Cross Stitch Collection

I`ve been (literally) snowed under for a week now - although if I`m honest, it could be a lot worse than the couple of inches we`ve had so far: I could be staying in e.g. Ballater and spend my precious time shovelling two feet of snow, instead of sitting in my cozy living-room, furiously stitching. OK, at the moment NOT so furiously, since I`ve had a little mishap. The design I`m working on now is a mandala-type intricacy by Durene Jones for Cross Stitch Gold - actually, it`s more like a henna tattoo, using a lot of DMC 902 (garnet) as the basic colour with some pink, orange and electric blue to accentuate and, of course, a lot of gold (metallic thread and beads as well) to make it sparkle. Unfortunately, I only got one skein of garnet and it looks like I`ll need more like four, and Anne must be on holiday or off sick because it`s very unlike her not to answer my email for days - anyhoo, after running out of the main colour, I did whatever else I could but now I just have to wait for the replenishment (unless Hubby takes me to Kirkcaldy on Saturday - I will NOT drive in the snow! - where I can buy some). In the meantime, I`m itching to get on with my little chefs but I don`t want to get another big project out, in case I get too absorbed in it and then I wouldn`t want to go back to "the job". So as a something-in-between, I started to play with this cross stitch clock I`d picked up a few weeks ago for £3 in a charity shop:

I think I`ll give it to my mother-in-law for her birthday (unless I decide to keep it in the meantime). Of course, I could also use this mini-break to get on with my knitting: I want to make some hats for the Woolly Brew girls` new appeal and my second teddy square, technically, couldn`t even be called a square as it`s only 5 rows so far but last weekend I got a far more important job from The Boss. Gregory came to me with a fully developed picture in his head concerning a little alien that he wanted me to stitch for his gang of teddies to experiment on (?). So I "just" had to follow his instructions and make it the right size (he made me unpick the legs twice because they were too long and too wide!) - so here`s the result:

He even drew the eyes on a piece of paper so I had a template to follow, and he showed me (the little control-freak!) the angle he wanted me to sew them on - as a consequence, my Hubby says it looks more like a little green pig with his blue ears flopped over his eyes, as if playing Peekaboo... Anyway, now that I have the time to write, I thought I`d add some photos of the works I`ve done so far for Cross Stitch Collection (at least the ones that have already come out). As another first, I shall attempt to add a link, rather than a photo, to my blog - starting with the retro Xmas trees that appeared in issue 216. Then there were the thank you cards I stitched for issue 218; and the latest issue (219) has my Mothers` Day owls in it but I couldn`t find a link to this magazine just yet, so here`s a good news-bad news situation: I`ll add my own photos which are much less artistic than the ones taken by a professional photographer... on the other hand, if the links above didn`t work, at least you`ll SEE these, right? OK, I think it`s a nice, long post now so I`d better go and get some work done, not to mention that a picture is worth a thousand words anyway - so here`s another 4000 words` worth:

UPDATE: since this post, I`ve found these too here.