Almost time for Market releases

As a stitcher, this is an exciting time of year with Nashville Needlework Market happening this coming weekend. The older I get and the larger my stash gets, I find myself not adding a lot to my wish list, but I will be getting a few of the Heart in Hand releases. The one I'm most excited for is Nativity Tiny Town, and the corresponding Frill:

Cecilia is also releasing Bumblebee Etchings, of which the bee is my favorite part:

I did stitch the skep for her on 20ct linen over-2 with pearl cotton #5, which she had finished as a pillow that is just as cute as can be:

Another design I'm looking forward to is Ladybug Picnic by Hands on Design:

Last year I had picked up Cathy's Botanical Bee at a retreat but hadn't gotten around to stitching it yet, so last night I pulled it out and went through some fabrics looking for a couple that might work for these designs:

Once I have all the floss I'll make a decision, but I'm hopeful that at least one of these will work for each piece. I've commented on Cathy's FB post that I would love to see a firefly in this series, so maybe that will strike her fancy and happen in the future.

I'm currently still working on Heart in Hand's More Any Town Tiny Town and passed the halfway point once the tree to the left of the toy store was done:

I'm hoping for a finish this week, then I'll decide what I feel like working on going forward. Murphy finished his pain meds last Friday and seems to be back to normal, so I'm hoping to get back down to my craft room soon so I can finally do some more stitching on Mirabilia's Merry Merry.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Bittersweet finish

I finished Amy Bruecken's Warm Wooly Welcomes last Friday night, and while it has some very sad memories attached to it, I still really love it. The adorable sheep and bright, happy colors really appeal to me, and even the back stitching was fun because it brought each design to life. Here are the final progress photos and the big finish:

I took the final photo under my OttLite, so the fabric color is pretty true in it; it was a piece of Belfast from Nicholas Flamel Designs in his Fragrant Lilac Collection. There were two pieces in the set, and I used the other piece for Amy's A Little Batty SAL:

I think purple lends itself well to designs with bright, primary colors as it seems to mesh with any of them. I'm going to send the sheep to Rensel Studio to be framed, since they did such an amazing job with Batty, and since they take over a year to get to a project, by the time I get it back from them the worst of the sadness should be past and the happy should come to the forefront again.

I recently went on a bit of a spree and picked up five of Amy's SALs that I didn't already have (I've had Lucky 13 for quite a while now), so once I get some other stitching done, I'll have the pleasure of choosing which one to work on next. I'm leaning towards Lucky 13, and I have a piece of PTP Crystal DaVinci (purple, of course!) that might work really well for it.

Murphy's movement has been improving, but he's still on a pain med and a muscle relaxer for a few more days, so I don't want him trying to go up and down the stairs to my craft room because the meds make him a bit woozy for a few hours after he takes them. So, since I'm still "stitchin' in the kitchen" I pulled out Heart in Hand's More Any Town Tiny Town yesterday and worked on it for a while. I had started this last May at the same time I started Warm Wooly Welcomes with the intention of switching between the two, but I loved the sheep so much that I just stayed with that one. I had stitched just the cloud back then, and here it is as of last night:

Last year I was almost caught up with all of the Tiny Towns, but now I am woefully behind. I have both of the Any Towns to do, as well as Thankful, and Nativity Tiny Town is being released at Market very soon. Cecilia has also released Frills for the Christmas and Big Hearted towns, and a Frill for Blooming is also coming out at Market; this means that I want to stitch all three of those again so I can add the Frills to each one, so I now have seven to do to get caught up again!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Dreaming of sheep

I finished Quaker Impressions by Smitten by Stitches on February 4, so I'm going to call it a blessings sampler because I could really use some good vibes these days!

This was my first time working with threads from Cottage Garden Threads, and while I love the colors and the rapid color changes in the variegated skeins, I do wish they would cut the threads longer than they currently do. They come pre-cut at about 20" long and I usually use lengths of at least 30", so it feels like a lot of extra starting and ending threads. But I'm very happy with the finished piece, as it's like a little bit of spring in the midst of a cold, snowy winter.

I also finally got around to adding a beaded hanger to The Giving Season by Val's Stuff, so it will be ready for my Christmas tree this year:

I would love to be working on Merry Merry by Mirabilia but my Murphy hurt his back on February 7 and is supposed to be resting, so he can't do the stairs to my craft room (and absolutely HATES to be carried!) and I don't really have a good spot upstairs for working on a design the size of a Mirabilia. I spent a couple of days just snuggling with him and not stitching at all, but as he started to feel better I brought out Amy Bruecken's 365 Days of Warm Wooly Welcomes, which I can work on while sitting at my kitchen counter. This is where I had left off last September:

This is a difficult one to work on, as I spent a lot of time with it while sitting with my mom in ERs and during her procedures last year; she even said how it would have a lot of "stuff" stitched into it, so it was hard to start on it again now. But it really made me happy last year, and I'm hoping that it will again as I get closer to a finish. Here are some progress photos from the past week:

The fabric looks weird in the last five photos, because they were taken in my kitchen instead of under my OttLite, which gives a truer color. I should be able to finish this one this week, which will be a bittersweet accomplishment. Murphy is on the doggy equivalent of bed rest for another week and a half, so I'll have to find another project I can work on upstairs after this one. Here's my little guy following doctor's orders:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Almost a blessings sampler...?

When I started Quaker Impressions from Smitten By Stitches I thought it was too late to make it a blessings sampler, which is supposed to be started and completed in January, but as I stitched I started to think that maybe I could get it done in time even with a really late start. It might have happened, but then I got sick, so that put paid to that idea! I'm still not feeling great, but well enough to stitch yesterday, so here is where I am right now:

I need to finish four and a half flowers along the edges and then I'm going to use some beads to add just a bit of sparkle. I probably won't have a lot of stitching time today, but this should be done by tomorrow at the latest.

Back in September I was getting ready for the Friendstitch Gathering, which was a very fun event. It is put on by the designers from Heart in Hand Needleart and Bent Creek, and this time they had the ladies behind Primrose Cottage Stitches as guests. I stitched three of the models for the box of goodies, including the drum design from Primrose Cottage:

I haven't taken any pictures of the box contents yet, and at this point it will be like discovering them anew as I have very little recollection of what was in there. Maybe this week I'll work up the ambition to pull it out and take some photos. I don't think they've released any details for this year's event yet; maybe after Market has taken place.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

A new designer

I am really excited for my friend Akshay, who has taken the plunge and published his first cross stitch design under the company name Smitten by Stitches. It's currently available for sale at Fox & Rabbit while Akshay works on creating a few more designs with an eye to opening an Etsy shop in the future. Some people are doing a blessings sampler SAL, though I didn't discover it in time to participate since it's supposed to be started and finished in January. I love playing with one color designs, so last Friday I pulled some floss and fabric that I thought would look good together:

Of course, then I had to stitch enough of it to see how they all came together, and I am pretty happy with the result so far:

Aside from the Threadworx floss, the remaining colors are from Cottage Garden Threads, specifically their Daydream collection. While I've had some of their threads for a while now, this is my first time using them and I am really enjoying them; they have a nice feel, and I like the rapid color changes in the variegated skein. I'm looking forward to playing more with this design this week, though Merry Merry will most likely be my main focus.

I spent Saturday and Sunday stitching on Merry Merry, though not a lot on Sunday because the urge struck to work on cleaning up my craft room (i.e. organizing WIPs and putting stash away that had been piling up over the past six months or so), so I spent several hours doing that. I'm making good progress on her though, and it's almost time to extend the Qsnaps:

The chart calls for Mill Hill treasure 12162, which is a medium snowflake, but when I went to place it in her headpiece I found that it was too large to fit in amongst the surrounding beads. I looked at the model photo on the Mirabilia site and it looks like that one actually goes over the bugle bead to the lower right of it. Here is the best fit I could get with that treasure:

Luckily, I had a 12161 treasure in my stash, which is a smaller version of the same snowflake, so that's what I ended up using:

I'm stitching mine on 32ct fabric, so it's possible the treasure might fit on 28ct, but if it doesn't fit I would suggest eliminating that bugle bead to the lower right of it, or using the smaller version.

I'm planning to fill in more green on her dress this week, attach some more beads to the finished area, then extend the Qsnaps and maybe start some of the white underskirt--I have a feeling that's going to be less fun to work on than the rest of her, so I might try to intersperse that with parts of the rest of the dress.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment on my last post, and my condolences to those who have also lost their mom. When I read the first comment posted it immediately reminded me that my mom is the one who started me on my stitching journey--she had come down to Champaign, Illinois for Mom's Day weekend and we were shopping on Green Street when we came cross a needlework shop. We went in, even though neither of us was a stitcher, and I fell in love with a Chief Illiniwek design they had stitched on an afghan. My mom bought the supplies for me, as well as a small kit to practice on first, and my love of stitching was born!

Those were some pretty amazing weekends, and I'm glad I have the memories of them.

Just in the past week or so I have actually had a couple of days during which I didn't cry at all, for the first time since about last October. My guys went to Iowa this past weekend and I spent about 15 hours over the course of three days doing some deep cleaning to make up for some of the neglect my house has suffered over the past year. I still have more to do (windows and screens--ugh!), but just getting things back in order has been a huge mood booster for me. I didn't have a lot of stitching time, but when I did I spent it on Merry Merry, who now has her hands/gloves:

I love that on a fabric with scattered snowflakes that both of her hands ended up right next to flakes--kind of like she's creating them and sending them out into the atmosphere. I think in the next few days I might start adding the bling to her headpiece and upper body, as I always love to bring the sparkle to life.

While I was gone a Nora Corbett model dropped that I had stitched, NC359 The Dining Room:

It looks like Wichelt changed the drop on the chandelier after I sent it back, and I'm not sure which version I prefer yet:

I have all six rooms of The Doll House kitted up, and I plan to stitch them all together, but no idea when I'll actually start them. I'm going to two Queen City Stitch Retreats this year; the first is their Chatelaine Weekend in July, and I'm planning to start Rose Lights sometime before then:

The second is their second Mirabilia retreat in October. At the first retreat in 2023 and again this year they are having a SAL for Charlotte, but I already stitched her back in 2015:

However, this year they're also having a SAL with a Nora Corbett design, Geranium, so I'm going to take part in that one:

So between Merry Merry, Rose Lights and Geranium I should have plenty to keep me occupied. I've also let Cecilia from Heart in Hand know that I'll be ready to stitch for her at the end of this month, so I think she's going to be sending a design that she'll be releasing at Market this year. It definitely feels good to be feeling more normal now; about this time last year is when everything started getting bad, so this year I'm hoping for calmer times.

Hope everyone as a great stitchy week!

Miss you Mom

It's difficult to start this post as I'm still coming to terms with my mom's death the day before Thanksgiving. She was actually living with us after a serious health event when I started this blog back at the end of 2011 and was always such a fan of my stitching; I would get emails from her almost as soon as I would make a post because she checked here several times a day, even when I told her I usually only posted one day a week. During her hospitalizations and rehab stays in 2024 I would often use her iPad to pay her bills, and every time I opened her browser it would be open to my blog. So it's hard to write this knowing that she'll never see it, but I'm trying to find my "normal" again and stitching and blogging are a part of that.

The Thursday before Thanksgiving I spent a few hours visiting my mom and I started a Jim Shore Mill Hill ornament for a friend who was supportive while I dealt with everything this past year; we both love the cardinals that visit our bird feeders so I thought this ornament was perfect for her. My husband, son and I were supposed to go to my mom's care facility the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to celebrate the holiday there, but Monday afternoon she slipped into an unresponsive state so instead I spent Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday sitting with her and stitching while families gathered in the main part of the facility. I finished the ornament Tuesday night, and the next morning she left me. All that to say that of course I couldn't give the ornament away, so I decided to stitch it again for my friend and used 18ct perforated paper instead of the 14ct that comes in the kits. I really like the smaller version created by using 18ct and will definitely be using it for more ornaments:

I did sub out two of the size 15 beads, one with a petite bead and one with a Magnifica; if there are more than about six beads in a row then the size 15s are too large for the 18ct paper. 

I also used the 18ct paper to stitch a new little ornament from Val's Stuff called The Giving Season; she is donating all of the profits from kits sold last November and December to a local pet food pantry in her area, so I bought it both because it's adorable and because it was for a good cause:

I'm going to make a beaded hanger for it, just haven't felt like pulling my beads out yet to choose colors.

I had received a Mirabilia model last August before things really got crazy here, so it was not quite halfway done when December rolled around and it was supposed to be completed by early February. It's probably good that I had it though, because stressing about meeting the deadline made me work on it even when I didn't really want to, and the stitching process started to work its magic and bring some much-needed peace to my mind and body. I finished it on December 30th and was able to ring in the New Year with no deadline pressure and working on an old WIP from about 13 years ago, Nora Corbett's Needle Fairy:

There are six Stitching Fairies in this series and so far I've completed Floss, Pincushion and Needle, with Thimble, Bead and Linen still to stitch.

Back in October I finished Nora's Arezzo, which wasn't very far along in my last post from September:

This past weekend I started the newest Mirabilia design called Merry Merry; I have this fun snowflake fabric from HLC Fabrics and I thought it would be perfect for this one:

Here she is as of last night:

There is some Kreinik #4 braid used around her collar and I really didn't like how thin it looked on my fabric. The circled area on the right side shows how it looked with one strand of the Kreinik; for the area on the left side I used one strand of DMC 890 to make the stitches then topped them with stitches of Kreinik and I like it much better:

I really need to get some things done around the house that I've been neglecting for the past couple of months, but I'm planning to work on this one when I have stitching time.

I'll end with a piece that I stitched for my mom back when she was exactly the age I am now, and a photo that I've always disliked. It was my mom's favorite photo of us but I've always thought I look horrible; now I just see how happy and healthy she looks and I love it too:

I'm really hoping for a good 2025, and wish the same for everyone.