Cruisin' along (pun intended)

I and four of my friends from the retreat last month have signed up for a Stitchers' Escapes cruise to the Caribbean in January 2028. We're still waiting to hear if we can get the cabins we requested, but since we signed up on the first day registration was open, I'm hoping there won't be a problem. I am both excited and terrified...😅 🛳️

My stitching has been cruising along, though, with part 6 of Welcome to the Circus being completed last Friday:

I spent the weekend working on Amy Bruecken's Lucky 13, and I am definitely on the downhill side of that now:

I have four and a half more characters to stitch, so it's unlikely (but not impossible) that I'll have this done by next Monday. Each character stitches up so quickly (and cutely) that it's hard to stop stitching at the end of the day--the old "one more stitch" refrain!

We are having a really mild autumn in Wisconsin this year (which is only fair because spring was so cold!); even though I cleared most of the daylilies, one bloomed just a few days ago, which really boosted my mood for some reason:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Halloween is over...

...long live Halloween--stitching, that is! I'm making good progress on Amy Bruecken's Lucky 13, with a goal of finishing it this month. Here it is as of last night:

Each character is taking around two days to stitch, so I'm hoping to finish in about three weeks. Part 6 of Welcome to the Circus will be released this Thursday, so I'll be taking a few days to get that stitched. 🎪

I've already signed up for the Queen City Stitch Retreat's Mirabilia Mermaid retreat next July, so I've been thinking about which mermaid I'd like to stitch before then and I think I've decided on Merchant Mermaid:

In a bit of good fortune, I actually bought the embellishment pack for this back in 2011 (which contains a discontinued treasure), though I'll need to find a couple of spools of holographic blending filament. I'll probably pull the threads this week and then pick a fabric, so I'll be ready to start once I finish Lucky 13.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Flutter Fruit collection up to date

I finished Nora Corbett's Miss Blueberry the day before I left for the Queen City Stitch Retreat and made a very small start on Miss Blackberry the day I got home, which was the 18th. This past Sunday I had everything done except for some Kreinik back stitching and the beading, so yesterday I spent the day working on her and am very pleased to say that I was able to finish her at about 8pm last night. Here she is before the Kreinik and beads:

And after:

Assuming there are two more in this set, it will be January at the earliest before they are released, so I will just have to be patient until then. I'm hoping for orange (or peach) blossom and strawberry, but I'm sure I'll love whatever they turn out to be. Here are the four current designs, all stitched on Zweigart's green/white leaves Belfast:

For now, I think I'm going to work on Amy Bruecken's Lucky 13, which I started at the retreat:

I'll see how much I can get done before part 6 of Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery's Welcome to the Circus drops next Thursday.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Leaving tomorrow!

The Teresa Wentzler Queen City Stitch Retreat starts on Thursday, so tomorrow I'm flying out to Charlotte--hoping for a smooth trip, but I put a bag of Hershey's miniatures in with my travel cross stitch project just in case! 🍫

I just finished Nora Corbett's Miss Blueberry a couple of hours ago, and she makes a beautiful addition to the Flutter Fruit collection:

I have Miss Blackberry ready to go when I get home, but I decided to take a different project with me to Charlotte. I'm taking Amy Bruecken's Lucky 13, which should be a fairly easy design to work on in a "busy" environment:

Last week I spent a few days getting caught up with Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery's Welcome to the Circus SAL; we're up to part 5, so halfway done now:

Heart in Hand recently released a new Tiny Town, Gingerbread Tiny Town; this is the model I stitched last month and it's shown as the drum finish on the chart:

It's 8:30pm right now and I need to head upstairs and finish packing. I'm getting a late start, but I have a direct flight tomorrow and it doesn't leave until 4pm, so I'm still doing okay on prep time. ⏱️

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

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!

Full steam ahead

I started Nora Corbett's Miss Cherry Blossom just over a week ago, and I would say I'm past the halfway point right now, so well on track to finish before the 15th. I ended up adding the beads to the top area once the wings were done, so now I have sparkles to enjoy as I work on the skirt:

I realized that I never shared photos of the two Nora Cobett models I stitched that were released in July (the day I left for my big adventure, so no surprise it slipped my mind!). They are from the Caribbean Collection, St. Thomas (on the left) and Belize:

I haven't had any Mirabilia/Nora Corbett models for a few months now; the last one I stitched should be the December Mirabilia release.

For now, it's back to Miss Cherry Blossom--might even have her finished before next Monday. 🤞🏻

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

A finish 18 years in the making!

I am ecstatic to report that I was able to finish Chatelaine's Mini Mandala Mystery 1 yesterday! I started it back when it was a mystery SAL in 2008, and this is as far as I got before it disappeared into the WIP bin:

I pulled it back out last month to take to the Chatelaine retreat, and last week I decided that it was finally time to work on it until it was done!

I've rewarded myself with a new start, Nora Corbett's Miss Cherry Blossom:

I've already stitched Miss Apple Blossom, and I feel like there's a good chance that the September releases will be the next two in this series, so I'm going to see if I can get this finished before the 15th.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!