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!