End of November Already?!

We had a very nice Thanksgiving this year. Meg was home from school Tuesday night. We hosted Thanksgiving dinner (butternut squash soup, turkey, stuffin' muffins, mashed potatoes/sweet potatoes, California salad and Meg made cream puffs for dessert). We always have a good time when we get together with my brother's family, so the whole evening was fun. Even better was the rest of the weekend. Dennis had to work Friday, so Meg and I did a little bit of Black Friday shopping (NOT at 4am!) and got our hair cut. Saturday morning we all volunteered at our church food pantry for a few hours. Aside from that, we had Wednesday evening, Friday evening and almost all of Saturday as relaxing family time. It was so nice to look up from my sewing (it was so nice to have time to sew!) and see the two people I love most right there.

By dint of working really hard, I did manage to finish the first page of my Winter Fairy! That's 1/4 done! I'm very excited - many times I thought I'd never get this far. All the half stitches in her face and hair just about drove me crazy. When I got to her eyes I decided to change the drak grey of the pattern to a dark blue of about the same shade. Here's a picture of her. Isn't she pretty? She looks like she's stepping behind a wall right now. I debated on whether to do the other top page or the bottom righthand page. I really don't like working on her skirt (white; near-white; ultra pale blue; pale blue...) so I decided to do the bottom right page and get a lot of the skirt done and out of the way. Getting to the little bunny at her feet will be my reward.

If anyone does read this, I'd like your opinion. Do you think I should backstitch what I have done or wait until the whole picture is completed? Some backstitching I can't do yet because I don't have the special Kreinik thread. I need to order that online. I will definitely leave the beading till the end.