So frustrating!

I started Nora Corbett's Geranium on July 24th and as I was working on it I decided that I wanted to use size 8 instead of size 6 beads along the edge of her wing, so on the 31st I ordered some from an eBay seller, which was the only place I could find them in stock. The seller shipped them that same day, so I should have had them last week, but the USPS messed up (of course!) and the package wasn't scanned so I didn't know if I was going to receive it. The seller and I agreed that if nothing showed up by last Friday he would ship another package, so when the mail went and the beads didn't show up I checked the tracking (which still showed label printed, never accepted) and messaged him. Literally, right after I sent the message I checked my email and had a notice from the USPS that they had my package--talk about timing! It got from MA to WI with no tracking at all, then showed up at the PO two stops away and is out for delivery today. 

The frustrating part is that I would have been able to finish Geranium last Thursday if the beads had arrived when they were supposed to:

But at least she'll be done later today; she'll make my 117th finish of Nora's designs. 🌺

While I've been waiting, I worked up a little pre-stitch for Friendstitch next month, which will have a finishing segment for the piece:

I then pulled out Heart in Hand's Any Town Tiny Town, which I want to finish before I start another Tiny Town--the Qsnap is the perfect size for the towns, but I don't want to take this one off or it might disappear into the WIP bin! My plans were derailed a bit though, when Cecilia sent me her latest releases last week:

Since I can't/won't start the Quilted Tiny Town until Any Town is done, I decided to kit up and start the Wee Santa instead; my plan is to work on both as the mood strikes:

I'm using an old Silkweaver solo for the Santa, and it's obviously very different from the suggested fabric:

I think the little geese will look great on it, but only time will tell if the whole thing turns out like I envision--the worst that happens is I don't like it and end up stitching it again. 😅

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

My homework is done

Last week I finished up the last two designs for Cathy Habermann's finishing class, The Holidays Take Shape, so I am ready when September rolls around:

The individual pieces are Sweets for Santa:

A Vintage Rocker:

Plaid Tidings:

Light the Way:

The kit came with raw Belfast, which I used for the first three designs, but I stitched the candle on raw/gold Belfast, as I thought the shimmering metallic thread made it look like the candle was being seen through a frosty window. I am very excited to see how these will be finished, and hopeful that my skills are up to the task.

With those completed, my stitching time is once again open to whatever I feel like working on--yay! I was finally able to make a start on Nora Corbett's Geranium, on Polstitches Carnival Queen opal Lugana (which I thought was a perfect name for a SAL for the Queen City Retreat):

I had to scroll back through my blog to see when I last worked on a Nora Corbett/Mirabilia design, and found that it was back in January. The flow of colors in her designs is such a pleasure for me to stitch and I'm hoping no new models come in for a few weeks so I can work on this as much as I want.

My last post was a bit long, so I ended up not adding some progress photos of the Chatelaine mandala. Since I started from the outside edge, I thought it would be fun to document the progress on one corner as the layers started to grow:

Someday I would still like to go back and finish Mystery X (Secret Victorian Garden). I started it when it was a mystery SAL back around 2007, and then stitched on it again for a day or two in 2017, so maybe 2027 will be the year I pull it out again! 

I could have sworn I was further along than this... 😅

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

It took me a week to recover from the Chatelaine retreat...

...but it was totally worth it! It's hard to know where to start, so I guess I'll begin by saying that I was able to finish Little Tuscany Mandala with 90 minutes to spare on the last night and was able to ring the bell--woo hoo!! 🔔 Of course, about half of the attendees had already left, but that doesn't diminish my happiness at finishing in time, because I was uncertain all day whether I was going to make it. I completed all of the stitching right before the room closed on Friday night, so all I had left to do was add the beads on Saturday, but as the day wore on I really started to think that I wasn't going to have enough time; I ended up skipping lunch and dinner and just took a few small snack breaks throughout the day, and my efforts paid off--phew! Here it is in all of its sparkling glory:

The trip did not get off to a good start, as my non-stop flight from Appleton to Charlotte was cancelled four hours before it was supposed to depart, and they rescheduled me for the next day (the day the retreat started) with a stop in Chicago. I booked with a different airline (though paid almost double because it was so last minute) and left on Wednesday as planned, but a ground halt due to weather in Chicago and then one in Charlotte meant I arrived at my hotel at 2am Thursday morning; what should have been about a five-hour travel time ended up being about 12 hours--ugh! The trip home was better, though I got delayed in Chicago again, so now I'm kind of dreading the trip back to Charlotte in October...😟

However, the retreat itself made up for all of the travel hassles; Maggi and Amy, the organizers, do such an amazing job, and they only get better as they gain experience. This was the awesome goodie bag they put together:

If you know anything about ClaybyKim needle minders, you know how difficult they are to get as they sell out almost instantaneously as they get listed in Kim's shop; Maggi and Amy and their husbands spent several months snagging one or two each week so they could put one in every bag--a seriously impressive feat! I also love that the fabric the bags are made of has a mandala design, and even the zipper pulls look like little mandalas; such thoughtful little details that make them so special.

I had a great group at my table, some new to Chatelaines and some not (Kay has finished eight of the large mandalas, including Rainforest, which she completed at the retreat), and received some wonderful table gifts as well as some goodies from people who brought them for the whole group:

One of my table mates, Becky, made these sweet little needlebooks, using parts from various Chatelaine designs; I guess I might need to step up my gifting game!

There were a couple of games, one of which I won along with another attendee, so we split the prize of 10 pieces of fabric; these are the ones I picked:

Amy is also the owner of a dyeing company, Oak Crown Studios, and along with two pieces of the special retreat fabric that I had pre-ordered I also bought a couple of other pieces from her pop-up shop:

A couple of attendees came from the UK and one came from the Philippines, so it was truly an international retreat:

For the inaugural year they had about 50 spots, but next year they will be opening up more space and will host up to 144 people in July. The brag tables were already amazing, so I can't imagine how much more impressive they'll be with that many people bringing pieces to share! They also announced that the October 2026 retreat will focus on Teresa Wentzler designs. If you're ever looking for an awesome retreat to attend, I would highly recommend one by Queen City Stitch Retreat.

The day before I left for Charlotte I was able to pick up my pre-stitching kit for Cathy Habermann's finishing class at Primitive Gatherings in September, and so far I've completed two of the four ornaments, with the third in progress:

I'd like to have them all finished by the end of the week, then the plan is to start Nora Corbett's Geranium, as it's one of the SAL designs for the Mirabilia retreat in October:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Two more sleeps...

...until I leave for the Chatelaine retreat--yay! It starts Thursday afternoon, but I fly out on Wednesday so if any travel snags arise I have plenty of time to deal with them. I've already been thinking about what I need to pack, and I'll probably pull my suitcase out tomorrow and get a start on it. 

I was hoping to at least have all of the specialty stitches on Little Tuscany Mandala complete before I leave, but I'm not quite sure I can get them done in the next couple of days. It would be really nice to just have the beading left to do at the retreat, because with the room being open for a total of 38 hours, I'm pretty sure I could get this done! Here is where I am as of last night:

I need to fill in satin stitches for the sky above the villas, and the villas have some back stitching, as well as back stitched gates in front of them. That is the part I've been putting off, because the villas are placed on the charts in such a way that the 5 and 10 count darkened grid lines cover parts of the back stitches, making it very difficult to follow all of the lines. I asked about the problem in the Chatelaine support group on FB, and luckily someone else had encountered the same problem on a different design; she suggested zooming in on the mockup photo on the Chatelaine site, and that looks like it's going to be an immense help.

I had to laugh at myself this past weekend, because I was looking through my Chatelaine kits that I bought many years ago and found two that I don't even remember buying! That made me go through my binders looking for the charts (I used to print the charts as I got them, for quite a few of the designs), but I hadn't printed them out. I started to get worried that I would have to buy them again because one of my laptops died about 10 years ago, before I could back anything up, and I thought they were probably lost. My last hope was that I had put them on a thumb drive, so I went through the cubbies in my craft room and found five drives, two of which were labelled and didn't have Chatelaine charts on them. Of the remaining three, the first one I opened actually had the charts--yay for me! That drive is now labelled as well... 😅

I did some thinking about table gifts for this retreat, and settled on a few skeins of DMC Color Variations, a skein of Caron Waterlilies, a Star De-Tailor (love this for when the thread is too short to use a needle but you only need one or two more stitches from it) and a needle minder. Hopefully, these are things that will be useful, and they don't take up a lot of space:

I've been grieving for my mom quite a bit again lately, after having a pretty good spell after my trip to Tulsa in April. This time last year is when we found out she had cancer, then she fell and broke her hip and had surgery, so this is when things really started to go bad. It's been on my mind a lot, so I'm hoping this trip will get me out of my head for a while again and provide another mental reset. 

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Coming down to the wire

I was feeling pretty good about being able to finish my Chatelaine before the retreat in just over two weeks, but then I was asked to stitch the larger Friendstitch model again (they are offering two colorways, one more muted and one brighter) and now I'm leaning towards thinking I won't get it done. But maybe I'll be able to finish it at the retreat, which would also be kind of cool, so it's all good. After my last post I did decide to move into the center and do the cross stitches there, then I started the back stitching and specialty stitches, moving from the center outwards:

I received my three latest Tiny Towns from Faye Riggsbee a couple of weeks ago, and she did an amazing job as always:

In non-stitchy news, I woke up to this site outside my bedroom window about a week ago:

She was guarding her baby, who was nestled in a little nook off of my friend's patio next door:

They were there all night, then left around 1pm--I'm sure once the neighborhood woke up and everyone let their dogs out into their yards the mama realized it wasn't the best place to bed her fawn down. It was pretty awesome to see her so close, though.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!