A stitchy round-up of the week

Hello Everyone!

First I want to apologize for not having had the time to catch up with all your lovely blogs this week. I've been busy with baking sweet goodies, seeing friends and watching LOTS of sports on the telly. I'm a huge sports fan and with a cross country skiing tour in Canada and World Championship in Biathlon and many other sports on the telly right now there just haven't been time for blog reading. Especially since I also have a Swedish BLOG about my everyday life with my dogs, and I post every day on that blog... So, all in all there just hasn't been enough hours in the day lately, but I hope to catch up with you all very soon since I miss spending time with my blogging friends!!

Anyway, moving on to stichy matters...
During the week I only stitched a few SMALLs. There was this little sewing machine...

From Cross Stitch Crazy issue 150
Designer: Diane Machin

 And I stitched this wolf...

From Cross Stitch Crazy issue 214
Designer: Durene Jones

 ...which I also posted on Kitten Stitching and the Friday Frolics SAL .  This is a SAL where we show the projects we work on on Fridays.

Since I hadn't found much time for stitching during the week, I wanted to get some stiching done during the weekend. Thus I dug out my Leap Year start which is going to look like this...

 

...one day far, far away in the distant future lol. Luckily my sister managed to enlarge the black and white chart for me, so now I can actually read the chart without getting an headache. I still have to add the gridlines so I'm slowly getting around to that. It takes a long time to do though since it is a large piece of aida. I have made a start in the middle though, and I chose to focus on the black windows. Mainly because they stand out on the chart lol.

With them in place it feels easier to imagine the rest of the piece. But I can tell that this is going to be a very slooow process for me. The most difficult part is holding the large piece of aida since I stitch in hand. I know - I should use a hoop but I just don't like them. So I'm going to do my best and enjoy the process of flapping around with the aida, and trying to keep my place on the black and white chart. If I can do an hour here and an hour there maybe I'll have a happy dance in about...five years time?? Oh well, at least I have started lol.

Having spent some time on my Fairytale Castle, it was a HUGE relief to pick up my recent start Christmas Town by Emma Congdon! Such a small piece of aida, and a colour chart LOL! This is where I was when I picked it up this weekend:

When I was going to stitch some orange buildings I didn't enjoy the colour the chart stated. To me it just seemed too dark and not vibrant enough for the design. So I dug through my stash and found another orange shade that I was happier with.

Above you can see the darker, original orange Anchor thread above the new orange DMC shade. It doesn't look to be much difference on the picture above, but I think it made a big differerence to the design and to my enjoyment of stitching with a brighter colour:)

This is where I stopped today:

 I'm really enjoying stitching all the bright buildings:) Yet again I don't have all the thread shades yet, but hopefully by the time I have to have them I've been able to order them:) By the way, can you spot the little street light?! It's soo cute I just had to stitch it today - I just love those little quirky details in this design!

That's it from me for now!
Hope you've all had a nice weekend with lots of time for stiching:)

Annie