2011 stitching plan...

It seems that everywhere I look on the stitching blogs people have joined in on either the Crazy January Challenge (where you start 15 brand new projects during the first 15 days of January), or the Up for a Challenge (where you list 15 of your various wips and finish those - not sure if you are to finish them in January or through out the rest of the year).

Since I have enough problems of my own with my startitis, and another 15 new starts would be way too much for me, and at the same time, I know I wouldn't be able to list and keep to the list of 15 wips without starting something new.. so I think I 'll just sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else's progress on these Challenges.

I will however outline somesort of stitching plan that I hope to follow this year...

1. I love stitched ornaments (not just Christmas ones) so I thought I would try and stitch at least one a month

2. I have a ton of fantastic freebies just waiting to be stitched, so I will try and squeeze one a month of these as well.

3. Sunday SAL with Barbi -this is going to continue, we're working on Molly by Carriage House Samplings right now, but once she is done, we are moving on to one of the other three girls left in the series, until all 4 are stitched.

4. I have several wips that I would like to either finish or at least make some good progress on this year - I've added their pictures below. Fairy Moon - Mirabila, My Stitching Treasures - Jeanette Douglas, Madonna Dolorosa - Kustom Krafts/Solaria, Heiloom Lace Canvas - SJ Designs, and one more not pictured - Pennsylvania German Alphabet - Goode Huswife (picture in my previous post)

5. I also have at least 3 UFO's (unfinished objects) that haven't seen the light of day in years, let alone have a stitch added to them, that I would like to make a decision about to either finish them or get rid of them... One is my Last Supper, the second is a baby sampler I started years ago, and the last one is ABCD Rouge by Anagram Diffusion.

6. Start whatever new project catches my fancy.

7. After January is over, try to only stitch from stash. I'm giving myself a month grace time for stash shopping. I think out of the entire plan this one will be the hardest to stick to, but I'll give it a shot.

Well see how well I keep on my plan...I'll keep you all updated...

stitching update...

Yes I have one of those as well, though this one will have to be pictureles...

I've been slowly (and I mean really slowly) plugging along on my Fairy Moon, and I am happy to report that the day before I arrived home, my long lost fabric from Silkweaver's arrived safe and sound, and as beautiful as ever.

That means that as of today, our Sunday SAL with Barbi is a go! We are stitching the 4 girls by Carriage House Samplings, and are starting with Molly. Its funny, as we both picked the same fabric from Silkweaver's to stitch them on... 32ct jobelan in Goldspinner.

I'm really looking forward to putting in a few stitches on Molly tonight, and I promise that I will update you all with my, more than likely meager progress as well as a picture of Fairly Moon as soon as possible.

Till then happy stitching...

a little more dancing...

I have two more quick happy dances with my ornaments from last night. I started working on the red set, and have the tree and candy cane done and will work on the partridge/bird one tonight... The red thread I'm using is GAST in Claret.

Here are close ups of the two separately, and then the third picture, is as you can see all of them so far. Once the 6th one is done, I'll start working on getting them finished up into actual ornament form.

SAL is coming along...

Here is my update from yesterday's stitching session on my LHN Neighbourhood

I really wanted to get that bottom house done, but it wasn't meant to be!!! Maybe next week? I'll keep my fingers crossed...

stitching progress...

I have some stitching to show... no happy dances, but I do have some progress!

First off, my Drawn Thread - Morning Glory. This is where I stopped as of Friday evening. I'm getting close to a happy dance with this one, maybe this week!

Next up is my Sunday SAL with Barbi. After weeks of not touching it, I was finally able to put some stitches into it. It was really nice to be able to get back to this one. However I am still lagging behind, and have major catching up to do! If you'll notice, I'm not quite finished the red house... I have two or three rows left on the roof, but I ran out of thread! I even looked in my extras and of course I don't have the colour I need. So a trip to Michael's is in order however that won't be till the weekend...

And last but not least, as of Oct 29th, these are all the names that have been entered in my giveaway... I have since added more - I just didn't take another picture. Don't forget to enter, as tomorrow midnight is the deadline (midnight Nov 3rd) Good luck to everyone!

Just a quick ps... please excuse the dark quality of the pictures, I tend to take most of my pictures late at night when I finish my stitching session... and sometimes the flash as well as trying to fix it in photoshop just doesn't help fix my wonderful photography skills!

its october!!!

Whoo hoo! My favourite month is here! I love the fall, I love thanksgiving, and I love halloween! All of these are all wrapped up in this fantastic month! (not to mention my birthday month as well)

I'm going to be doing several giveaways this month, so please keep an eye out for them. They are open to everyone, and instructions/directions etc will be posted shortly for them. Though the giveaways will have a mainly stitching theme, those who read my blog but don't stitch are more than welcome to enter as well.


I am also happy to announce on a stitching note, that my JCS Ornament issue finally arrived yesterday! I've gone through it a couple of times already, and will admit that I don't like the new format, I hope it goes back to the way they did it in past years. Other than that small inconvience I did find several (okay 20+) ornaments that I could see myself eventually stitching.

Also in stitching news, have you all seen the new halloween release by Blackbird Designs - Midnight Watch??? This is a definite must have for me. I just love it! Its had fall colours, a black cat and the alphabet!! What more could a girl ask for?


I've decided I will be getting this as a birthday gift for myself. Its already sitting in my cart at two ONS' - I just have to decide which one to actually order from... the local one, which would be to support our "local LNS" or from the USA where it works out to be cheaper even with the exchange. (okay not by much but still cheaper) Decisions, decisions!

Till next time, happy stitching and enjoy October! Watch for the giveaways!!!

new moon and wips

Well I'm a little late in showing off my totally useless SAL progress for this month, since the new moon was on Saturday the 22nd... but here goes!

My jar seems to be full right now, but that is before squishing. A lot more thread and stuff will fit in once I squish it down.

I can also finally say that I stitched! I stitched a bit on Saturday and a little Sunday and some even on Monday! It was so nice to finally stitch again! That was a very long week and half that I didn't get a chance to sit down with my needle and thread. I made a little progress on my BBD's Berry Time, as well as a little on the LHN Sunday SAL with Barbi.

and yes, before anyone says anything, my grass is the wrong colour... it is supposed to be the darker green, like the flower's leaves, but I'm not sure how I messed up the greens and it is now the lighter one, and it will stay the lighter one... not worth frogging all of that

game and giveaway

On one of the Hungarian blogs I read, Rita is having a game/giveaway. Please check her blog out if you want to play.

I'm not sure if these entries will count, so to be safe I am stitching something new. However, I did stumble onto these patterns a few years ago, and the link was one of my favourite for Hungarian folk motifs (one of my weaknesses and true loves - I love anything relating to Hungarian folk culture). I was very sad when the link no longer worked, and tried to search the web to find them again. Thanks to Rita, I now have the new link to some of my favourite patterns! So thank you for that!

I originally stitched myself a pillow (still needs to be made into one) way back in 2005 using one of the motifs from the first link in Rita's blog. If I remember correctly, I used DMC 820 - four strands on 20ct joblean for the my pillow.

The following year, in 2006 I was asked to stitch the group gifts for our Western Canadian Hungarian Folk Festival (WCHFF). By then the link for these patterns I had no longer worked, so I had to use my pillow's pattern to count off of.

I stitched 17 banners in total - I managed only 15 in time for the festival, the two hosting groups recieved theirs after the fact. As well as four little pillows as extra gifts for the guest instructors which I made at the festival itself. For these I also used DMC 820, but this time only two strands on an unknown count of evenweave fabric that one of the dancers brought back from the flea market in Budapest, Hungary. It wasn't easy to stitch on, but once I got the first few stitches in I was good to go.

Here are some photos of the banners: 1. the 15 stitched but not finished into their final shape, 2. what the actual banners looked like (the shape is the shape of our province), 3. the little pillows

dancing, orts and stash

Where to start... let's start with the dancing! That is always fun!

I finished the next letter in my alphabet blocks, here is "n", as well as a "group" shot of some of the blocks around it.

Next up, its my progress report for the totally useless SAL - here is my ort jar so far:

And now for the stash... I picked up three Blackbird Designs charts and the reason I got them now and not later, as I'm supposed to is these charts have a tendancy to go out of print and then very difficult to find if you can find them at all. Two of the ones I got were actually out of print already but I managed to find them.

I got: BBD My Heart is True

BBD Thank You Sara Tobias - which I manged to find before they reprinted, so its not really out of print anymore

And last but not least BBD Blessing Be Thine - which I think is my favourite out of them

When I first saw this on Yuko's blog, I was in love and started my search, but found out very quickly that it was out of print. So I sort of gave up and put it out of my mind. Then suddenly I saw on Miss Jane's blog, that she had just ordered it from a little store called Country Sampler. So I quickly went to their site and ordered it for myself!

I'm not starting any of them just yet, I have too many on the go as it is... though I will admit it is difficult not to start anything new - and I don't mean just out of these three new purchases. I'm feeling the itch of startitis happening and that isn't a good thing. That is what got me into the trouble I'm in as is!

a new look and some stitching

I thought I would try something a little different with my blog again... hope you like it. I'm still getting used to it, though I know its not a big change, I do prefer the three column templates better. However, this will be good for the next little while.


Onto stitching... I didn't get a lot of stitching done on the weekend, so I don't have a lot of progress to show on the SAL but here it is... I am enjoying this and enjoying the colours. I hope one of these Sunday's I'll have more time to actually sit down and work on it!

For the rest of my time last week, I kept on going with the canvas project, so here is where I am on that one. I still have quite a way to go before its finished, but I'm enjoying working on it right now. Here is a picture of the whole thing, and you can see how much I've already filled in and how much I still need to do before even starting the backstitching parts.

Since I've reached a good stopping point, I'm going to put this aside for a couple of days and go back to my alphabet blocks as those sort of have a deadline (hopefully Christmas) that needs to be met. As it is I'm only half way through the letters but I still need to make a few "filled" in squares as well.

We've also had guests here since last Monday, and they leave tomorrow. Its been fun and nice to have them here, it will also be good when they are gone. The house can go back to normal, and I won't have mountains of dishes to do (they all like to cook and all like to use lots of dishes! - since I don't cook, I'm usually on clean up duty ) Our poor kitty has also gone into hiding (she doesn't like people very much) since they've been here and I hardly get to see her!

Anyways, that is it for now, I'm heading back to stitch...

Stitch, two, three

I know I said I was going to switch projects on either Sunday or Monday, but I sort of kept going... not sure why, but I did and here is my progress on AimG so far:

Also the birthday package that I sent out to Evi, has arrived and am happy to report she liked it too! I again didn't take very good pictures of the whole package, so she sent me a couple, but didn't take a picture of the back of the stitching, so I've included that as well.

Right now I'm working on a small bunny freebie for myself for Easter, hopefully I will have it finished in time, and then I really should stitch up a couple of SAR's that have been patiently waiting their turns... after that it's back to the grind with the alphabet blocks! So that is my stitching plan for the next little while, we'll see how well I actually stick to it!

spring came in with a bang! (picture heavy)

Well I have to admit, it is true that where I live, you just never know what to expect with the weather... Last week we had great weather, plus temperatures, sunshine etc. though not all the snow was melted, at least all the driveways, roads (for the most part) and sidewalks were all clear, as well as most of the lawns in places. Even yesterday we had wonderful weather, +13C and sunshine... then the weather warning came... a winter snow storm was headed our way and overnight our neighbourhood turned back into a winter wonderland:

This is what we woke up to this morning, as you can see the tape measures shows 8 inches (20 cm) of freshly fallen snow:

Then after brunch hubby and I decided to tackle it and shovel the driveway... as anyone who has been to our house knows, we have a large driveway, so we only did about 1/2 as well as the sidewalk and a path on the other side by the parked jeep and truck. I will admit, I was/am tired from the shoveling... it looks fluffy enough but once you dig into it, its heavy and wet, but oh so pretty! The sun was out and as you can tell the snow was already melting off the jeep.

Sorry I haven't been around lately, I've been reading blogs, just not posting. I sort of lost my stitching mojo as well as my blogging and emailing mojo but it seems that they are are back! So great big aplogies to those who I owe emails to, I haven't forgotten you, and I've been thinking about you alot. Emails will be on their way soon!

I have been stitching but not alot, so the birthday gifts and the swap gift that I needed to get done have been very slow going. But they are done! I can't show them all to you yet, as they haven't yet reached their desitinations, but once they do I will show you. Here are a couple of things I can show, as one has been recieved, and I know my nieces don't read my blog.

This one is for one of my friends who's birthday was back in February, but as is usual for me, she got the gift a little belated...

and then the whole package together

Here is what I made my nieces. The same little pincushion/ornament as above, just different beads around the edges. I still need to get their packages together and mail them off. I know it won't get there in time for one nieces' birthday but if it gets to them before the second birthday then all will be good. Its going to be strange this year, as we are normally in Hungary with them celebrating. This year due to many factors, we've decided to postpone our trip and hopefully go in the summer time.

I also have a little happy dance to share, in that I've finished off another one of the letters in my alphabet blocks. I finished the letter "i" and I'm already half way through the letter "j", so I should have another little dance in a couple of days.

And last but not least a little freebie to share from Kissy-Cross's blog A little cup of something to keep us warm with all that snow outside.

click picture for the pattern