Another goal met

I was happy to finish Teresa Wentzler's You Were Hatched last Wednesday, a bit earlier than I had thought I would. I spent most of one day just doing the back stitching on the dragons; it's a pretty subtle impact for all that work:

The border also took most of a day, with the metallic back stitching taking almost as long as the stitching; here is the completed design:

I'd like to finish this as an ornament before the retreat, but I'm not really feeling the urge to actually do it yet. I've been in a cleaning mood lately (probably already anticipating "hibernating" for the winter), and once I'm done inside the house I need to start getting the landscaping ready for winter. 

Nora Corbett's Misses Blueberry and Blackberry arrived today, so I'll probably start one of those tonight or tomorrow. While I was waiting for them to get here, I pulled out a Mill Hill kit, Feline Friends, that I had started back in July when I was traveling to a couple of retreats; here it is as of last night:

I'm planning to take this with me when I go to Charlotte in a couple of weeks; hopefully it won't take 10+ years to finish like the other Laurel Burch kit in this set... 🤣

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Goal reached and a new (old) goal

I almost realized my goal of having both Miss Apple Blossom and Miss Cherry Blossom finished before the next two designs in the series were released on the 15th, as I was able to complete Miss Cherry Blossom on the 17th:

I'm now waiting for the two new releases to reach me, which are Misses Blackberry and Blueberry. I'm hopeful that they will work on the same fabric used for the first two, which is Zweigart's green/white leaves Belfast:

After Cherry Blossom was done, I decided to pull out Teresa Wentzler's You Were Hatched, which I started back in January and did just a little bit of work on before switching to a Chatelaine I wanted to have done before the Chatelaine retreat this past July:

The Wentzler-themed Queen City Stitch Retreat starts three weeks from this Thursday, so I figured it was time to get this out and see if I could finish it before then. After three days with plenty of stitching time, I'm pretty sure I can have it done later this week:

Definitely glad I chose a small one to do; there are five shades of blues used in this piece, and all five are made up of blends, which seems just a tad excessive--can't imagine how many blends are used in one of her big ones!😄

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Small change in plans

I was on track to finish Miss Cherry Blossom before the 15th, but a couple of things have made that look less likely. The first was part 4 of Frosted Pumpkin's Welcome to the Circus being released last Thursday, which I completed on Saturday:

The second was a Heart in Hand model that arrived Saturday afternoon. That will probably take me most of the rest of the week to finish, then hopefully I can get back to Miss Cherry Blossom. I have all of the white and lightest pink in her skirt done, and I'm hoping that filling in the rest of the colors should go relatively quickly:

I wanted to have her done by the 15th in case the next two designs in this series are released that day, but I wouldn't even receive the charts until close to two weeks after that date, so I should still have plenty of time to finish this one first.

In other news, we had an extremely close call with disaster last week, when half of one of our 24-year-old trees came down during an early morning storm. Somehow, it managed to avoid our house, except for one little branch that just kissed a gutter:

I thought that wind had brought it down, but it looks like it was actually a lightning strike:

We're having it assessed in a couple of days; I was hoping that we might be able to save the remaining half, but that seems unlikely if it was a lightning strike. It's really sad to lose a tree that we planted when we first moved into our home, but I'm so thankful that it didn't hit our house!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!