Dearest Edward

What a surprise - four calling birds arrived this morning.  They are very sweet, even if they do call rather loudly - they make telephoning impossible.  But I expect they'll calm down when they get used to their new home.  Anyway, I'm very grateful - of course I am.
Love from Emily

12 Days of Christmas (Correspondence) - John Julius Norwich

Joan Elliott has gone for the modern Calling Birds (1909 version only) rather than the traditional Colly Birds (1700s onwards) which are blackbirds.  I expect she liked the blue rather more than black!

If you are interested in the different versions, check out this Wiki page - The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Two versions have Canary Birds, some have Coloured Birds and one has Ducks Quacking (1864), so Emily got off quite lightly there!

I have decided to stitch all the background parts of each block with just one strand so they don't overpower the main feature.  I also changed the French Knots to tiny over one crosses to make them more even.

Here is the whole piece so far.  I have stitched all the red on the second Angel and will continue the border this month.

Theme-tas-stitch is hosted by Kerry

Each month Kerry is giving us a theme to stitch to (or shoe-horn our existing stitching into).  We link up on the 21st of each month.  The theme this month is:

April Showers - What pieces do you have that contain water?  It might be rain, river, sea or lake - see how many stitches you can make!

We need a gigantic shoe-horn for this one, nothing watery at all unfortunately.  The first piece is my Just Nan So Many Stitches project.  I started this as part of March Madness for Theme-tas-stitch and then have continued to put 30 stitches per day into the project.  Today I added some Ice beads.  Ice is frozen water.

Stitched on 32 count Antique White evenweave

That was the small shoe-horn, now the large one.  What needs water to survive?  What do we always say when it rains?  "Oh well, it's good for the garden".  So here's a little garden:

This is Just Nan's Spring in the Square - Day 112.  So that's 1,120 stitches doing just Ten-a-day for the FB challenge.  Recently I've been adding lots of colour to the flowers.

Here's a larger garden:

This is Gathering Honey by Jannlynn.  Last time I stitched on this I completed the top left hand corner which was very time-consuming with all the colour changes and fiddly fractionals.  This time I have finished the entire border (yay!) and the top right corner.

I stitched the bees first:

And then added the honeycomb around them.  For the bottom left corner I will backstitch the bees after the honeycomb because some of their legs got a little lost doing it first.  The honeycomb is three strands of thread and the legs are only one.

Hopefully I can complete the bottom left this month and then focus on the bottom right next month.  That's more fiddly flowers.  Then there's some writing to add top and bottom and it's done!  So if not a May finish, then it should be one for June.

Finally, thanks to everyone who took part in the Easter Treasure Hunt Blog Hop.  The competition is now closed and I will be drawing and announcing the winner in my TUSAL post on Wednesday.  My Blogaversary draw will continue until the end of the month.  Don't forget, anyone who links up for GG gets an extra entry into that draw.