He’s done! 
After 12 hours and 30 minutes in the past two days, I finished ” ‘Tempest’ in a Teacup…” my first Teresa Wentzler design! As I have already mentioned, I really enjoyed stitching this piece.
I have had some extremely positive remarks concerning my color conversion, so in the next couple of days I will post it for those of you interested.
I really like doing color conversions with cross stitch pieces, but it isn’t an easy process. It requires that you spend a little more time with a piece and are able to visualize what your end product will look like. However, when I do one it makes me feel even more creative and artistic than usual. 
When I do a color conversion, the first thing I ask myself is whether I want to do a major conversion (changing nearly everything) or just a minor one (changing just a few things here and there.) If it is minor, I just change things on the fly and as I feel that they fit into the piece.
But if it is a major conversion, I do a lot of preplanning. I have to ask myself what I envision the end product looking like. For “Tempest,” I knew that I wanted to have a green dragon, so I quickly realized that I would have to change most of the colors of the pattern. I also knew that I wanted to stitch on my lavender fabric and that the colors of my dragon would have to be pretty bright so that he didn’t fade into the fabric.
Once I made those preliminary decisions, I laid out the “true” colors of Tempest so that I would know which colors belonged where. Since I also wanted to stay in the spirit of a blended TW design, I also needed to see what blends Teresa suggested so that I could figure out how to do my own blends.
In Teresa’s “Tempest,” the body of the dragon is shades of coral, his spines are a violet/blue mix, his wings are gold, and the teacup is white with shades of gray and light violet. I didn’t want to change the teacup, so I left those colors as is with the exception of the fact that I changed the colors of the flowers on the cup from blue to mauve. For the dragon, I chose teal blends for his body, bright blue and purple mixes for the spines, and silver for his wings. These colors also made up the border.
In her instructions, Teresa uses various colors for the backstitching to accentuate certain parts of the dragon. At first I tried this, but in the end I backstitched everything in one color (dark pewter gray) because otherwise I felt that he merged too much into the fabric. If I were to do him again on white/cream/ivory fabric I would backstitch with my colors according to Teresa’s instructions.
In the end, I finished “Tempest” in about 49 hours. Of course, that counts six hours of stitching on Aida before I started over on Evenweave and over three hours of backstitching that I ended up ripping out because I didn’t like it.
Though it isn’t for everyone, color conversion is a fun process for me. I am secure enough in my artistic abilities to be pleased with my choices but also confident enough to rip out things I don’t like and do them over if necessary.