Weekend Update: Finishes, exchanges, kitting up and more!

Hello everyone!

Hope you had a great weekend.  Even though Mondays are totally my enemy, I had a great stitching weekend, so I'm excited to share my progress with you. 

First of all, my Buzzy Bees N bookmark was received by my partner in the Lucie Heaton Facebook Group Initial Exchange.  Since I forgot to take a picture of it after I finished the bookmark itself, here's the picture she posted on FB so that you can get an idea of what it looks like. 

I also got my package from the same exchange.  In addition to the adorable framed initial, my partner also sent 5 colors of DMC floss in my favorite pastel shades, 3 packages of various trims that will come in handy for finishing future projects, a monogrammed journal, and a bar of mango coconut dark chocolate.  Whew!  It was such a nice surprise to come home to on Friday. 

Here's a close up of the stitching itself:

I love the frame she used, and doing the initial in beads was a genius idea.  It makes it look so elegant and totally matches the feel of the whole piece. The fabric appears to be some sort of opalescent hand dyed evenweave, and I love the colors!

And my other big news from the weekend.... Baby Tinkerbell is finished!!!!!

This ended up kind of being a love/hate piece.  I love the pattern, and I loved working on it, but in the end it wasn't as fun as it could have been because of the deadline I was up against.  Also, I wayyyyyyyyyy underestimated how long it would take to stitch and backstitch this whole thing.  But I'm happy with the result.  I might even stitch it again someday, though if I get the chance I will definitely be doing it on evenweave because the fractionals were everywhere!

This is a freebie pattern I got off an Italian blog, and was stitched for the Love Quilts charity.  It was done on white 16 count aida (which was a nightmare for fractionals!) with charted DMC threads in 2 over 1.  I started it on May 15th and finished on May 31st, so not bad for a fairly large complicated pattern.  I think the stitch count is around 120 x 80-something (I have it written down somewhere, but not in front of me at the moment).  This was one of my Turtle Trot pieces, so I can now put that down as complete. 

So now that that's done, I have two more charity projects in the pipeline, and then no more deadline stitching for me this year!  At least, that's the plan now.  I need to get serious about finishing up some of the Christmas projects I have planned.  Now that the year is almost to the halfway point, I'm starting to realize how behind I am on those. 

I spent a couple hours last night kitting up said charity projects, and my latest exchange swap project.  There's something so satisfying about starting/preparing to start a new project, isn't there?  The exchange will be a summer themed one this time.  I also need to stitch up my Round Robin block and get that mailed off.  So I guess that's a sneak peek at what you'll be seeing here over the next month!