Spring flowers

This is the Mystery WIP I have been making which is a bunch of spring flowers in a vase with some butterflies. I finished while on holiday with the kids in England.

This is the background story as posted with my WIP:

While looking at my UFOs last year I came across this but couldn't find which pattern belonged to it, so I set it aside knowing that I'd probably eventually find out what it was for. I was right - last night while thinking about my options for the #stitchingpirates latest contest and while starting to put a printed in a magazine pattern into the PC Stitch so I could play around with it and Frankenstein the pattern, I realised that *some* for the squares had been coloured in with pencil - the way I do with patterns I'm following. A moment of pondering later and I knew what it was and I'm so happy - I've been wanting to do this pattern "forever" as I really love the flowers but don't like the background as much and judging by the rectangle i've drawn on the fabric I was planning to do something other than the square background in the pattern.

The pattern for the flowers and vase is from the magazine cutting I'd stuck into a scrapbook many many years ago so I'm not entirely sure which magazine it came from other than that it's almost certainly a Dutch ladies magazine so probably Libelle or Margriet. I changed the colour of the shadow of the jug from the green that it was to a grey as I'd stripped out the background and border that the magazine pattern had. I added the butterflies from the "yellow butterflies biscornu" pattern by Rainburst Embroidery as I knew they were going to look just right with it. Once I'd completed it I realised that I'd made the lines around the edges of the space with ballpoint pen (how silly can one get?!) so I decided to hide the lines with 3 lines of backstitching, 2 in DMC colour variations 4045 and the middle one in 4150. I still have a small section of ballpoint pen to remove but I am planning on trying out ballpoint pen remover on it.

Stats:
Size of embroidery: 7 3/4" inches square / 19.6 cm square
Fabric: 24 ct evenweave
Number of colours used: 21
Number of cross stitches: 4737
Number of backstitches: far too many!
Time needed: 2 weeks