Moving It Forward Monday: Cross Stitch May-nia Progress

First off, I hope all the stitching mamas out there enjoyed a beautiful Mother's Day yesterday!  

My May-nia month has been progressing a bit.   With the only new start scheduled for May-nia completed last week, it was time to get back to the WIP on the schedule.  I was hoping to finish up my "Maybe Wine" piece that's going to be a wall hanging companion to this one:

This one was a Dimensions kit.

While I did get more work done on it, it's still a WIP at this point:

I started May here....

...and got this far this week.

When I chose this piece last year, I never really expected it to be all that hard but the color changes in the flowers have kicked my butt!!  I've done a lot of false starts and frogging when it came to filling in the flower colors.  The good news is that it resulted in the need to learn two new cross stitch techniques:  parking threads and gridding my fabric.  

I had practiced the latter on the Coronation piece I did last week and learned this week that it was also okay to just grid a difficult section of a pattern where it was needed rather than gridding the whole piece of fabric so I did that in advance of starting the bottom flower.  Even so, I'm STILL having problems getting some of the "confetti" and sprinkled color placements right as I start on it.  

I really hope to work out the kinks in the process since I will really need these skills when I get to the first "full coverage" piece I have kitted:

Pattern available on Etsy here.

Once I get the stitching done on "Maybe Wine", the rest of the month is scheduled to be focused on the "fully finishing" work for the two May stitching projects and two other projects completed prior to May-nia.  So I also spent some time looking for finishing supplies.  

For the Coronation piece I have an idea do a fancy pillow finish that I envision doing in royal purple, velvet and gold.  While shopping for those supplies, I also found the perfect backing fabric for "Maybe Wine" since it will be finished in a hoop frame like its companion.

So all the finishing things are in house for whenever I manage to get this stitching done.  And so May-nia continues.....