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!