I don`t write often but when I do, I write a lot :)

I thought before I disappear for another half a year, I`d better do something about the promised photo montage - and I have to say, the project didn`t start out too well. Trying to save myself the trouble of going through six months` worth of photo archives, I thought I`d just simply look up e.g. Bothy Threads` website and cut-and-paste pictures from there... Problem is, I could only find 1 of the 3 (Hen Fun) and the other two, Sand Castle and Paddington Sports are either not available yet or they`ve been re-named. In either case, I don`t think I should attach their pictures here from my own collection but here`s the official version of my first one:

This week so far hasn`t been a great success story in general, anyway. After posting my latest assignment last Tuesday to Anne for Card Shop (some lovely Fathers` Day cards by Jenny Barton, by the way), I experienced that "school is out for the summer!" feeling for the second time since last May: I had no other job lined up, so I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. I was spoiled for choices and my head was reeling... Should I get my La Scapigliata out from its hiding place where it`s been gathering dust (just kidding! It`s safely packed away, especially as since I`ve started working on it, we`ve moved house AGAIN!). Or should I knit for a change? Or start a new stitching project? Eventually, I decided on the latter and started something for my Gran`s 80th birthday this April. There was a freebie calendar that came with the World of Cross Stitching (issue 195) that, incidentally, contained one of my works, the cat bride by Margaret Sherry (top right):

I started to stitch the three little chefs (bottom, middle) because I like to stitch useful things (i.e. not only pictures you hang on the wall) and I thought this bluish design would go well in my Gran`s kitchen, so I`ll laminate it and add another laminated white paper under it, so she can write her shopping list on it with a marker. But in order to do this, the stitching shouldn`t be bigger than A4 - so what did I do? Like a rookie, I cut the fabric first (to my defence, the pattern DID say it`d be 25x14.5 cm on 14 HPI aida) and I`ve already done the dog`s apron and half of his legs when I realised I was running out of space. So I unpicked the whole thing and duly got side-tracked by the usual "so is this piece of fabric wasted now?" dilemma - so I started to stitch a teddy with a birthday cake for my Mum (whose birthday is in February - my Mum`s, not the teddy`s!) which I managed to muck up THREE consecutive times, after which I decided that this piece of aida is cursed and threw it away, while my Mum`s birthday stitch has gone to the back burner for the now. Anyway, a couple of days ago I re-started the 3 chefs on 16 HPI and I got this far:

So far, I`ve only had to frog it once and luckily, not the whole thing just some of the white at the bottom - I kept miscounting until I photocopied and enlarged the chart so I can mark the squares off with a felt pen (I just hope it`s not a sign of my eyesight getting worse! Although that`d still be better than me getting sloppy - especially as I got an email from Anne yesterday and a new job is in the post so I`d better get my act together!). Oh, and in the meantime I knitted a reversible teddy square, as the first installment of (what I plan it to become), a baby blanket made up of different coloured squares, probably for my (also un-visited for the past six months!) Etsy shop since Gregory is, sadly, not interested in these kind of things any more: