July TUSAL

And now it's TUSAL time, the Totally Useless SAL where we all show our ORTS and link-up on Daffycat's blog (if she makes a post, she's gone very quiet again).

Here is my TUSAL jar with my current projects:

On the left we have the two sides of the Just Nan Butterfly Needlebook:

stitched on 28 count pink evenweave

The side on the left is all finished except for the beads and my initials.  The side on the right needs the pink shades adding.

 The other design is my Christmas Ornament for the month.  For July we can choose any design from the 2006 issue of Just Cross Stitch Ornament Special.  I went for this one from The Sweetheart Tree to co-ordinate with their Noel Christmas Noel Bellpull.  This is Christmas Joy Bellpull: 

stitched on 32 count linen

What I did not realise is that it is simply a smaller version of the Noel ornament!  Or rather, Noel is a larger version of Joy, as Joy was published first.  The designer clearly ran out of time for a new design and thought "I can duplicate the leaves, add an eyelet and have a new ornament"!

I stitched both of them using a DMC conversion and the same beads from my stash.  I will finish Joy in the same way as Noel.

Rachel, the Ten Hour Stitcher made a blog post recently about the DUCJC 2016 which sparked my interest.  Debbie the SoCal Stitcher was a blogger who started the whole Crazy January Challenge with 15/31 starts every January.  Sadly she passed away and was sorely missed by her blogging friends.  I took part in the DUCJC in 2015 (Debbie's Ultimate Crazy January Challenge) which I decided meant working on 31 projects in January, some WIPs, some new starts.

Rachel got me wondering how many were ever finished.  As luck would have (or serendipity?) 13th July is Debbie's Birthday.  So I thought it would be good to make a post about my own 2015 challenge and find out how many got completed.  Here's a chance for you to join in - either show your own DUCJC pieces or take a guess how many out of my 31 projects got finished!  Here's the collage of the projects I worked on that year:

Finally, there will be a Summer Blog Hop this year.  We will have an International Theme for the Postcards this year.  Each person emails me a photo of something they have stitched on an International theme which is suitable to send to a fellow stitcher along with a short message of the kind you write on a postcard.  I will forward the photo to another participant who shows it on their blog.  The photo can be anything which fits the International theme, let's see which countries we visit this Summer.  If you'd like to take part then leave a comment or send me an email.

The Hop will run over the whole of the Summer with a few cards going out each week.  Final deadline will be the end of August, just in time for Back to School!