Off to London!

London, United Kingdom. Not London, Ontario.

My plane leaves in about 5 hours and I'll be in London around noon tomorrow. This is my first time in Europe (well, except for the airports that I've sat in while waiting for my connecting flight).

I'm very excited!!! Hopefully the flight will be decent.

Poppy HD

Of all of NC's Pixies so far, only Poppy has screamed out to me to be stitched. I think it's the red dress.
So a month ago I took the plunge and started her and she raced along so very fast.

Of course as I was on the home stretch I found that I was missing one red thread. Fast forward a couple of weeks where Michaels still doesn't have that ONE red thread. So I beaded around it and kept calling Michaels and terrifying the staff. Finally, two days ago, they had it. I dashed out madly, bought it. Got back home and promptly put it to use.

So here is Poppy.
Started on May 15.
Finished June 22.
Took me 42.5 hours.

The fabric is waterlily, but it naturally shows up in all the pictures as a weird kind of gray. Grrr....



I couched all the metallic backstitching. I did about 3 stitches and decided I hated it, and then spent a few hours swearing as I couched the whole bit. I think this pic shows it a bit.



And you can see the wings and all their bling up close here:


Now she goes into storage to await the day I have enough money to take her and everything else in storage to the framer!

In bookish news: I'm working my way though Ian Carmichael's narration of the Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers. And I love him. He really makes Peter seem like a featherbrained rambling smarty. I'm on Strong Poison, and I think the first meeting between Harriet & Peter is so adorable!

Oh, how I love that red dress!

Now I want to dig up my Red Rose of Sharon...

Building a country house.

In the second stage of my one-building-a-year SAL I've been working on the Country House. Not willing to spend for a tiny piece of floss, I've been replacing colours I don't have with sometime similar.
BUT even the colours that are requested show up darker than the model photo when I use them...so I keep changing them until the house looks right to me. Which is not with any of the requested colours!



I have started backstitching the house. But I think I'll switch around and stitch the roof and base next.

The couch is open...

Inspired by all the fabulous bloggers out there, I've decided to throw my adventures out into the world!

Self-patting aside, I'm a very happily single and at 23 a rather youngish cross stitcher from the beautiful frozen North. (Canada, not the North Pole!)
I tend to babble as I go, so there'll probably posts on books I've read and any anime I've recently watched... but I'll try to stick to stitching.

Blu