Lady of Shalot update

As promised, here are some pics!

This is how she looked when I picked her up in January:


This is her in February:


And this is how she looks now!


Quite some progress, don´t you think? :-)

Oh, and by the way, that vase with flowers was a real pain! Hopefully that is done and over with!

Framed happy dances

I realized I never ever showed the pics of my 2007 happy dances framed! So, here they go!

Madonna of the Garden by Mirabilia:



This piece was stitched for my home church as a gift to the Lord. I think it now hangs in the parish building, but haven´t seen it.


Angel of the Sea by Lavender and Lace:



stitched as birth announcement for a dear friend and displayed with pride in their bedroom :-)


and the Maidens of Seasons I by Mirabilia



which I did for myself, and used to have them in the living room before we moved, but now they are still packed - haven´t hanged them since!

Lots of updates!

I recently realized that I used to have a blog, and that is has probably been ages since I posted anything!

Yeap, November 2007, that is some 18 months ago!

Lots has happened since. Around Christmas 2007, I got hooked up on some computer games and pretty much lost interest in cross stich because of that. I hardly touched it for almost a year!

Then, there was the house. Shortly after we got married back in summer 2006, we signed a reservation contract for a house to be constructed as per our request. It took some time - the construction did not begin till late 2007 and we got the keys in October 2008 (concrete and bricks - that takes time to build!) Also, the house needed a lot of finishings - we had to lay carpets, paint the walls (they were boring white before), have kitchen installed, blinds, lights, furniture, you get the story. We are still not there - now that most of the inside is done, we are slowly moving to the outside - we will have a pool installed, then we need to do the fence, the patio, plant the trees and the bushes and the whole thing. I don't actually think we will ever be done with the whole place, it will always be a work in progress, but that's life :-)

On top of that, I changed job last summer. After a not-exactly-fair thing that my ex boss did to me, I decided it was time to leave behind 5 years of my life and move on. I work in real estate investment - not the best career right now - but I was lucky to have started looking just before the crisis hit here in Europe. I found a nice, safe position in a major bank and looking at what is going on in the company I used to work for, the nasty thing my ex-boss did was actually the best that could ever happen to me as I wouldn't have left otherwise!

But this is a stitching blog, so back to stitching :-)

In my last post, I wrote about starting on Angel of Grace by Lavender&Lace. I finished her right after New Year 2009 (I reinvented my interest in stitching this last Christmas). I don't have a photo, but I promise to make one and post it here!

Haven't started anything new - instead I work on the old UFOs. I got out the Portrait of Elegance by Dimensions, and did a good progress on her, and also the Lady of Shalott by Teresa Wentzler. LoS is a pleasure to work on - well, mostly. The border certainly is. I have her on the hoop right now and am working in the left lower part. The left upper part was not too much fun to do - loads and loads of confetti stitching in the flower vase and on the curtains, but I have only some of the flowers left and the rest seems easier. I think I could have the entire left half done by end of June, but will see.

The plan for this year is to finish the Lady and also the Portrait of Elegance. Don't know if it is feasible, but hey, if not, they can be finished next year. Or the year after that :-)

Happy November!

I can't believe it's over a month that I posted the last time! I got busy with the charity stitching (which turned out to be more time-consumming than I thought) and I managed to get two pictures done.

This one is for a children hospital:

Precious moments - Loads of Love

and this one is for the Pink charity (against breast cancer)

Precious moments - Lollipop (OK, it's not called lollipop, but I can't find the name!).

I finished those two late October and went back to stitching on the Enchanter, where I finally completed all the stitching and now I am left with the oh-so-funny backstitching. And since I have been so good with finishes this year, I allowed myself a new start - on the Angel of Grace by Lavender & Lace. Not much to show right now, as all there is is a white blob of her skirt. I mean, what else can you expect after 2.5 hours of work, right?

I went ahead and had my three August/September happy dances framed, but I don't have the pics of the framing yet, but will post them soon!

Two September happy dances!

Since I started a lot of pieces in 2005 and 2006, it's time to reap the happy dances!

Here are two lovelies I finished during September:


Mirabilia - Maidens of Seasons I

and

Lavender & Lace - Angel of the Sea

I am currently working on Passione Ricamo Spring Fairy spirit (not close to finishing, but the piece that is - TW's Enchanter - was driving me crazy with all that confetti stitching - I've had enough of that on Maidens!)

Anyway I’ll put her aside for a month tonight – I am involved in two charity stitching projects and I want to dedicate October to charity only – and will see if I will pick her up after that. Just today I heard the news that a very dear friend is expecting her second baby in March, and I want to stitch her another baby guardian angel, and this time I want to have it done on time!

So it is a week...

that I said goodbye to my furry baby. I wasn't in the mood to write about it earlier, and I didn't even have the time, so here it goes.

Last week, when it seemed that our cat was getting better, I arranged for another rentgen to be done. That was on Wednesday evening and the results were not good - her lungs were filling up with water again. Yet then it still seemed that she would last at least through the weekend (we were scheduled to visit my grandma that weekend).

On Thursday, when I came home from a work gala dinner, I noticed immediatelly that things were bad... the cat was apatic, not moving, and breathing very hardly. I knew it was time... so all in tears I send a text message to our vet (who is my close friend) asking her to come the following day.

It was very tough for me. I did make it through, though, and I held the cat all the time, while the vet gave her a sleeping shot and then the lethal one. I then had the other cat sniff the body so that she would understand, and packed the body in a box (out vet knows better - she brought a box of kleenex and a transportation box for the body), and somehow I was even able to drive 200 miles to my grandma's house.

We buried the cat on my grandma's garden, where all the family pets are. I am actually in a way glad that it turned out like this, because otherwise we wouldn't have a decent place to bury the cat - here we live in an apartment house with no garden. I think the burial was harder for me than what I had to do the day before - I had to ask DH to take the body out of the box, because I just couldn't stand touching the cold and stiff thing that was all that was left from my beloved cat.

I miss her a lot. I don't cry the way I did the weekend after we received the diagnosis, when every look at the cat reminded me of what was to come. I just don't think about it and then it doesn't hurt. And when I do think about her, I try to remember only the good things... but of course, now that I am writing this, I can hardly see the screen through tears.

But I just have to get this out somehow.... you can't really talk about grieving a loss of an animal to people at work or to friends, because they wouldn't understand and they would think you are crazy, and DH just doesn't want to talk about it at all. Wonder if he'd be the same if it was his parents... or me.

Better don't want to know.

A happy dance!

Well actually this happy dance is from end of August, but I never got around to put it up here.

I finished Madonna of the Garden! Go me!

This is her:

Madonna of the Garden by Mirabilia

I really like the way she turned out, and the beading was well worth the effect. I still need to wash her and take her for framing - I am thinking a massive golden frame, no matting, to give her the look of old rennaisance paintings - then she will be a great addition to the style of my 12th century church building (did I ever mention that I did this piece as offering to church? Two years ago, when I was getting ready for my legal finals, and scared to death that I wouldn't pass them, I went to church, prayed hard and promised to finish the piece and give it to church if I made it through the finals. It took me some time, but now it is done! In the medieval ages, people would offer to build a church building, I am not that rich, but I put a lot of work in that to please the Lord, so I think that counts as well). Probably will take her to framer's next week, along with Angel of the Sea, which is now also finished (but no picture yet).

I am now working on the Seasonal Maidens, and they are mostly done as well, so wait for some more pictures!