Blooming Tiny Town is here!

I was very excited to receive this chart last Friday and immediately went through my stash looking for the threads; I was missing four colors so Saturday I took a trip to my LNS to get them. In a marvelous bit of serendipity I was looking through the fabrics just for fun and found a piece of fabric in just the color I was thinking of using and in the right count (40ct) and size (and it's an odd size--about 6" x 15"):

 So yesterday I made a start and got the first tiny house done:

There's now a new FB group for HIH designs which just opened this morning (and already has over 500 members!), so now there's a place to share my progress there. I'll also just mention that my Gizmo needle minder came from a group called Minifig Minders on FB. Courtney converts Lego minifigures into minders, and they are so cute! I'm trying to be good and not go crazy, but I do have four that just make me smile:

Still keeping up with my current SALs, starting with part 5 of Cecilia Votta's seasonal design:

I'm thinking there's a girl on a swing coming in the next part (I see a leg and a foot), though I could be completely wrong--part of the fun of a mystery SAL!

Dragon's Blood Mandala Mystery has 10 of 25 parts completed now:

I started with three skeins of Waterlilies and I've now used one of them up; this means parts 16-25 will take another full skein (since it's a mandala) and I'm sincerely hoping parts 11-15 don't take more than one or I might run into dye lot problems if I have to add another skein. Fingers crossed the middle isn't too "floss intense"...

And the last one is The Rooky Wood, which has five of the 20 parts left to go:

I'm a bit torn on this one right now because the chart calls for the word "for" to come after "makes wing", but the original wording is "makes wing to" so I'm thinking I might change it. I need to see a bit more though, to decide on spacing; maybe seeing the next part will help me decide.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Thank you for the kind thoughts

Thanks to all for the kind words about my sweet Gracie; she was an important part of my life for more than 13 years so it's nice to be able to share with others who understand how difficult her loss is. I'll always think of her when I see Cats in the Rain, which I plan to take to the framer in the next week or two. I drew a winner for the chart this morning:

Leonore, please send me your address and I will get this in the mail this week; my email is rrowe @ new.rr.com (remove spaces). I hope you enjoy stitching this adorable design as much as I did.

I'm slowly getting back up to speed on model stitching but I did take a bit of time to catch up on The Rooky Woods SAL, which had part 14 of 20 released last Thursday:

Only 6 more parts to go and it looks like the quote will make up the majority of the rest of it, and maybe a border along the bottom.

Last Friday I received an email from Faye Riggsbee that my Tiny Town drums are finished and ready to come home:

I bought some JABCO pins to add to these when they arrive; I'm looking forward to seeing them in person and adding the finishing touch. Cecilia posted a picture on FB of the next one in the series called Blooming Tiny Town, which is supposed to be released late this month; Faye said that she was finishing the drum for the cover photo while she worked on mine. I think this might end up being my new favorite:

The weather here is still not very spring-like, but at least I can enjoy stitching spring.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!