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!