Fair & Square Exchange

Besides working on my bus project I haven't done much stitching this week. But I'd like to share pictures of my latest Fair & Square exchange with Ruth.

These are the squares she send to me. Aren't they absolutely gorgeous? I love how she added the Finnish flag to the design. It makes it even more special.

I had to finish the squares straight away into a pin cushion. Usually I use the signature square on the back of the pillow, but this little apricot tree is far to special to hide it there.

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And here are the squares I stitched for Ruth. The design is from Maryse and called the "Sweet heart Cottage". I have stitched this design once before in it's original colours, but for Ruth's squares I changed them.

Just a little something

Hi everyone! No stitching progress from me today, just a little something I have wanted to share for a while now. But don't you worry, I am still stitching. I put in my first 2 hours into "On Travel with Jane Austen" and I love it.

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But here is now what I wanted to show.

Every now and then, milk cartons get a special designer look here in Finland. And in early spring Valio came out with this design. Ok, it is not exactly cross stitch, but anyway. I think it is pretty cool.

Have a wonderful day!

The Sampler Girl's give away

Some of you might already know that I won the latest give-away on The Sampler Girl's blog last Sunday. I was so overwhelmed, couldn't really believe that I really won. The chart is called "On Travel with Jane Austen" and it is so beautiful.

Even though that I am on the mission to reduce my WIPs and UFOs and don't want to start any new projects, with this one I am making an exception.

I spend the whole week with selecting fabric and floss. The chart calls for manely CC and WDW floss, but they are rather difficult to get here in Finland and very expensive. And I am on a stash diet anyway. So I decided to over-dye my own floss. I've been wanting to do this for a while now, ever since I read a post on the blog Primitives by the light of the Moon. So with their instructions and a beige coloured fabric dye to give the floss a primitive look I started dyeing for the very first time. 

This is the DMC floss that I have chosen to dye for the Jane Austen chart. 

I over dyed some more floss to have something in reserve for other projects. Can you see already the difference?

These are a few of my favourite. I love how they turned out.

And here are finally the selected colours for On Travel with Jane Austen. I am using  a tad darker shades than the original colours.

I have just started placing the first few crosses and intend to stitch some more during the weekend. So more pictures will follow soon.

Fair & Square pin cushions

This morning I felt a lot like sewing something. So I decided to finish my remaining Fair & Square pieces into little pin cushions.

Here is an update picture of my Fair & Square basket. It is quite full already and very soon I need to get a bigger basket.

The basket is the center piece of our dinner table and gets a lot of attention whenever we are having guests.

from Linda in 2009

from Milly in 2011

from Pam in 2012 - Pam designed those squares herself.

I am back in business

After my last post about my lack of stitching motivations Theresa send me a link to an article with a rotation plan.  She and a few other stitching pales are following this plan with great satisfaction. I have never been a big fan of rotations (they never worked for me before) but in my desperation I thought it could not harm giving it a try.

I have chosen to rotate five projects and the first one to start with was the Alphabet 1900 or Riesenmustertuch, as we call it in the Sticklounge group.

So I have put in my first 10 hours already. That went much quicker than I thought. 10 hours of stitching time in just two days, not bad at all.

And here is the result. 

Almost all the dark brown parts have been stitched in this first round. You might wonder why I stitched in two different colours. That is, because I am changing it all to dark brown. I will have a lot of hours of frogging ahead of me, but I think the brown looks so much better and in the end the effort is well worth it.

The next 10 hours of stitching will go into Lady's Smock Fairy. It's one of my dead line stitching for Quilts 4 Kids.

Something finished....

I have been struggling lately with my stitching progresses. It seems like I lost all my motivation and many days pass by without placing a single stitch. I am not found by this at all. I have a big pile of UFOs and an even bigger one of projects that are close to become UFOs if I am not getting back into stitching. 

So this morning I worked a little on my Alphabet 1900 and I intend to work on it a few more hours during the day. So therefore there is no picture of this one yet.

But I took a few pictures of projects that I finished a little while ago and just haven't had the change of taking good shots of them.

At first there is BOO! I truly love this design. It was so much fun to stitch and I think I will stitch it a few more times on different kind of fabrics.

Design: BOO!

Designer: The Stitcherhood

Fabric: some orange 29ct. 

Thread DMC 310

I have also finished the 1999 Christmas Sampler by Carriage House Samplings. I don't know yet how to finish it, but it will be with some shabby dark fabric. It was my first time stitching on black fabric and I really enjoyed it. 

Design: 1999 Christmas Sampler

Designer: Carriage House Samplings

Fabric: 18ct black aida

Thread: DMC as recommended

At last I have a little Tantes Zolder design to show you. I have started this one many years ago and just finished it just a few month ago. It is a really small design, just 3.5 x 2 inches big. I have no idea what to use it for. Maybe I'll add some lace and a pale fabric and make a lavender sachet or pincushion out of it.

Tantes Zolder

Fabric: 40 ct. white Newcastle linen

Thread: DMC

I do have one more project that I sewed last night into a cute little pouch, but it is a gift. I will post pictures of it next week after it arrived to it's new home.

Exotic Flower

So we finally moved to the new place. Living here for already two weeks and so far we like it very much. Of course everything feels still a little strange and we have a lot more work to do before we can call our new apartment a home. But we are getting there.

Because of the moving I haven't had any time and motivation for stitching for at least a month, but last night I finally picked up that stitching needle again and made even a little progress. Some of you might remember that I wrote a review for one of Yiota's cross stitch kits a little while ago. The design I am stitching is "Exotic Flower" and it is one of the charts  based on a William Morris Design. 

I really love the pale colours in this design. It might not show on the picture but this chart has many different hues of beige.