TAST Week 4: Cretan Stitch and CQJP Block 1 Finished

I used this week's stitch, the cretan stitch, to make some grapes for the wheat.  Cretan isn't one of my favorites, and some folks over at the Tuesday Stitchers group agree.  I used a piece of ribbon to help space the stitches, and I think that helped a lot. I hope it doesn't look odd that there are grapes missing around the wheat,  but I didn't want to layer one motif over the other.  The grapes are lazy daisy and French knots.

I'm pretty happy with the finished block.  One down, eleven to go.

 I added a bug for the birds to eat.  The blue stitch to the left of the bug is called snail's trail.

The stitch immediately above the bird's head was the dry run for the snail's trail stitch.  I got the loop going the wrong way, and this is how it came out.  Because it otherwise looked okay, I left it.  If this stitch doesn't have a name, I'm naming it Snail's Trial.

The combination of stitches that runs behind the humming bird is the one I'm considering replacing.  It's got a wrapped herringbone stitch as a base, and it's accented with yellow lazy daisy (that's the part of it I like) and some pink French knots.  I've decided that my wrapped stitches look messy, and the spacing changes behind the hummingbird.  I'm not going to tackle this now, but I'm going to think about taking this out and re-doing it in an edited form.

Not bad for a month's work.  I'm really looking forward to starting February's block.