Part 1 completed, on to part 2 (of a different SAL)

Last night while watching the final (finally!) episode of Sanditon I was able to finish part 1 of Erica Michaels Quilting A-Bee-Cs, using the recommended Classic Colorworks floss (except for subbing the dark green and adding a purple):

Part 2 will be coming out next month, though I don't know exactly when; hopefully I'll be able to finish Hands on Design Gather Butterflies before it arrives. I'm having a hard time settling down with my stitching lately, but I would like to have this done by the end of this month (or, more likely, early next month):

Also in May Heart in Hand's Seaside Tiny Town will be released, so of course I'll have to make time for that as soon as I get it! And there's another Tiny Town coming out in July called Any Town Tiny Town:

This was designed for the 25th anniversary of Keepsakes in Ohio; they had a pre-order on their site that ended on April 15th. Their shop is the white house to the left of the center, with their little black shop cat, 310, next to the door. The chart will be released to all shops next year, and the idea is to personalize it to look more like your own town. I might try to make the cross stitch shop look more like my LNS, The Stitching Bee, and there's a local flower shop that I would love to try to imitate:

I've messed around a bit already, and it isn't going to be quite as easy to translate into a "tiny building" as I had hoped, but I've got plenty of time to work with it and see what I can come up with.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Oops, made a new start!

I truly intended to work on Firefly Fairies until the next set of HOD Gather Round designs arrived, but I got distracted by a Market release from Erica Michaels Designs called Quilting A-Bee-Cs; part 1 (of 5) and the threads arrived last Monday and I couldn't resist making a new start. I had a piece of Access Commodities Heron Gray 38ct linen on hand, which is being stitched 1-over-2 with the recommended CCW floss (except for a substitute for the dark green and adding a purple):

Gather Butterflies is supposed to be mailed today, so it should arrive later this week. I'm going to work on this until then; the next set of blocks will be released next month, so I'd like to have part 1 finished before then. It's nice to have some small finishes along the way as the whole piece takes shape.

Rosewood Manor just released a design that I stitched the model for over two years ago, called Strawberry Wishes. I love the font in this, as well as the pretty colors:

I've been cleaning the windows and doing some other spring chores lately, which has cut into my stitching time, but it's nice to finally feel like winter is on the way out (even though it snowed a bit this morning). Still need to clean out the garage and get going on some yard work, but even doing those things feels nice when there's good weather to enjoy.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

More Firefly Fairies

The next Gather Round club kit was supposed to ship now, but it's been delayed for a couple of weeks so I'm going to keep going on Firefly Fairies for now. I haven't been doing a lot of stitching lately, but have made a bit more progress; here it is as of this morning:

I've always loved this design just from the chart photo and it turns out that it doesn't even come close to showing some of the details, which makes it so fun discovering and bringing them to life. It uses four colors of Kreinik braid, though I'm switching some of it out for beads of similar colors, which really makes it look like it's sprinkled with fairy magic:

Those little feet peeking out of what will be her underskirt have always been one of my favorite parts!

Since there's not a lot of stitching to show I'll share the final three framed pieces that I recently got back, all of which were Nora Corbett designs; this is Miss Moth, stitched on a Silkweaver solo:

Miss Dragonfly, stitched on SMF MacMillan (I think that was the name of the fabric):

And the Mirabilia ornament from the 2000 JCS ornament issue:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!