April 21/10

Not the greatest of photos, but you can see the progress being made on the Jelly bean houses of St John's:

I have almost completed the two strand cross stitches, but as you can see by the weird gap on the bottom that I have run out of yet another colour. That makes three in this kit so far. Fortunately, I have lots of this particular colour in my stash so yet again, not a big deal, but this floss number will be added to my email feedback when I am done with this kit.

And just for fun, introducing Oliver:

I am getting another cat this week, but he is not the one. This little guy lives next door and is really cute and friendly. I leave my patio door open during the day because otherwise I would be getting tendonitis from the continual "in-out" of the cats. Oliver spent a good part of his day here yesterday and went home around 10pm last night when I realized that he was shut into my house! He came back today to check out the facilities, taking a nibble out of the food bowl, a sip out of the water fountain and a long hard sniff of the litter box. My cats are not too crazy about him coming over to visit and it amuses me to listen to them try to scare him and chase him off. He just ignores them and makes himself comfortable!

April 10/10

I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and stitch up this kit. Seeing it sit there unopened on my ottoman was almost painful as I was/am still going through the grieving stages of the end of the relationship with the guy who was with me when I bought this kit as a souvenir of the trip to Newfoundland. Already hit on one pet peeve of mine with kits-----ran out of one of the threads! Fortunately, the chart gives the DMC number so I pulled the colour of out my stash, but I will be emailing them to let them know that they miscalculated. The jellybean houses of St John's are so beautiful to see in person and it is kind of fun to watch them come alive on the fabric under my needle.

Mar 21/10

It has been a while since I have blogged! Between work and my trip to Newfoundland, I just have not had the time to update things.

I found this kit in the NONIA shop on Water Street in St John's. The jellybean houses of St John's are a delightful splash of colour that captivated me so I was pretty excited to find this kit by chance as I was about to leave the shop. I am not sure when I will stitch it because the guy I visited in Newfoundland ended things between us the other day and it was painful to even look at the package today to photograph it. Maybe when time has allowed a few wounds to heal......

These four photos are of "Snow Wishes" by Cathy Coombes of The Victoria Sampler-Designs by Cathy Jean found in the 2009 JCS Ornament edition. I used 28 count Monaco and played around with the colours from my mystery thread box. I mimicked the design colours in the first photo and then played around with the combinations on the other three just to see what would turn out. I used beads on the snowflake for the first design and then switched to just using DMC Light Effects E3747 because I like how the blue tint mimics the colour of snow.