Rome update (mostly)

I`m tidying up my magazines and only just realised that last month I forgot to post about these wedding cards! 😳 Luckily, I have the time now to rectify the problem (hence the tidying of magazine shelves, etc. because I plan to repaint the bedroom). So:

These easy-to-personalise cards by Megan Caines of Meloca Designs were featured in issue 320 of The World of Cross Stitching, and I had great fun stitching them as they were just the right blend of get-on-with-it-quick-symmetrical (handy when time is of the essence!) and something-unique-to-this-particular-card-before-symmetry-gets-monotonous. 😊

So as I have mentioned, I`m trying to make the most of being between commissions at the moment, running around the house cleaning, painting, reorganising - but I also dug out some of my own projects that I hadn`t seen for months and months, e.g. this Autumn cottage by Carol Thornton from Gold 140:

My progress on this is frustratingly slow, not only because of work commitments but also because in my wisdom, I picked this pale yellow aida from my stash, and if you`d ever heard me moan about cardboard thick fabric that I have no choice but work on, you`d wonder why I put myself through this misery voluntarily, but waste not want not, amirite, and this freebie that came with a kit or a magazine was the perfect size for this project, so on I plod, I suppose... 🤷

However, just to give my poor hands a wee break, yesterday I also dug out my Rome stitching from under the bed - er, not that holding this rigid tube of linen is much easier after a while, but I desperately want to see some progress on this one too. I had to go back to a post in 2020 😲 to see where I last wrote about this Thea Gouverneur design - looks like the last time I took a photo, I`d just finished the first A3 page of 10:

This was in December 2020, and I must have picked it up at some point since then because I have some of the Spanish Steps done, so I`m just plodding on with those horizontal lines at the moment, hoping to reach the right edge of the design before I have to put this away again - I`m about to start Page 10 in the bottom right corner, I`m so excited! 😀

As I was reading this older post, I also realised that I`m mentioning there how I spent four days going through all the threads, matching them up to my DMC stash (in case I run out of a colour - I don`t like that kind of pressure when I`m stitching), but I never showed y`all the storage system I upgraded from 3 cushions to just one folder, and since I`m supposed to be giving some tips here 😉, I thought I`d share it with you, in case any of you finds it a handy idea.

So this was my original setup, something I just quickly came up with when I opened the kit because I wanted to start stitching straight away (er, and some think I have the patience of a saint?!? 😂). But I soon realised that not only did these 3 cushions take up a lot of space, there was also the danger of my needles with leftover threads disappearing into the cushion, so I needed another solution. Eventually, I ended up buying some of these numismatic sheets: there are various sizes of pockets, depending on what the coin collector wants to store/display in them; I chose the 12-pocket pages because these are small enough to store just a few lengths of threads but not too small so that my fingers would struggle to get the threads out (plus, the design uses 119 colours, so 10 pages worked out perfectly).

I decided that the easiest (for me) way to find a thread is to group the symbols by shape - I admit, this pic is not the best example, there are easier ones like squares or triangles... I guess this page is the `they have a dot somewhere in them` group 😂. Anyway, hope some of you will find this idea useful, thanks for visiting and happy stitching! 

The World Of Cross Stitching 269

This week the latest issue of WOCS is out and in it there are 2 (very different!) projects that I stitched. Fiona Baker`s under the sea motif library was a treat, like something sweet after a meal; I was working on a big project at the time... I think it was the tiger...? Yes, it was, because I remember thinking these small pieces of powder blue aida were such a relief to my wonky eyes after each session on the black evenweave. 😊 So I stitched one every evening after I finished for the day with the tiger; they were funny, fun and varied too - one on plastic canvas, the other on aida band, etc.

And the finished results ended up being just as varied: from cards to key rings, from pencil cases to bookmarks. And I loooove the mini canvas on the easel - I actually have some of these in my stash so I might need to make one for myself someone. 😉

The other project in the same issue is this romantic wedding wreath by Shannon Wasilieff. When I was stitching it, there had been no mention of a royal wedding yet, so originally it was finished for an imaginary couple:

But then the wedding date of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was announced and the quick-thinking team at the magazine re-stitched the two names and modified the date - it would have been a sin to miss such an opportunity, this wreath could have been tailor-made for the royal wedding and has been published at the perfect time too to commemorate the big day this weekend. But there is an alphabet with which readers can personalise the design to suit the couple they wish to stitch it for, and it does look stunning framed in a hoop. It took 35 hours (I don`t know why the magazine says 38 - sounds better? *shrugs*), 9 of which were taken up by adding the 1042 beads - yes, I counted them. I`m that anal. *shrugs again* I can also imagine a card with just one of those roses on it...? So all in all, a very good issue of WOCS, full of versatile, usable charts - I`ve already put Amanda Gregory`s blackwork flowery cards on my to-do list, all six as a sampler (as I don`t really do cards). So one day, when I have loooooads of time... 😉🤣😂