The colours in this crocheted face washer matched the view nicely on that grey, blustery day

And then there were these mermaids. I put a few hours of stitching in – this is Mirabilia’s Mermaids of the Deep Blue. To be honest, I’m still in a little bit of shock that I actually cross-stitched. It’s been ages – I’d be willing to bet that most of my cross-stitch-y friends and readers have stopped following this blog, it’s been so long!

Blogtoberfest Day 6

Here:

Aaaaand here:

So. Now you see Mssr. Cuthbert, my storyteller (the dragon is Claude. You know, like ‘Clawed’. I know. Sad. ).

And now ST is likely to return to the box from whence it came… hopefully not for all eternity!

Finn (with liberal amounts of help) worked on this:

I worked on this:
(which incidentally I finished off tonight, but the photos I took were a bit on the crappy side, so I’ll have another try in some decent light over the weekend).

Later, I went along to this (you can spot me in one of the pics on the blog if you squint), and I stitched on this for a bit:

Fun fun. The design is an ’06 Christmas freebie by Hillary Lang, and there is a matching boy-elf, so I’ll be stitching the pigeon pair to make up as Christmas gift bags for the kiddos. Cute, huh?

Have a great weekend – we’re off up north to celebrate Fathers’ Day with multiple fathers!

Much more finishable looking, don’t you think?

Thank you Tracey, Suz, Laura, Juli and Claire, for the many stitches you have put into this. I’ll be making every effort to finish this before the year is out (ie before Finn turns 5), so watch this space!

So, I started, and then finished, Teenie Hardanger I by The Sweetheart Tree, instead. Pretty, no? The chart for this was a gift from my Secret Stitcher last year, Allie. She sent me II and III as well (among other wonderful things).

I’m much happier with my cutting this time. Well. Except for that one bit. That bit where I snipped one thread too many. Whoops! I ended up having to reweave a piece of linen so that I could do the woven bar properly. But all’s well that ends well, hey?

Hardanger-y goodness part two is this:

Haze stitched me this lovely candle wrap and mat for the Hardanger exchange on the Rotation BB. It’s taken a little while to arrive, it’s been on a bit of a world cruise, actually Thanks Haze, I love it!

When we arrived on Thursday afternoon, we had planned to do a fairly simple strut replacement job before heading off camping. As soon as FIL got a look at the underneath of the car, it rapidly turned into a drive-shaft-rebuild-needed-asap job. One of the drive shafts turned out to be a bugger to detach, so we weren’t able to get them into the rebuild place before everything shutting down for the long weekend. Nevermind… we loaded our considerable cargo into a trailer and FIL’s car, and took off from Friday through Monday for a lovely few days of riverfront camping.

On Tuesday morning, we had the drive shafts rebuilt, then FIL and OtherHalf spent the afternoon getting the car back in working order. And here we are, back again. Chocolate-bloated and laden with half a ton (it seems) of dirty laundry, but back.

Here then, are some promised catch up pictures. First, the two pay-it-forward packages I didn’t show you earlier:

For Angi

For Debbi

Next, the final UFO that I stitched on for the round robin. This is Tracey’s Royal Holiday. It was nice to finish on another Mirabilia design:

Before:

And after:

And that, boys and girls, marks the end of so-called ‘obligation‘ stitching for me. For the time being, anyway. I joined this round robin because I knew I would go through a bit of a stitching slump while Niamh was little, and I figured this would be a good way to spur me into doing a little bit, better than nothing at all. But I have to confess, I’m not sad to see then end of it. I was growing a bit resentful of the time spent stitching on other people’s work (though I will no doubt feel differently once my own UFO gets home, and I see first-hand how much has been worked on it). Each time as the deadline approached, I felt pressured to stitch, even though I didn’t necessarily feel like doing so. I have done very little other stitching for the whole year so far – I completed the Hardanger exchange, I’ve spent a couple of hours on Lilly, and just in this last week I’ve come very close to a finish on one of my smaller pieces (hopefully I’ll dance this weekend). But that’s all. So I’ve decided to opt out of any more exchanges or round robins for at least the rest of 2007. How much or how little stitching I will actually do, I can’t predict, but I just don’t want to feel the pressure of deadlines for a little while.

Or, you can get up close and personal with the stitching here. Although I thought finishing it as a ‘wall ornament’ was kind of uninspired (hey, I was really tired!), I was really happy with the quality of my finishing. I have a bag (or, um, three) of finished-but-not-finished projects which I’d really like to start making a dent in – Anne and Karen have started up the Focus on Finishing blog, have you seen it? That should provide me with some inspiration.

The reason I’ve taken so long to post this is because my ‘spare’ time (insert maniacal laugh here) has been taken up with Suz’s UFO for the Round Robin. She sent around Black Swan’s Lily Pond Dreams. Confetti stitching ahoy! It kicked my butt, and once again I didn’t achieve as much as I would have liked. Here are the before ‘n’ afters, clickable for biggering.

And, just in case you aren’t all pictured out, here are pics of the three pay-it-forward packages that I know have arrived. (Should check up on the other two – Angi, Debbi, are yours there yet?). I dyed a fat 1/8 of linen or evenweave, and some stranded cotton (plus a perle for Jenna) for each person in their colour preferences. So far, so good, everyone seems to like these:

For Jenna

For Tash

For Jinger

Phew! I think that’s about it.

And now, her bags are packed and she’s leaving on a jet plane for America. Tracey, I hope you enjoy stitching on her

I have nothing more for you tonight – it’s tax night in our house (yeah, I know, we are really, really, really late!) so I’m off to join in the fun

I finished up the right hand border, and ‘Lizzie’ will be in the mail tomorrow. I’ll get a picture for you before she goes.

While you wait, why not go waste some time? Be careful, it’s v.addictive!