Feather Stitching

Alas, my wee Lumix is still in hiding – so yet again you are stuck with crappy scans of my current WIPs.  The GREAT news is that my elusive back-ordered Rainbow Gallery thread arrived on Friday, so the last two nights have been spent doing the first part of the fill-in stitches on Sapphire Star.  Here’s the latest scan of where it’s up to … I’m now in the process of doing little upright cross stitches in the centres of the ‘main’ part of the design – once that is done it’s time to re-do the centre long stitches, followed by the final parts, which is all long-stitch.  Every time I pick this project up the colours blow me away and I savour every minute spent on it – I think this one will be finished by the end of this weekend, if not this week!  😀

Friday nights are “Dawsons Creek” nights in our little flat – we have finally finished season 5 (which I’ve probably enjoyed more than the others to date), and this Friday I get to drool over a younger version of Jensen Ackles for the final season of Dawsons.  Then I can give myself a HUGE clap on the back and a resounding cheer of “Well Done, Lass” … that I managed to survive the whole series – and once I’ve finished drooling over Jensen (I just have shut out the fact that he will look about 12, and concentrate on that dreamy voice of his – another great thing about stitching!), it means we can finally move on to a different TV series for Friday nights.  It seems our next choice is either going to be series one of Fringe (my choice) or Dark Angel (which I’ve never seen before) – or the entire series of Buffy … or perhaps all three in that order!  I guess that ties up Friday nights at our place for the rest of the year! LOL.

Anyway, back to stitching … next up is a little freebie I started at the start of last week, but I can’t find three whole DMC colours, and therefore can’t go any further until I find them!  Perhaps they’re off having a little soiree somewhere with my Lumix camera – hopefully they’ll take photos of their little antics hmmm.  Anyway, I guess this one is now on hold until I can make a run out to Spotlight to pick up some more DMC – so much for being a quick stitch to whip up in a day! 😛  (I’ll add all the chart details etc once it’s finished.)

Lucky last is a piece that I started working on on Sunday afternoon.  I decided to take up a Ghost Trappers challenge (one of the two Facebook games that I’m stupidly addicted to), which pretty much meant being chained to my PC for the entire weekend … or at least all of Sunday anyway.  I ended up setting up my little lapstand on my computer desk, so I could click my mouse every 4 or so minutes … yes, demented, I know … but I enjoyed having some “me” time in my room and enjoyed killing three birds with one stone – stitching, playing games, and reading an audiobook!  Pretty much summed up in one word … “Heaven” 😀

Anyway, here’s the WIP from my Sunday stitching session (Lizzie*Kate’s Hocus Pocus) – this may not get touched now until Sapphire Star is finished, or it’ll remain my ‘bedroom stitching’ project until I can pick up my missing DMC skeins for the acorn freebie.  Either way, it’ll probably just take one more day or two nights’ stitching and it’ll be finished.

Reading-wise, one book I managed to finish last weekend was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – I don’t know of a single person who hasn’t raved about this book after reading it, and I have to admit I really really enjoyed it.  I even shed a tear or two in a couple of places, and very glad I took the time to read it.  Savage and raw in places, touching and tender in others – this was a really enjoyable read!

Next up I started and finished reading Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell.  I’ve read all the Kay Scarpetta novels over the years, and enjoyed every single one of them, and this one was no exception.  I have to say, though, I was glad that I’d read the previous book first, as Scarpetta referred often to an incident or two in the previous book – while you could have still followed the storyline easily, it was much better knowing the full background to the situation being discussed.  The only books I’ve ever disliked of Ms Cornwell’s were Hornet’s Nest and Southern Cross, the Andy Brazil series – I disliked them so much I didn’t even bother getting the 3rd book in the series, Isle of Dogs, and it took me a while to get back into buying her books again.  Thankfully Kay Scarpetta et al continue to provide me with good reading fodder with her forensics expertise and thrilling crime writing!  Way to go, Ms Cornwell, you kept me hooked for another 13 1/4 hours! 😀

As for the next book, I decided to try a different style of writing, with a shorter story, and clicked the play button on Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood.  Set in the 1920’s the awfully English accents and dandy characters are quite fun and are easily wiling away a few hours.  This one has been very easy listening, and I’m only 1 1/2 hours away from the book’s ending.  I have to say for stitchers audiobooks are yet another of life’s great inventions … while it takes a while to get ‘into the mood’ of an audiobook, once you are ‘in the right mind space’, it’s a wonderful way to combine two loves – a love of stitching and of reading 🙂

And I guess on that note I really should get into bed – as much as I love audiobooks when I’m stitching, my actual preference is to hold a physical book and devour its pages one by one … these days, though, my stitching has been taking a priority while I’m in the mood, and physical books have been well and truly lowest on the list.  I’ve decided it’s about time I got further than the first chapter of J.R. Ward’s first book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and I’m going to put my stitching down 1/2 an hour early each evening and read a few pages before bedtime … sounds like a reasonable plan, except I know that once I get my teeth into a good book I get into true reading mode and end up propping my eyelids open with matchsticks while glancing at the clock in the wee small hours of the morning and thinking “just one more chapter …” 😉

Which is a good point … perhaps I should just switch the light off and go to actual sleep before midnight … that’d be an interesting change 😀