All our Yesterdays

I love the "All our Yesterdays" cross-stitch design series!
Ok, not all of them - there are some in the series that aren't so appealing to me - but, basically, if they are good, they are adorable!

I've so far finished two, both came as kits, produced by DMC.
The first I made, ten years or so ago now is this one:

I seem to remember that the strands weren't sorted in this one - you had to try to identify the colours, which took me quite a while. Nowadays, it seems that kits typically come with the colours sorted, which is a real improvement.

You might notice that I did very little backstitch although the original requires a lot of it. I'm not a great fan of backstitch - a painting doesn't have outlines either. I'll do it if it seems necessary to distinguish shapes or to achieve an effect, but will leave it out wherever possible. As the colours here were very lively and created sharp contrasts on their own, it didn't need much.

This second one I made was pleasantly quick work, a real summer project:

As you can see, there was more backstitch necessary here, but I still didn't do all that was suggested in the pattern.

And, yes, you can see where the fabric got dented from holding it and I don't know how to get rid of these (or also of creases from folding sometimes). The reason here is that these kits come with a very stiff fabric that lends itself to working without a hoop, especially if the design is so small - so pretty much my own fault, I guess. Still, I wonder what other stitchers do about this problem.