My First February Finish

About time, after nine finishes last month. I finished Rita's round robin block and sent it on earlier this week. This top picture is the naked block as she sent it to me. Her theme was summer.

Here it is after I worked on it. What is summer without the sun? That's why I added the sun at the top in goldwork. Couching down all that metal took several hours. I kind of ran out of steam after that.

Here's a close up of the sun.

And here is one of the two seams I did, along with the other motif. It's a little rock garden.

And my last seam, inspired by Joe T. Garcia's in Fort Worth. The place is a wonderful summer place, and its outdoor patio is always covered in lights of many colors. To me, the place -is- summer.

Squaring the Circle

I'm working on the next to last round of stitching now. As you can see, it's going to become a square. At least the red doesn't look like measles now. My goal is to finish this before I go on my trip in less than four weeks.

Belated Christmas Present

Strange things sometimes happen when mailing via APO. Truly, my Christmas present from my best friend was mailed before the tenth of December. I picked it up from the post office today - it had been sitting somewhere forgotten for months! Isn't this great?

These are little watchmakers' storage cylinders and their own metal box! The box got slightly dented in the looooong transit, but isn't it neat? He separated out all kinds of small stone beads and watch parts so I can use it immediately to embellish things. I love it! I've never seen anything like it, either.

Doing Some Dark Here Too

It seems dark colors were the theme of the week this week past. I added darks to this too. The middle building now has its black line on the roof and more dark brown on other buildings. Slowly it builds.

Adding Some Lowlights

This week I worked with one of the darker browns, adding the folds into the skirt. They were scattered across the area, so there are all these islands now across the bottom of my stitching.

Angling Along

I took this piece to my EGA meeting on Monday and got some extra done on it. The double cross stitches are all worked in the same color of Watercolours, but since the instructions say to skip every other and fill in on the second pass, you get a kind of piebald effect to it. That's emphasized by the way the stitches are made - the top stitch changes by placement within the design. I'm not sure yet that I like it this way.

Frame Done-ish

I got the dark blue outline of the frame done this week - now I get to start working on the fun part. Corrected the mistake in the middle, too.