Enjoying all the water birds while I work on Seaside Tiny Town

The weather in Wisconsin has finally gotten really nice and I've been enjoying walking every day; I've started to carry my phone with me because there is a pond along my route that has a lot of birds, and after I missed getting a photo of a snowy egret I decided I'd better be more prepared in future. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the egret again, but I've seen more pelicans a few times:

I've seen one Great Blue Heron:

Ducks and Canadian geese with their babies:

There's also a hawk right past the pond:

And I saw some Sandhill cranes a couple of months ago in a different location:

We've lived here for more than 20 years now, and this is the first I'm seeing some of these birds; there are newer water retention ponds in the area now, so that must be what is attracting some of them. I really look forward to getting to the pond every morning to see which birds are hanging around that day.

The weather has been so nice that yesterday I sat on our patio and stitched for a few hours and was able to almost finish the Seaside frill (which has an egret!) that I'm adding to the Seaside Tiny Town:

I've haven't felt much urge to stitch lately, so this Tiny Town is taking longer to finish than I thought it would; I'm hoping to get it done by the end of this week. Once it's finished, I'll probably start on one of the next two Polar Plunge charts which finally arrived this past Saturday:

I'm still waiting for the second part of Quilting A-Bee-Cs by Erica Michaels to arrive at 123Stitch so I can get it ordered, and I'll probably work on that after the Polar Plunge designs are stitched.

I also took the plunge into needlepoint and bought a painted canvas after I saw this photo on Facebook:

It's going to require some time to decide what threads to use and figure out how the stitching works so I don't know when I'll actually start this, but I just thought it was such a beautiful design that I had to get it!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Saw some pelicans (I think!)...

...so it must be time to start Seaside Tiny Town! Honestly, the timing of this was so fun; I went for a walk this morning and saw a group of pelicans (I think that's what they were, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) swimming and feeding:

Then the charts arrived in the mail this afternoon:

I'm going to pull the threads tonight (I know I have at least some of them) and pick a fabric, then I'll be ready to start it either tonight or tomorrow. First, I want to do about 20 stitches on Black'd Skie to finish up the border of the fifth square:

I finished the fourth square last week, and am hoping to get back to this within the next couple of months:

This past Saturday I went to a local stitch group for the first time and had a really nice time meeting and chatting with the five other stitchers who attended. I wasn't sure what the room set up would be, so I didn't want to take Black'd Skie, which is pretty large; instead, I took a piece that I had just barely started a few months ago:

The group will meet again in June, so I'll probably take this piece again since it's an easy one to work on while chatting (though I did have to frog a bit because a couple of those bricks are six stitches long instead of five like the majority of them were!).

Yesterday I pulled up Cathy's finishing video for the Polar Plunge series and got the matboard and batting cut for all six ornaments:

That's all of the preparation I can do for these now until they are all stitched. I finally ordered the next two Sunday night, but they probably won't ship for about a week--that gives me just enough time to get the Seaside Tiny Town done before they get here.

I'm a bit surprised that I got quite a few crafty things done last week, since I finally spent a couple of days cleaning out the garage. It only took three trips to the dump this time, instead of the four it took for the basement, and now I even like taking the kitchen garbage out to the bin because it looks so nice out there. :D

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Gather Round club halfway done

Last Monday morning I finished the stitching on HOD's Gather Butterflies and then did the final finishing that afternoon, so two of the four seasons are now fully complete:

I'm looking forward to seeing what gets gathered in autumn; leaves or pumpkins are probably two likely choices, but I'm thinking Cathy will do something different--will hopefully find out in June!

The next two HOD Polar Plunge charts should be in shops soon; while I wait to order them, I decided to get started on the finishing for them. I painted and sealed the ornament boards and picked up a big piece of matboard that I'll start cutting to shape this week. I decided not to cover the boards with scrapbooking paper, as I like the look of them plain like this:

While I wait for the new Tiny Town, Polar Plunge and Quilting A-Bee-Cs charts to arrive in shops I decided to pull out Primitive Needle's Black'd Skie. I looked back in my blog and saw that I last worked on this in December 2021, so I guess it was time to get it back out and finish at least one more square!

I should be able to finish square four today, then I might start on square five so I can stitch on it in between working on the Polar Plunge finishing preparations. 

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Almost made it

I was hoping to have all three of the Hands on Design Gather Butterflies pieces stitched by the end of the weekend, but as I predicted I wasn't quite able to make it. I came pretty close though (and my inner 5-year-old had a gleeful laugh at this photo):

I'll have the stitching done later this morning, and I think I might try to do the finishing this afternoon so I can get a start on some housework tomorrow. It's funny that I'll have the spring and summer sets of designs done, since apparently we're still in the midst of winter here:

My bleeding heart was just starting to flower, so I'm going to be pretty bummed if this kills off the blossoms:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week (and better weather than I do)!