Horseman and Numbers

And speedily moving onto H is for Headless Horseman:

The Horseman was a nice speedy stitch.  Once again I "tweeded" part of it, the horse has the bottom /// in light brown and the top \\\ in a darker brown.  Nice effect.  I've been looking at Julie's finished squares and am rather envious of her moon in C.  She's been using hand-dyed threads and the moon is lovely.  I'm almost tempted to frog and restitch mine but not quite!  Frogging over 1 is a nightmare and it took me long enough the first time!

I think it'll be a while before "I" comes out so this one is having a rest while I pick up Bluebeard's Mermaid for the first time in ages, I've missed her so much.  It took me 10 minutes of looking and staring to remember where I was and what the symbols were colour-wise.

This is the 2nd teacher's sampler.  My son's year group are streamed for Literacy and Numeracy so he has a different teacher for Numeracy to his class teacher.  Hence the numbers:

 This is the design my son drew for me and coloured in.  You can see the finished piece is pretty similar.  We tweaked some of the colours as he'd duplicated a couple.

His class also have a 3rd teacher on a Friday.  They had her last year too and then I stitched her a celtic dog.  This year she's getting a coaster with a Joan Elliott celtic design in, because I like it!  I thought about asking for last year's sampler back and unpicking the dates but thought better of it hahahahaha.

I've been following people's progress with Papillon's Castles in the Air project.  This is a gorgeous two year SAL which I thought I'd totally missed the boat on becoming aware of it at about part 19!  However on the site she says the charts will be available for a little while yet.  Unbelievably it is only 1 Euro to buy the first chart then you can download all the rest for free.  I thought you had to post pictures to get the subsequent ones but NO!

Now we come to the problems.  There are two versions - cross stitch and speciality stitch.  I love a speciality stitch but cross stitch would be quicker and it's a big project.  What the heck - it's A EURO - buy both and have the choice.  So I pay my 2 Euros and get to download 48 charts!   Then I see there is a choice of pictures for the centre, either little vignettes or floral designs.  I knew I preferred the floral designs (or so I thought), but the little vignettes are sooooooo pretty....maybe I could stitch them as smalls?  THEN I notice she gives an option for cutwork on some parts!  She even includes a free bookmark design to practise your cutwork on.

And all that before you have to decide what colours to use, some are coded with DMC some with colour suggestions - light green, a floral colour etc so this piece will be 110% original for everyone who stitches it.  And then there's fabric....

My "stash-sort" for the week was to sort my small picture frames.  All 40 of them.  I have a slight addiction to buying small frames.  It's hard to get square frames so I tend to grab them when I can.  I now have a nice neat list with all the dimensions on them so I can see instantly if I have the right size for a project or which count I need to stitch a project on to fit the intended frame.