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Monday, June 1, 2015

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!

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7 comments:

  1. Congrats on finishing her! I agree about he letter the 3d effect makes it so much more elegant

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  2. Congrats on the finish! It always seems like the projects I think will take forever get finished a lot sooner than the little ones that I thin will take no time at all!

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  3. Congrats on a great finish! And I hope you can relax a bit now with your stitching and enjoy the new piece.

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  4. Congrats on the finish. Tinkerbell baby is so cute.

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  5. Congrats on the cute finish!! :) The gifts are lovely!! I liked the idea of beaded letter.

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  6. Tinkerbell is adorable, yay for the timely finish and hooray for and end on deadlines being in sight! And even more yay for the lovely stuff you got with your exchange ^_^

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  7. Great work Alyssa. Your Tinkerbell is just adorable! Wonderful piece!

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