A Freedom Day Update

Only because my calender says it is Freedom Day in S. Africa. At any rate, it is almost May, already - wow, where has April gone? And where are those April Showers we used to get? We got a couple, but less than 3" for the month - the summer is looking HOT and DRY, no end of the drought in sight. Car washing is banned - my car has not been washed in 1 1/2 years, and looks it :( Every clean spot I make when I'm cleaning the windshield while pumping gas, just draws attention to the dirt everywhere. Though during pollen season, everyone's cars are filthy; it's just that, once the yellow-green stuff goes away, I have a layer of black grime under it :( Maybe a day trip to SC is in order, so I can find a place to use a hose and wash my car....

Pics in this post should be clickable - sometime Multiply cooperates, other times... not.

On to the stitching! I worked on several things last week, here and there, but before I get to those, I did want to note that I took an updated pic of Chatelaine MMM03 - I didn't get to work on it at all, and hoped to on one of those days I had off around easter, but lack of sunshine prevented me. But the previous amount of work I didn't update, because I thought I'd get back to it again shortly - no such luck. And I wanted to send a picture to my mom, and realized I didn't have a current one. So now I do:



There's also a detail pic that shows the beads up a bit better - it's so hard to get a good pic on black fabric, and the light outside was really too bright - it was just glare when I tried that. No indirect light I could easily get to when I had time to bother with this. Here's the detail:
http://tinyurl.com/de7bn7

I worked on the newest RR piece I have, Paula's. She chose a set of Lizzie Kate Flip Its, and picked a gorgeous piece of linen banding for it. I picked the next one down and started and completed it during the week - Remember:

I will do another section, as I want to pick one that is using Vikki's Woad Blue (Paula's conversion to all HDF) - those are some of my favorite of Vikki's colors, especially blues :) We'll see. I'll also take a better picture next time so you can see the banding better, and the overall piece.

I also worked a night and an afternoon on Cabaret du Chat Noir - I felt guilty for not touching it all last week when I was working on MTM. I have a good start on the sun behind the cat's head, but there is a strange color charted in it - amidst 20 colors of orange is a dark gold, 680, and I haven't figured out if it is really supposed to be that, or if it's some kind of mistake. It looks a little off to me, but then, it's a long way from done, and not having the original picture it was converted from, I can't say right or wrong - I did verify, multiple times, that I had the correct thread as charted. I'll just keep going and see what it looks like further down the road - I really don't relish the idea of frogging 2 threads off of 22ct fabric, in Confetti City - I can live with a lot of things, I think :) Here he is:

During lunch, I got into the over-1 parts of Medieval Miniature, and tried to work on it at games over the weekend, before it got too hot and too bright - imagine it being too bright to work on over-1, even with the ever-present sunglasses! And yes, for the record, I am a bit fried - temps in the 90s (see my Friday post) and I had 4 games to go through - my sunscreen clearly gave up the ghost at some point, though I can only imagine how realllllyyy fried I'd have been if I hadn't bothered. Anyway, back to Medi Mini - 20 minutes at lunch doesn't get me much progress, but it's some, and you might even be able to tell what part I'm working on already :)
And my main focus piece for the week was English Garden Sampler. I felt like I got a lot done on it, but now, looking at the picture, it doesn't look like as much as it felt :( But maybe it's because the one column that is complete is white & light grey, so "appears" to be less done than it really is. Whatever - as always, not as much as I'd hoped, but better than none :) Green stuff, grey stuff,
and purple stuff, here & there in typical TW fashion:

There's a detail pic, too, showing mostly just this area I worked: http://tinyurl.com/cbjqbs

And that's it for the week :) I like weeks when I have an opportunity to work on different things - except the week I'm working on MTM when I can't be distracted from it for even a minute. I would have liked to work on a couple more things over the weekend, but I was pushing it already, switching stuff in and out, and being out in the sun just wiped me out Saturday - I was in bed by around 11:30, which is highly unusual for me on a weekend. I think I read about a page and a half, had no recall of what I'd read, so I gave up and shut off the light.

This week, the main project is Knotgarden - and whatever else manages to jump onto the frame. I also need to run into Hobby Lobby and check out the buttons and embellishments int eh scrapbook aisle - Tracy enabled me into a bit of stash enhancement with Pushing Up Daisies, and I want to go see what bits I can find for flowers and bugs - if I don't see anything that really grabs me, then I may order the JABC buttons, or improvise something else - and I need to figure out how to make the bird into a hermit crab...? My mother will probably be appalled when I show her this design :)

Well, that's enough rambling - time for lunch, I think! Happy Stitching to everyone this week!