April 17/07

THUD!.....
That is the sound of me falling off the 50 challenge band wagon. There was a cross stitch magazine on the rack at work that I just had to have, the resistance was low and here I am. Oh well, some of the stash was reduced and I now also have a better handle on just what is stashed on my shelves. Good luck to the rest of you who are still hanging in.

March 1/07

Ok. So it has been a while since I have posted some new pics. The digital camera was at my Mom's house so I could not post anything that I have been working on. These towels were completed about 3 weeks ago. The pattern comes from a Leisure Arts leaflet called "More Christmas Fingertips" and they are stitched on towels from a shop in Norway called Christiana GlasMagasinet. The towels are regular kitchen towels, but there is a bit that is a lovely evenweave of something like 32 count. I bought a bagful of them because they were only 24.50KR (about $4-5 Canadian).

Once the towels were completed, I moved onto this pattern that I found on the Christmas ornie SAL. I decided to play around with different whites and sparkly threads to see what effects I could come up with. They are stitched on light blue 14 ct. Fiddlers Cloth. This first one photographs the best. I stitched it with DMC white:

The second one was stitched with one thread each of B5200 and E5200. The contrast between the fabric and the threads is not all that great so it it difficult to see in the photo:

The third one is done with one thread each of DMC white and a DMC silver metallic that was flaoting around in my thread box. Unfortunately, I ran out of the silver and had to finish with a DMC antique silver. The results are probably not so visible in this photo, but I am not excited about how this one finished up.

Here is my WIP of the moment. I have started a very ambitious project of cross stitching a Christmas stocking for every member of my immediate family (6 people!). It has been fun hunting down patterns and kits that suit each person, but now the real work begins.....for the next few years!

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Projects 33-37.

Feb 8/07

These cute little snowmen are from "The Cross Stitcher" December 2004. Four of them are stitched on 14 count cornflower blue Aida and 2 are stitched on 14 count Delft blue Aida. I did not have enough fabric to stitch them all on one and the intention is to give them away as Christmas gifts so I was okay with them not all being on the same colour. The only things I changed are the colour of the berries on the wreath which were supposed to be lemon yellow (DMC 307), but that did not appeal to me so I switched them to DMC E321 and I added snowflakes to all of them. The original pattern only called for the snowflake to be stitched in DMC 932 on the snowman in the middle of the top row, but it snowed here last weekend while I was backstitching these cuties and I decided to stitch snowflakes on all of them with DMC E3747 to give the snowflakes some shine.

There is a funny back story to this set of ornaments. Two weeks ago, I was almost done all of the cross stitching when I ran out of one of the colours and could not figure out a way to substitute anything on hand without ruining the final snowman. Being sick with a sinusitis infection and bronchitis at the same time and having to work overtime because all 3 of us pharmacists at the shop were sick, I could not find the time or the energy to drive even a half hour away to pick up the floss. My youngest (6 foot 2, 280 lbs) brother lives a few blocks away from my LNS so I asked him to go pick up the floss and bring it out to Mom's for Sunday dinner. He called me from the store saying that the colour did not exist (he had written down 392 instead of 932) and I could hear the 2 shopowners twittering in the background so I figure that it is a rare occasion to see a hockey bruiser in the shop! :-) Then, he proceeded to forget two weeks in a row to bring it out to Mom's so I went to work on the previously posted project until I picked up the floss from his apartment last night when I was in the city for my Spanish class. The upside is that I got the floss for free because he felt like such a dork for forgetting it twice when he is usually quite conscientious when it comes to his older sister!

Projects #27-32/50

Oh yeah. I forgot that I must admit a mea culpa about the challenge. In my defence, I did hold out until I was at least half way through the challenge and I have gone a whole 4 months without buying ANY patterns. Well, my friend and moneysucker eBay had Teresa Wentzler's Four Seasons Fairies and I am a sucker for TW designs so somehow the bid button was clicked and the pattern just fell into my mailbox. Please let me be strong enough to regroup and not falter again!

Feb 5/07

As I was going through my boxes and baskets of patterns this past weekend, I came across this one that I purchased in a shop in Robinvale, VIC, Australia. The company is called Red Brolly and the pattern is "Christmas" designed by Bronwyn Hayes. It is stitched on a piece of muslin that I found in my fabric stash. The whole thing took about 7 hours to trace and stitch, mostly because my concentration on cross-stitching has made my embroidery stitching skills a bit rusty!

Project #26/50.

Jan 24/07

The colour is very off in these bear photos! They are stitched on a Charles Craft (very white!) afghan for the newborn baby of a co-worker. I found the bears on http://www.dmc-usa.com/. The bows are pink and blue because I did not know the sex of the baby when I started stitching this! I actually finished this project about 4-5 days ago, but it has taken me a few days to find the time to post the photos.

This is the completed afghan about 20 minutes before the mom and baby showed up to my house for the work baby shower. The bear in the middle is actually on a bib that I stitched ages ago!

The afghan makes project # 25/50.

Jan 19/07

These ornaments were inspired by a photo I saw in the 2003 BHG special publication called "Cross Stitch Christmas". I say inspired because they were in the shopping section so I had to design them myself. I used 14 count red Aida, a silvery DMC floss (I lost the tag ages ago), a red, white and silver ribbon from Michaels and some plain white buttons. The words: faith, hope, glory, love, peace and joy were designed using a lettering section in another BHG publication.

So, that makes projects #19-24 out of 50.

Jan 5/07

Here are a couple of recent finishes since the New Year. Sorry for the lateness, but I have to borrow a digital camera to get the images and then post them!

My apologies. I can not find the pattern for this one at the moment to cite its source, but I can tell you that it is stitched on 28 count Monaco and that I used buttons that have collected in my notions box!

"Maple Leaves", a kit from Foxberry Cottage crafts.

(Edited to add that this makes projects # 17 and 18 out of 50.)

Dec 20/06

Whoo! I took a deep breath and told my boss about my school plans. I really dreaded telling him because I did not want him to feel disappointed in me for leaving the pharmacy in the relatively near future. What a relief to hear him say that he was really happy for me that I was excited about this undertaking and he thought that I would be excellent at International Development type stuff. He is open to my changing and scaling back my work schedule as needed to accommodate my school schedule, if necessary. I had wanted to wait until after Christmas to talk with him about it because he did not need that headache, but I had a list of things to run by him this afternoon so I added that onto the list. He appreciated me telling him now so that he would have time to digest the news!

Tomorrow night is the El Salvador work crew Christmas party! It will be great to hang out with the old bucket mates again! I am meeting with the executive of my Rotary club on Jan 8/07 to chit chat about sponsorship of more houses in ES and how to finance the project. Sometimes, I feel like I am caught in a vortex of activity when I look at all of the projects I am into and other times, I realize that I would not be happy if I was not volunteering for several things at the same time!

Tonight, I am finishing off 6 Christmas cards so I may be back later to post the pictures of my stitching!

Updated to add:

Projects 11-16/50.

Dec 8/06

I was reading through another stitcher's blog and I realized that I should declare my one exemption for the 50 Project Challenge. I have decided to stitch Christmas stockings for my immediate family to replace the ratty ones we are still using. My exemption is any Christmas stocking pattern that I think will be loved and cherished by my family members. (Just thought that I would declare that before I paid for the 2 I have won on eBay!).