Fill in on Mama Swan (Dutch Beauty)

I'm on the last motif of the last page on this huge piece - the mama swan.   This motif anchors the bottom third row and in a lot of ways, it's the focus of the entire sampler.  The cattail marsh, heavy nest, adult swan with four cygnets is by far the biggest motif, and your eye goes there right away.

Now as charted I have several issues with this area.

First of all, as you can see from the chart's cover photo (link to 123Stitch), this area on the original sampler is very badly damaged,  In fact the thread is missing altogether from a large section of the head and neck of the adult swan.   So all we have is the 'best guess' from the person that charted it from the museum original.

Secondly, almost all of the cygnets and the body, tail, and wings of the mama swan are outlined in DMC 3021 - the dark brown-black color.   But the neck and head of the adult swan are not outlined - this seems an odd choice on the part of the original stitcher, since everything else is so very consistent throughout the entire sampler.  I suspect she ran out of thread and her replacement outline thread faded.   Again, there is substantial damage in that section of the piece.   So what I did was pull the DMC color family list for the charted filler color (Mocha Brown) and used the second darkest color of the five shades in the family (DMC 3032) and stitched the outer most stitch on the head and neck in that shade. (Not the beak and basal knob - the black patch on the top of the beak).  I also used this shade to finish off a couple of small sections of the cygnets where the dark outline was missing or faded.

Last, but the most noticeable.  Mama and babies are all charted in the same color - which creates an undifferentiated blob, especially where the rightmost cygnet is tucked in 'behind' mama.  While baby swans are little grey-brown puffballs, just as charted, adult swans are WHITE.   My linen is cream, and unfortunately, almost the exact shade of the lightest color in the DMC family, so I went with the next lighter color (DMC 3033).  That's still darker than I'd like, but it's tolerable and just enough so that the cygnets show up next to mama. 

One thing to note, there is a LOT of DMC 842 (which is a Griege with a very faint pink undertone) in this piece.  It shows up in some places like skin on the human figures and cherubs in the top row and the beak of the mama swan, which makes me think that it was originally a brighter actual pink.   So in those places (and a few random flowers), I subbed in DMC 3774.  

The only other color I changed is one of the stripes in the shield in the 'Dutch Lady Liberty' motif.   I went with the blue, white and red of the modern Dutch flag and used the DMC 3726 on one of the stripes instead of having two 'white' ones and an off center blue stripe.  That Lady Liberty motif is, by the way, my least favorite part of the piece - awkward elbow! 

I'm liking the choices I made, but wow, that's a lot of fill in on mama swan!

For the record, the color family for the swans is:

3866	Mocha Brown - Ultra Very Light
3033	Mocha Brown - Very Light (adult)
3782	Mocha Brown - Light (cygnets)
3032	Mocha Brown - Medium (outline)
3781	Mocha Brown - Dark