Productivity

...I has it! Or at least, I has it where stitching is concerned, because everything else (uni work included) has been put on the back burner so I can power through my projects. Fortunately, I don't have a lot of work that needs doing at the moment, but with exam season around the corner... well, let's just say that I'm gonna need to focus, or else my Erasmus year won't be happening.

Since I finished my Monday rotation piece, Peter Rabbit over the weekend, I moved on to the unnamed flower kit produced by Janlynn. Here's a quick reminder of where I was when I left it...

Flowers, as of 21st April 2013

You may recall that I managed to finish all the actual cross stitching on this over the weekend, leaving only the backstitching to go. Well, turns out the backstitching was fairly simple...

Flowers, as of 22nd April 2013

...because I finished it in a day! I'm pretty pleased with this in the end, despite hating it for a while. It's a little something-or-other for my tastes - traditional, maybe? - but I actually quite like it now. Maybe someone will recieve this as a card. We'll see.

Since my Sunday rotation would've been the needlecase for my mother if it hadn't been IHSW, I duly moved backwards to work on that a little more on Monday. Here's where I was last time...

Tartan Thistle Needle Case, as of March 31st 2013

I didn't get huge amounts done, since I'd dedicated most of the day to the flowers, but I did manage some significant progress...

Tartan Thistle Needle Case, as of April 22nd 2013

There's still a lot left, but since Sunday is my newly designated "doing nothing day", I aim to get this done within a couple of weeks or so. I almost wish I'd bought this one for myself!

Today's project was the "mystery project". I was doing a thing on Facebook where I'd post my progress every day and let people guess what I was stitching, but this project got put to the side for long enough that I think people have probably forgotten (and I'm fairly sure nobody from my Facebook even knows this blog exists, so I'm not gonna bother with that here. It's actually Serenity Design's North and South, which I stumbled across on Ebay purely by chance in February, but decided I had to have since I love North and South and Richard Armitage beyond words (apologies to Dearest Boyfriend for that). I was also lucky enough that both my classes for today were cancelled, so I had the whole day to stitch (and recover from waking up at 4:30 due to a horrendous blocked nose). Here's how it was when I last worked on it...

North and South, as of March 31st 2013

As you can see I was using a hoop at this point, which I've since stopped using, since for a project of this size the hoop marks are horrific, and this fabric seems to be fairly easily distorted. Fortunately this worked in my favour for using the Q Snaps, because it's now been bent back into shape.

Here's where I got to today:

North and South, as of April 23rd 2013

You can see here that I've also changed stitching techniques for this - I've moved to my newly-discovered column-by-column parking method, which, more than anything, is more inspiring. I like the look of threads dangling everywhere, waiting to be stitched in. It's so full of promise, and means I can't wait to get back stitching!

I've currently got a horrendous nose cold so all I want to do is sit and stitch and allow sunlight to pour onto me, but my side of the house doesn't get any sun (it's the north wall), and our house is a bloody heat sink, so despite it being a tropical 17C out today, I've been shivering inside with a tissue in my hand and a sprinkling of tissues around my desk. It's clearly a sign I need to curl up in bed and stitch there ;)

Happy stitching!

Heather x