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!