Hardly any stitching

In the past couple of weeks I have been doing some charting work, so my stitching time has really suffered. The only thing I worked on was Quilting A-Bee-Cs, and so far I only have one color from part 3 finished:

I've been charting a couple of things; the first was a hand drawn chart by Nora Corbett that she gifted to her Patreon subscribers:

Nora suggested that "hand" could be replaced with the stitcher's name, so I decided to do that (luckily the capital M had already been charted!), and I changed the single blue flower to pink because I just couldn't get past one flower in a different color:

Then, since I was already working with the charting software, I decided to test out an idea I've been pondering for a while. I've always loved the skirt portion of Lavender & Lace's Angel of Love (which was actually designed by Nora for her mother's company), but I've never really liked the top portion of the design. I was wondering if the top of Mirabilia's Angel of the New Dawn would look good with the Angel of Love skirt, so for the past several days I've been working on a mashup of the two. I still need to do some tweaking of the chart, and I'll be converting the beads from round to cylindrical, but I think I'll be able to make it work. Here are the two designs:

And here's a rough draft of the mashup:

I'll probably start working on it sometime after the retreat, which I leave for next Wednesday. Right now I'm starting to get everything together for the trip, and I'm probably not going to get much stitching done in the next week. It's been quite a while since I worked on a Mirabilia so I wasn't sure what stitching to take; I went through my WIP bin and found Silver Moon Tea, which was last worked on about 10 years ago--at a retreat, funnily enough! This is the last photo I found of it in my blog:

I might have done a bit more on it than this; if I did, I'll take a photo before the retreat so I can see how much progress I make. I like this one because it's fairly small in size, so I can take moderately sized Qsnaps, and it won't take a lot of room to work on at a shared table. There is also going to be a chart by Nora handed out, so I'm taking a few fabrics in case I decide to work on that instead, but it's hard to pick a fabric without knowing what the design looks like!

I'm also expecting Hands on Design's final Gather Round kit to arrive later this week; it turns out Cathy did surprise us (or me, anyway) by making it "Gather Pinecones" instead of "Gather Snowflakes". I think it might be my new favorite of the set:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Appleton/Green Bay Tiny Town is done

I finished my personalized Heart in Hand Any Town Tiny Town last week, and while my buildings would probably have fit better in a Medium Town, I am pretty happy with the result:

Here are the three buildings I replicated:

I have three Tiny Towns completed now that I want to send to my finisher, but unfortunately, I've already missed the cut off to have them done this year. By the time she'll be ready to take them I'll have at least one more town done (Harvest Tiny Town), and possibly more if Cecilia releases another one in a few months. Harvest will be my ninth; I'm glad I started these fairly soon after the second (or third?) one was released so I can keep up with them as they are released--such a fun series!

I decided to start on part 3 of Quilting A-Bee-Cs instead of Owlvira's house, since part 4 should be available at 123Stitch in two or three weeks; I don't want to get too far behind on a fairly large design and then have it end up in the WIP bin for years. I haven't made a lot of progress since I spent quite a bit of the weekend cleaning, but I'm hoping to get a lot done this week:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Autumn would be my favorite season...

...if it weren't followed by winter! I'm always a bit sad this time of year, knowing that we're heading for shorter days and colder temps; February is the shortest month of the year but I'm already dreading how long it seems to take to make it through to March. Not that March is noticeably better, but at least there's the tantalizing possibility of that first little peek of spring, and knowing that soon everything will be turning green and there'll be beautiful weather ahead for months to come.

We're actually having a mini heat wave here for a few days, hitting around 90F during the warmest part of the day, but we recently had some pretty cool days so I made use of them by getting most of the fall clean-up yard work done already. I'll probably do a bit more trimming on some of the bushes and trees, but it's nice to have the bulk of the work finished this early, especially since I'll be heading to North Carolina one month from today for a Mirabilia retreat that Nora Corbett will be attending. It's getting close enough now that I need to start figuring out how to pack so that I can just take a carry-on bag, and my flights have already been changed a couple of times so when it gets a bit closer I'll have to figure out if I need to change anything with those. I wish it was close enough to drive, but I know I would go crazy being in a car for that long!

I haven't been doing a lot of stitching because I've been busy outside, but I did finish part 2 or Erica Michaels' Quilting A-Bee-Cs:

Part 3 has arrived, but I'm not sure when I'll get to it at this point. I was going to work on it after I finished my Any Town Tiny Town, but Just Nan released another amazing 3D house design that I've already kitted up and that I'm excited to start:

The main part of the house is stitched together on one piece of fabric in a cross shape, then sewn together. The chart has every side being stitched in the same orientation on the fabric, but that means when it is assembled some of the sides will have the top legs of the stitches going in a different direction than some of the other sides. I think when I stitch it, I'll probably turn it as needed to make sure all of the sides have the stitches going the same way when assembled (since I'm just weird that way!).

First, I need to finish my Any Town, which I should be able to do tonight or tomorrow; I need to finish the flower shop, add a tree next to it and then go back and add some French knots and buttons:

I was concerned that the buildings I designed would be too big and they are, but I couldn't really get them any smaller and still make them look like the originals so I'm just not going to worry about it! Someday I'll probably stitch the town as charted, though probably not for a while since I still have Harvest Tiny Town to get to.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!