A New Year’s Update

Well, it’s 1/3 of the way through January already; the last several weeks have been a blur. I’m not going to go into details, but just know that I’ve been sidelined these last couple of months with a new medical issue; suffice it to say, ladies, do your SELF EXAMS every month! It’s important! Moving on…. Christmas came & went – we were lucky to have both boys home with us over Christmas! It was lots of back & forth to the airport (63 miles one way), and fortunately, not too many delays coming or going – the weather saved itself for this week, I guess. They got to see their friends, and the 19yo did a lot of sleeping, which he hasn’t gotten to do since he left for boot back in June. We all went to see Rogue One in 3D IMAX – great movie! All things considered, a great Christmas. As the 19yo will be heading to the UK after he finishes school, this was likely our last Christmas together for a while. He will be not too far from where I was back in the day (RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge near Ipswich, Suffolk) – I guess that means DH will finally get his trip to see Chelsea play 🙂 We are still waiting to see what the 23yo’s first assignment will be…..

Stitching wise, I was working on Lady & Unicorn before I had to put everything down for surgery; I didn’t make a lot of progress, despite having it out for about 3 weeks – I left myself lots of holes to fill in the last time, so I did my best to get them filled; not much progress to the right, but a lot less white showing:

For comparison, see it side by side with the last update in its Flickr album, here.

I also had an impulse start, and finish – I was too wrapped up in stuff to concentrate on L&U, and a Mill Hill kit jumped right out of my travel bag and onto my floor stand. TA-DA – Wild Blue Cat, a Laurel Burch design:

We had our Christmas exchange at our November PINS; I forgot to get a picture of the gorgeous ornie I received (again – the photog can’t remember to be the subject, apparently), and my recipient has not been there to get hers yet, so it’s now living in my car. Since I have no idea if she reads this or not, here’s a couple of links to the stitched piece, and the finished item.

I was also able to go to IHOP on the Thursday between Christmas & New Years, and made a bit of progress on my FNN Field of Sunflowers, though I did have to take out the WRONG color I put in the last time I touched it and put it back in correctly:

And last up for 2016, my ort jar at the end of 2016:

A Christmas present that I ordered after Christmas arrived the other day – I finally broke down and ordered some new stretchers for Chatelaines, these from Judy Odell’s Just A Thought. I got the two BIG sets – Large & Medium, as well as both sizes of side bars. I hope to use them on a Chat soon, since I haven’t touched Deep Blue Sea or Hummingbird in last year’s rotation. Here are the stretchers:

And lastly for this update, another impulse start & finish, this time a Chatelaine – who knew you could have a Chat done in 2 weeks? You can when it’s a bell pull 🙂 This is Mini Mystery I, which was a series of small castle designs; I have 3 of them to do, all on 4″ banding in 28ct white linen. These are older designs, so some of the Thread Gatherer silks are discontinued (TG did do a special lot of some of these this past fall, at special request of the Chat FB group, so I did get one of these oldies). This was a fun design – just enough of each little part to give me a bling fix, and a cute small, which has bell pull HW on order:

I liked this so much, I started the next one last night! Yeah, we’ll see how that rotation works out this year…

Well, that’s the news. I’m not going to do the usual recap and goals for the coming year; until I get this medical crap done, I’m kind of making things up as I go (or will until I return to work, in some capacity, on 1/23). Maybe I’ll do something more structured later, or maybe not – who knows? Until next time, Happy Stitching!