Do You Do Voodoo Too?

I'd gotten a little behind with The Dark Alphabet, partly because of stitching on the Joan Elliott Round Robin and partly because Julie is banging out the letters this year!!

So I'll be putting the hours into it this month to try catch up.  V was for Voodoo and as usual The Note of Friendship blog is full of information about the letter and plenty of useful links if you want to know more.

This wasn't the most exciting block to stitch, the lettering was great but the little figure got a bit tedious!  When I stitch over 1 in rows I get a ridge between every other line, which is great for some of the pieces but for this one I stitched diagonal rows which made it a little more interesting.  I dangled the carrot of "Wyvern" to get me through it.  I'm using a variegated for Wyvern and it's so much more fun!

The green scarf is stitched in the Van Dyke Stitch, quite fiddly over 1 but a nice little effect.

The next piece is my current daytime project, Cherry Hill by CCN.  This was a giveaway from Crafty Rahenna and I'm loving it.  I'm using DMC on 40 count Newcastle linen, over 2, a mixture of 2 strands or 1 strand depending on the effect needed.  I'm using two different variegateds for the green and there'll be a variegated red coming soon.

Not a brilliant pic because I'm using my scanner.  It's quicker and easier than using the camera for WIPS.

The third project is my alphabet sampler for my friend's new baby boy.  I shifted the letters around to include his name... 

I'm so pleased with the wobbly lower case letters!  I charted them myself on a piece of graph paper and they looked a little upright and straight so I kind of free-styled them on the fabric.  I'll be adding Big Sis's name further down.  This chart was published in Cross Stitcher magazine this year.

There's also a charting project called "I Blame Karen" after Stitchy Woman.  She makes these throwaway comments on stitching forums which set my mind ticking and before I know where I am, I'm surrounded by pieces of sketch paper, graph paper, charts and being accused of being a "Manus-o-phile".  Non-Latin speakers will have to wait to see if this ever comes to anything other than an in-joke and a moment of madness on paper.

Finally, the Easter Treasure Hunt was a HUGE success, it was so much fun blog-hopping to see the letters.  There was only one Picture Poster who couldn't make it, she was away for the weekend but everyone managed to guess the missing letter!!  I'll keep the entries secret until the Friday deadline just in case anyone is behind in their blog-reading.  I used the Easter weekend to catch up on mine, I only have today's posts outstanding and have been commenting all over the place which I love to do.