottom to work with.

I had been playing on a website with freebies and had downloaded a bunch of letters that I really like, and as Melanie's last name starts with an S, I wanted to use that (since mine starts with an S, I thought it would be fun).     Her husband also knows me as the ferret lady, from back in the day when I had several, so a ferret was necessary.    Pancho, my clear favorite, was also known as Emperor Pancho as a joke on the old bulletin boards, so a crown had to show up!  And voila! A band I was super proud of and had a lot of fun stitching.

Next was Belinda's.   She is the designer behind Tor Rhuann designs.   And her RR was looking very clean and crisp and I wanted to do something more along the lines of blackwork.   We all know I'm into Octopuses and other cephalopods, so I adapted some regular cross stitch octopuses into blackwork and just created my own squidlings.    I did end up adding a kind of seed stitching to the octopus heads because I felt like they needed something a little special.

The two end guys are worked in Bethlehem which is a nice overdye that uses a lot of purple and green, and then the two guys in the middle are purple and green solid overdyes.   The squidlings look black, but they're not, I used Royal Purple, which has a purple/blue overdye effect to it.  I'm super happy with the design, and judging by the instagram comments, it's my most successful band so far.

As for my RR, it took a turn I did not expect, and while I'm not at all unhappy with what people stitched at all, I did feel it necessitated a change in what I had planned to stitch for my band.  Hopefully I'll get to that one soon and I will officially take it off the WIP list (wouldn't that be nice!).  While I'm technically done with the obligation part of the stitching, it would be unfair to call it complete at this point, I think.

And in other news, I started a new project that I was itching to do before I get back to my rotation.  It should be done today/tonight, so I can't wait to show that off.