More Frosty Forest

Last Friday I picked up the second design in CCN's FF series, Snowy Deer, and last night I finished it up:

Once again I played with the floss colors; I went through my stash of Waterlilies and picked put some forest-y colors for the trees, and I also changed one of the deer to a darker shade than was called for. Here are the first two parts together:

I am already further ahead with this one than I am with Santa's Village, which started over a year ago!!

On a non-stitchy note, here is a rare picture of all four of my kitties, zoned out in the rays of the sun:

For those who celebrate it, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and to everyone a terrific New Year!

Needle Fairy WIP

I'm currently working on a model for Karen, but it's going pretty slowly as this is a bad stitchy time of year for me. If I can't sit and stitch for at least two hours when I do sit down, then it hardly feels worth it, and with all of the holiday preparations, I don't have large chunks of time like that. As a result, I just don't do very much stitching. :(

Today was my monthly stitch group, though, so I did finally get some good time in. I took my Nora Corbett Needle Fairy WIP with me, and made some progress. Here she is before:

And after:

Well, it doesn't look like that much, now that I compare them...oh well, progress is progress!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

What was I thinking...

...when I decided to stitch Santa's Village over-one on 28ct Tattersall linen?! Oh, that's right, I was thinking how cute it would be in the individual squares of the fabric. What I wasn't thinking was "Gee, I wonder if the fact that my eyes are now 46 years old (well, 45 when I started) will have any impact on this decision"!

Yep, for about the past year or two, I have noticed that it's getting harder to focus on close-up needlework. But I still have 11 houses to finish on this piece--ack! Well, since it was a Country Cottage Needleworks WIP-it Weekend on another blog I contribute to, I decided to pull this out and stitch a bit on it. Here is where I had left off almost a year ago:

And here is what it looks like after working on it Saturday and Sunday:

The "whole" piece so far (yeah, not even 1/6 of the way through!):

To give a bit of perspective, here it is next to Raccoon Cabin, which is stitched over-two on 32ct linen:

Sure, it's cute, but now I'm in a race to see whether my eyes completely fail me before I can get all 12 houses done--blech!

For now I really need to get back to the model I should have been working on. This is just a bad time of year for concentrating on large designs, because there is so much other stuff that needs to be done around the holidays.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Frosty Forest start

For what will probably be the only time during the release of these nine designs, I am caught up! This is the newest multi-part design from Country Cottage Needleworks, and today I finished up Raccoon Cabin:

Here's a close-up of the cute little raccoon:

I did change several of the floss colors, so mine looks a bit different than the chart picture. I hope I can keep up with this one; there are 12 parts to Santa's Village, and I've only completed the first one!

I wanted to mention a giveaway being held on Missy's blog. I have bought several pairs of hard-to-find Gingher scissors from Missy; now she's giving away a pair of Cheetahs, which I don't have yet. Fingers crossed I can win a pair!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Faerie Autumn Glow is finished!

I finished this gorgeous lady last night, and I just loved every stitch using these amazing colors; it was like stitching flames! Only Nora could take purples and oranges and make them look like flowing folds in a dress:

I have now finished three of the four seasonal faeries, with just Summer Love left to stitch. However, I'm already behind on starting the model that Karen sent to me a couple of weeks ago, so it will be next year before I can start Summer. Oh well, that gives me time to think about converting some of the colors, as I just don't look forward to stitching so much green!

Here are the three completed faeries:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week, and for those who celebrate it, a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Best stitchy mail EVER!!

I am so excited that I can hardly gather my thoughts enough to write, but I wanted to post some pictures as soon as possible. Today I received my finished Pretty Little Things box from Judy Odell, and there really aren't words to describe how much I love it! I took a bunch of pictures, though nothing can compare to seeing it in person:

Judy, when you read this, you are the BEST finisher ever, and I can't thank you enough for the beautiful job you did; this has immediately become one of my most prized possessions! Also, thank you to Nora Corbett, whose design "Pretty Little Things" looks like it was made for this piece.

And thanks to those who take the time to stop in and read my blog, especially those who leave such wonderful comments. The only thing better than stitching is being able to share it with others who understand the obsession!

Best colors ever!

I have stitched quite a few Mirabilia/Nora Corbett designs, and I have to say that Faerie Autumn Glow has to have my favorite combination of colors, yet! So rich and vibrant and happy--and I haven't even gotten to some of the brighter oranges in the lower dress:

I'm hoping to be able to work on her quite a bit this week, and then I'll be at the Door Co. stitching retreat this weekend, so hopefully she'll be done by early next week. Karen has sent the next model to be stitched, which is added incentive to finish this one up quickly!

I got a very exciting email from Judy Odell yesterday, saying that her busy season has passed and that she will be finishing my Pretty Little Things box in the next week or two. You can be sure that I will share her finish as soon as I have pictures!!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

A new start

This past Saturday I finished the model I've been working on, which means I have a bit of free time until the next model arrives. To make the most of it, I immediately started Nora Corbett's Faerie Autumn Glow, on a piece of SMF Moon Princess Belfast (my last piece, unfortunately!):

I'm hoping she'll be a fast stitch, so I can finish her before I need to start another model. Then I'll just have Faerie Summer Love to stitch in order to have all four seasonal fairies completed. Autumn is definitely my favorite in the set!

I thought I'd also post another picture of Snow Queen, this time with the two additional treasures attached (they arrived the day after my last post):

And here's a cute picture of Gracie, demonstrating the claim that "If it fits, it ships":

Now it's off to the post office to mail the model, then down to my craft room to stitch and watch season 2 of Person of Interest on DVD. Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

I was bad, but it was worth it!

For the past month I have been diligently stitching on a model, which I started the day after my first stitch group meeting last month. Karen didn't want me to take her piece to stitch group, so I pulled Nora Corbett's Snow Queen out of the Bucket o'WIPs, where it had been consigned four years (!) ago; my previous post showed a bit of progress that I made on it at last month's group.

This past Tuesday was the day of my stitch group, so I once again worked on Snow Queen. It felt so good to take a small break from the model that I decided to work on it for the rest of the day. Well, it turned out that by the end of the day, I had completed all of the stitching, and all of the backstitching except for the doves; after a bit of work on Wednesday morning, it looked like this:

And, as any bling-loving stitcher could guess, I couldn't stop there! It wouldn't be practical to try to do the beading at stitch group, so I HAD to take another day off from the model so I could bling this girl out. So, yesterday I pulled out a bunch of beads, using whichever ones I thought looked good, and I finished her (except for two treasures that are currently in the mail). She's so sparkly and pretty:

Four years in the Bucket, and it turns out she only needed three days to be completed! Here are a couple more pictures:

For those who are interested in this pattern, it is in the Cross Stitch & Needlework: Cross-Stitch Keepsake 2010 Calendar.

Now I will get back to work on the model, which I'm hoping to finish within a couple of weeks; hopefully before the Door County retreat in November!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy weekend!

Snow Queen got a little love

A couple of weeks ago I went up to The Stitching Bee for the first meeting of the stitch group I joined. I decided to take my Nora Corbett Snow Queen WIP with me, because the model I'm working on for Karen is a secret. I can't believe that I started this four years ago already! It seems like once a piece goes into the Bucket o'WIPs, it is doomed to stay there for all eternity!!

However, this little gem has now been rescued, and is small enough that I should be able to finish it this year, even if I only work on it a little bit at a time. Here is what it looked like upon its release from the Bucket:

And here it is after a bit of love:

Okay, so it's hard to see much of a difference, but it's there!

Speaking of The Bee, Kendra is having her annual Door County stitching retreat the weekend of November 8-10; this will be her 10th year, and promises to be loads of fun. This will be my third time attending, and this time I'm bringing my mom along, so it should be even more fun for me than usual. My mom and I laugh like loons when we get together, though I suppose we'll have to try to tone it down a bit so we don't scare anyone!

For now I am off to work on the model; hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

It's done, it's done!!

The stitching for my Pretty Little Things box is done! I finished it up last night, and this morning I am getting it ready to mail to Judy Odell, so she can work her finishing magic on it. The wait to get it back is going to be agony! ;)

Here are some pictures of this little beauty:

The cluster of crystals at the bottom right in the picture above is what I'm hoping Judy will be able to use for the handle on the box top.

In other stitchy news, I have now received the next model for Karen, so I will be starting that later today. Unfortunately, I won't be able to share anything about it, and there is a time rush on it, so I may not have much to blog about for the next month or so.

I did go to my stitch group up at The Stitching Bee yesterday; it meets the third Tuesday of every month, and yesterday was the first one. I decided to take my 4-year-old WIP of Nora Corbett's Snow Queen with me, and made some progress. I'll post some before and after pics in my next post; it'll be interesting to see how much I can get done on a piece that I work on once a month for a few hours.

Hope everyone is having a great stitchy week!

Four down, one to go

I have finished four of the five panels needed for my box, and have started to outline the fifth one. Here is where I left off as of last night:

I'm thinking that I will put my name and the year in the top left corner of the panel at the top left of the picture. I have emailed Judy to let her know that I'll be sending this her way in a week or two, so hopefully she'll be ready. ;)

I was hoping to have this done by now, but I didn't do much stitching last week, as I lost my sweet butterball Sabrina on Tuesday. Her kidneys had been going downhill, and she had stopped eating for several days, so it was time to let her go. Even though I only had her for two years (her original owner gave her up after 13 years!), I loved her as much as any of my furbabies. I will miss her terribly, but am still glad I took her in.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Enjoying the process

I've continued to make progress on my Pretty Little Things box, and am just loving this project! I think a lot of the enjoyment is coming from stitching something without a strict pattern; I'm having a lot of fun choosing which items to stitch and where to stitch them. I even created a pair of earrings, because none of the charted designs would fit in the space I had remaining.

Also, once the larger designs have been stitched, I'm going back and adding some bling to fill in some empty spaces. Here is an example of that:

I had some crystals and beads in the upper left corner, but they snagged on my Qsnaps when I moved them, so I'll go back and add them later.

So far, I have two panels completed, and I have two more outlined and ready to stitch. Then I just need one more of the larger panels; it's looking pretty likely that I'll get this done before I need to start another model for Karen. Here are some more progress pics:

Oh, and speaking of models for Karen, here is one that I stitched that has just been released, called "Crosses of the Kingdom":

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!