November IHSW

IHSW or International Hermit and Stitch Weekend always starts on the third Friday of the month.  It's a chance to lock yourself away and focus on your stitching for the weekend.  You can take part on your blog or via the Facebook page.  Links at the bottom of this post.

This month I focused on the Discworld Mappe by Lyndisfarne Designs.  Here's where I was on Friday:

And here's where I am now:

Genua is a country across the main continent from Ankh-Morpork, past the Ramtops and Überwald. Genua as a country makes its money by taxing the Vieux River traffic in a manner that cannot be called piracy, because it's the government doing it.

At some point the royal family of Genua died out due to inbreeding over the generations, which had become so bad that the last male heir kept trying to breed with himself. With the line extinct Genua requested that Ankh-Morpork nominate a suitable new king. They rewarded their most successful general Tacticus, making him a duke and sending him to Genua. As the new king of Genua his first act after assuming the throne was to declare war on the biggest rival: Ankh-Morpork. This led to the downfall of the Empire of Ankh-Morpork.

In more recent times the city was ruled by Baron Saturday regarded by some as a wicked ruler, but able to get away with it due to his good looks and charming smile. Chaotic though his rule may have been, most people remember it with fondness when the Baron was overthrown and replaced by the Duc and the fairy godmother Lilith. Under the tyranny of Lilith Genua became a fairy tale city, clean, tidy and full of happy people (if they wanted to stay alive that is). As Nanny Ogg put it "why do they need all these guards all over the place when everyone is so quiet and well behaved?". Theft was punished by decapitation, but so was the crime of 'not fitting it' as toy makers were locked up for not singing while they worked and innkeepers were imprisoned for not being fat enough.

Genua is a country of cooks and carnivals. It is said that in Genua there is not much to cook, so the cooks learn to turn anything and everything into a gourmet meal. Ingredients that might make an Ankh-Morporkian or a Lancrastian feel ill include: whiskery things, tentacled things, snake's head (animal product, not name of a plant), dead leaves, things dredged out of mud. The annual carnival is called Fat Lunchtime, where there is costumed dancing and drinking on the streets on the night of Samedi Nuit Mort.

Source: L-Space

As you can see from the little paddle steamer, Genua draws many characteristics from New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A, and is also partly based on Disney's Magic Kingdom.  In addition it is the German name of the Italian town of Genoa.
Here is the whole piece now, to give you an idea of where I am, the mountain with the cloud round it named Cori Celesti is the centre of the world and the design.

stitched on 32 count custom-dyed Murano from Sparklies

I completed another one of the Words from Jessica Savage in Cross Stitcher magazine.  This one is Create:

stitched over one on 25 count blue evenweave

We have four so far:

A few people have said that they don't do Facebook and asked if I could host a link-up for them, so here it is! Just add your name and the link to your actual IHSW post, not just your blog home page.

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Finally, the next IHSW will be 20th - 21st December so make sure you note the date in your diary or come and join us in the Facebook Group - IHSW on Facebook. If you don't do Facebook then you can check in here.  I appreciate this is the weekend before Christmas so I think the challenge will be to get ANY stitching done at all!  I am working on the Saturday, but not the Sunday.  At least I get a lunchbreak for stitching at work!