Stitching Update: May - July 2010

Due to many factors mostly stemming from my migraine still being with me (started late March and here still here) I have been very quiet on my blogs and with my stitching.

The treatment for my migraine revolves around short-term medication leading to regular sleep patterns and lifestyle changes (both work and at home). As part of this, I'm getting back into my stitching and  reconnecting with the world again.  Anyway enough whinging, onto the update:

Stitching update!



In June I finished off poor Jasper in Bloom.  Jasper was a project I cross-stitched in May-July 2008 as one of my train commuter projects.  Unfortunately the back stitching was getting me down so I put him away.  I found him last month while looking for a different project, and decided to "be good" and just struggle through the back stitching.  The struggle turned out to be a mere two nights in front of the TV, and he was done.

A lesson there in building molehills into mountains and the fear is worse than the event and a few other platitudes.


I then, flushed with this success, went back to New York and finished it off completely.  The silver scroll-work was a pain to do on Aida but well it always is :)  This Vervaco kit, unlike Moscow, contained enough fibres to complete the whole project.  I've included a photo of the finish here so you can see that Vervaco uses generous fabric sizes in their kits.  If only they included evenweave or linen as an option...

In late June-early July my mum visited for a fortnight. Mum brought over all of her finishes so we took them down for a Show and Tell visit to Colours Down Under :)

While mum was here, I mentioned that I had a "Fall limited edition" range of Carrie's Threads that was released in a collaboration pack a couple of years earlier.  I hadn't given away any of the threads because they all blended well together but I hadn't found a chart that I could use them on.  Coincidentally, the next day Tracy released a new free pattern, Celtic Spiral, to those on the Inkcircles email list.  Mum and I pulled out those threads and some fabric and started stitching!

Unfortunately for the stitching, I introduced mum to World of Warcraft that night and no further stitching was done for the rest of the visit.  The day she flew home I sat and stitched the rest of this piece, all except for the last 10 stitches.  You see mum and I both chose one colour the same in our palettes and I gave the rest of the skein to mum to take home with her.  I was a) quite sure I had enough and b) given our history mum always finishes our collaborated projects months ahead of me. In this instance, I was wrong on both counts.

Mum has popped a length of the thread in the mail and when it finally arrives I will finish off this poor thing.  Or not.  I just found out that the direction of the project should have been reversed for the Southern hemisphere.  {insert expletive here}.

After that I became all enthusiastic about our private round robin group starting up again, so I pulled out the Historical Dress Sampler that went around last year. I had great plans to stitch up the rest of the grey border pieces to make life easier for placement for the others. In the next four weeks I stitched precisely 10 stitches on it.  I gave up and just sent it on as is.  I feel so ashamed that I just couldn't motivate myself enough enough to stitch on it.

After it went, I started a new project, a piece for a friend's birthday in late August.  So this is my focus piece for the next few weeks.  I'll put up a separate blog with pictures and progress on this project on the weekend.  I was going great guns until I found one row of the wording was out of alignment, so I've unpicked it.  Hopefully I can have that area restitched before Sunday.  I will once again be using the Sunday updates to help keep up my motivation.

And that's it - all my stitching over the past two months :)