Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a nice celebration and feel a sense of renewal.  :]

It seems appropriate for a new year to start with a new beginning...of the Prairie Rug II.  As you may recall, the first Prairie Rug ran into a major problem with dye lot mismatching.

Sullivans sent me a dozen replacement skeins, but they were more grey in color so I'm saving those for a future project.  I bought nine skeins of DMC 522 all of the same dye lot, so I hope this means the issue will not repeat itself.

I used the original pattern I had made with Aunt Martha's Tracing Paper and a Sulky Iron-On transfer pen in black.  You can obtain a few transfers from the same pattern.

I chose a slightly darker purple-red and have made the brown DMC 3371 outlines thicker.  One nice thing about starting over is being able to change things you were unhappy with in the first run.  I'm also going to work in matching areas just in case I do run into matching problems.  This way opposite blocks will match one another and any variations will seem planned.

Punchneedle goes relatively quickly, so this is 7.5 hours of work.  The border is done as well as most of the interior details.  After that, it will be all green, green, green.