August Stitch from Stash and Pie

Well, August turned out to be a very productive month, with no fewer than 5 finishes!

Here is the Pie:

Yes, those couched lines on the Discworld Mappe took nearly 2 weeks to stitch.  To be fair, some of those days were very short because it was sometimes difficult to get the enthusiasm to start on them.  I also stitched the lovely silver stars around the edge of the Mappe.  I intend to do a full post this week dedicated to the Mappe, so I will show lots of photos then.  In the meantime, here's another full picture of it:

stitched on 32 count Murano custom-dyed by Sparklies

Holly Noel by Just Nan was the first finish at the start of the month and then it took 20 days to get another finish.  This is the Alice freebie from Passion Creative:

stitched on 28 count linen from a Crafty Kitten grab bag

The original is charted in two shades of grey but I knew I wanted blue for Alice.  Originally I planned to use the dark blue for all the darker stitching but having done her eyes I realised it was just too dark.  So I used the intended lighter blue for the rest of the dark stitching and chose a new light blue.  I love the way this turned out and hope to scrapbook it very soon.

The next finish up was my Summer Sampler SAL with Leonore.  We have both been stitching Just Nan's Morning Meadow over the last eight weeks.  Here's my finish:

stitched on 32 count pale green linen (matches DMC 772)

I didn't have all the charted threads or beads so I substituted blended DMC for the Caron Waterlilies, standard DMC for the Perle and beads which I did have in my stash.

I also made those bunnies darker so they would show up better

This is a very early Just Nan - JN013 copyright 1993, the year I started stitching.  She uses some absolutely wonderful speciality stitches in this sampler.  Some I was familiar with and some that were new to me.  The butterfly stitches are fantastic and I like the satin stitch flowers too.  She uses Mosiac Stitch to great effect, there's so much texture in this piece.  I do wish she would do more band samplers but I have several in my collection so I can't complain too much!

Another Just Nan was the final finish for the month.  This is Jasmine Mix, 49 x 49 stitches but 17 colours and 1 kind of bead:

stitched on 32 count Vintage Country Mocha linen

I absolutely love this one.  The way the B5200 just pops off the fabric and those gorgeous dark pinks, the splashes of yellow.  Great little design.

I did purchase a little treat this month.  I saw a former shopowner selling off some Just Nan exclusive kits from when she owned a shop, for a bargain price and had to snatch one up!  Then the Just Cross Stitch Hallowe'en Special came out so that's an essential purchase.  It is very good this year, now I just have to figure out how to fit a couple of the designs into the rotation!

August
Just Nan Regency Roses	£8.50
JCS Halloween mag	£7.50
Total	£16.00

Finally, with only 2 days left in the month after completing Discworld I decided to pick up a very old project.  So old, it's not even on my WIP list as I didn't discover it until I was stash-diving for old finished pieces to FFO.  This is Bramble Harvest from Needlepoise charted by Judith Stanley in the days of hand-written charts.  This is just the cover, I literally have some blackberries and a row of Fly Stitches and it's a finish!

look at that price tag - £7.50 for an entire kit!