Know Your 'Shrooms

What do you stitch on bag for a DS? How about the classic mushroom from Mario? What's that you say? The owner hasn't actually played the classic Mario? Why let that stop you?

My brother got himself a DSlite and wanted a simple drawstring bag for it. I'd been looking for an excuse to stitch up Fiona's Mushroom pattern. A simple thing like my brother not being a Mario player wasn't going to stop me!

I wanted to stitch "Grow up" and "Get a life" (because I think that's funny. My sense of humour is such). But he wanted "Game over"...


No border because then it would be very obvious if I mess up the assembly!

Title	Mushrooms
Designer	Fiona
Start date	December 30, 2010
Finish date	January 3, 2011
Total time	8.25 hours
Fabric	32 ct Thunderstorm
Floss	As charted; except I used B5200 instead of white

Best Foot Forward

I have a tradition (currently in it's 2nd year) where I start and finish something very small on New Year's Day. Like a good luck charm. Only stitchy.

I went with The Stitcherhood's Love freebie. This'll work for my February pinkeep. As a sidenote, I'm going ahead with the themed pinkeep idea, except that months will be stitched at random (as I find patterns I like). And I think I'll save the "finish" finishing part for when I have a few pieces so I can assembly-line it.
I love the red and yellow combination. Not too sure about the pink, but I know I don't want the heart in red or yellow, so...

Title	Love
Designer	The Stitcherhood
Start date	January 1, 2011
Finish date	January 1, 2011
Total time	3 hours
Fabric	32 ct Waterlily Jobelan (I adore this fabric!)
Floss	Kreinik 003HL, CC Goldfish, CC Ruby Slippers, GAST Daffodil

Looking Forward

Happy New Year! Here's hoping everyone's 2011 is filled with all things excellent and piles of stash and tons of stitching!

Now I'm a planner (not so much a do-er), so of course I need to set plans for the year:

1. Work at least 100 hours on Ganesha (He didn't get a stitch last year)
2. Finish at least 10 of my carry-over WIPs
3. End the year with less WIPs than I started
4. Make one (themed?) pinkeep a month
5. Finish Sleepy Hollow so I can wrap up that contest (I haven't forgotten, just...not feeling Halloween)

I think that's a suitable number of vague and specific goals that I may be able to keep.

And more specifically:
Goals for January:
1. Start and finish my New Year's Day small
2. Start my New Year's Start
3. Finish Mushroom and turn it into a drawstring bag
4. Start Cirque des Triangle
5. Start anything else I feel like since it's Guilt Free January! Woohoo!

Statistics And Other (Boring) Facts

Or A Very Very Long Post Where I Wrap Things Up For The Year.

Starting with a look at Goals for December:
1. Stitch on the UFO RR and mail it out Cut it very close since I mailed out on the deadline (and it arrived last)
2. Finish Cirque des Cercles YES!!!!
3. Stitch on the next UFO RR (if CP gets it here before the end of the month) Done

Unexpectedly in December, I:
1. Started and finished Christmas Tree 2009
2. Started Celtic Spring
3. Started Mushrooms

A quick look at everything I stitched this year:
And a look at numbers:
Total finishes: 33 (the 27 pictured, an extra Heart Biscornu since one was eaten by the post, two mini fobs that didn't live past the day, a 2nd Small Token, a hardanger needlebook, and my 2nd exchange)
Pieces started and finished in 2010: 28
WIPs at the start of the year: 8
WIPs at the end of the year: 15 (that doesn't bode well for next year!!!)
WIPs carried over from 2009 and not finished: 3 (I also didn't put a single stitch into two of these

Fastest finish: one of the lost fobs in 1 hour. Of those pictured both the Christmas fob & the Seahorse fob took 2 hours each
Most time consuming piece: Minx
Pieces that took 10 hours or less: 18
Pieces that took between 10 & 50 hours: 10
Pieces that took between 50 & 100 hours: 3
Pieces that took over 100 hours: 1
Total hours (approximately): 825

A Day Late

Why be on time when you can be (un)fashionably late?

Begin with a pot:

Add a somewhat nontraditional tree topper:

Go crazy with the decorations:


End with a sparkly tree:

Start date December 20, 2010
Finish date December 26, 2010
Designer Nora Corbett
Fabric 32 ct opalescent white lugana
Total time 18.75 hours

For anyone planning on stitching this: The urn is most definitely not symmetrical. The entire middle bead portion is not symmetrical and the base is off a bit here and there. Many of the ornaments are not round/oval/any symmetrical shape.

I made lots of little changes here and there to make the urn and some of the ornaments symmetrical. I moved branches around so that ornaments wouldn't be floating at random. The vertical strands of beads are not in the charted colours since that would have red strands with a giant pink bead and I preferred it as a pink strand with a giant pink bead. By the end I was randomly placing beads since I didn't like where they were charted. BUT it's pretty and that's all that matters.

Dancing in Circles

Finished 10 minutes ago.

Cirque des Cercles
Start date January 24, 2010
Finish date December 18, 2010
Fabric 32 ct Lemon Whip Lugana
Floss DMC 115
Total time 97.5 hours

A couple of motifs have been switched around and a couple of stitches are off (but mirrored correctly on the opposite side).

Jolly Good

Finals are over, it's winter break and maybe I'll get some stitching done? But first:

Flashback to, oh maybe, about a week ago? So I open my mailbox and there's a pretty light blue box. With a Royal crest. My first thought was the Queen was sending me mail!!! Then I realized that instead of being called British Mail it's actually called Royal Mail. A slight disappointment (I like the idea of royalty) but I recovered very quick when I saw what Lindsay had sent as part of our exchange.
A lovely purple and green biscornu which now holds court as the largest in my collection, fabric with the cutest stitchy print, and an ornament!

Purple is the September Celtic Knot and green is the October Celtic Knot. Both from Ink Circles. I've been planning to stitch some of Tracy's squares up as a biscornus, so this was just serendipity.

The snowflake (a green one?) was apparently sent because the mail went out late. Ummm. Am I a bad/greedy person if I say I'm glad for Lindsay's over developed sense of guilt? Now I've spent a great deal of time drooling over her beaded works so it gives me great pleasure to hang this pretty up beside the other ornie I won from her last year.

Music to my Ears

Continuing what appears to be a December theme of posts with little stitching, here's what I scored from Berit who's currently decluttering. The entire Mill Hills Harmony set of charts! The whole set! (And yes, that very cute Halloween chart and that yummy silk) but the whole set! I plan on stitching the whole lot together and turning it into a cube finish.

Berit is actually decluttering another lot of stuff right now. She goes by the unscientific (yet simple) method of picking a winner when she feels like it, so if you're interested drop by.

Ocean Waterlilies

Ages and ages and ages ago Veronica had a giveaway that I (among many) won, and ages and ages ago she mailed it off to me, and ages ago I received it. So isn't it about time I shared a picture?



It has the cutest dolphin charm, a gorgeous dark blue central bead and just a tiny bit of pink here and there as a lovely counterpoint. Basically it's very pretty. And adorning my pinking scissors.

A Beehive?

At least that's I thought when I saw the orange "thing". Turns out it's part of a roof.

Round 2 of the UFO RR was Rachel's Wizard of Oz.

Upon arrival:

Upon departure:

Finished off the page and put out a feeler into the next.

TUSAL December

Almost forgot that it's the new moon today.

Butterflies in the Stomach

While it's as fun to give as to receive, they never mention that the giving part comes with a truckload of nervous butterflies!

A while back I put out a shout for anyone who wanted to swap a biscornu and Lindsay agreed to be my guinea pig. She already put up pictures ages ago, and I'm finally getting to mine.

A lot of nerves and indecision later I send this off to her:

Which unwrapped to


Should I admit that I entirely unsure of sending the box and put it away a dozen times and hesitated at the post office with a desperate need to rip apart the package and toss it out?
The prize at the bottom of the pile
The design is a freebie from here. It's actually from a set for the four seasons.

Since no mail-related post is complete without CP bashing, this took about 3 weeks to get there. Can we make it official? 3 weeks to send or receive mail from Canada?

In more mundane news, work is going pretty well. It's the exact same thing I was doing over the summer so no learning curve or anything. BUT I get home pretty late and therefore no stitching AT ALL.

I'm pretty sure everyone (and their dog) knows about the Crazy January Challenge and the spinoff Flip'n Crazy January Challenge. I will not be joining either of these. Mostly since I'm not that crazy! But best of luck to everyone playing.