Of course in my list of WIP’s, my Ultimate Cross Stitch Challenge couldn’t be missed. This really is a work in progress, no doubt for many years to come. However, I am having so much fun when I am working on it. That doesn’t happen often, as there are usually other more pressing projects, but I hope to be able to put in some more stitches over the next week or so.

Here is how far I am right now:

I am working at the very top at the moment, this is how tall the whole piece will be. The rabbits and ewe are from Spring has Come, I will add the other seasonal charts in their respective parts of the linen. The little square below that is from Birdsong II. There will be another design from either Birdsong I or II next to it.

It’ll be interesting to see how far along I’ll be a year from now.

Enjoy your Christmas Eve, I most certainly will. Miss Murphy is curled up on the couch, I have a nice dinner ready to be warmed up and the rest of the evening it is Harry Potter, the couch, some delicious coffee and my stitching. Tomorrow will be the final day of my 25 Days of Christmas.

It is hard to believe that it’s just a little over a day before it’s Christmas. Fortunately, there isn’t much left to do. Christmas cards are sent, presents are bought, food is in the fridge and most importantly, my stitching is all set to go. What more could a girl want for Christmas?

Today I have pictures of our Stitching Book, which is a workshop that will end in January. Not all of the pages are done yet, most of them are stitched, but the assembling will have to take place at one time. My mom already has put together 2 pages to show how it would look, the rest will have to wait till the designs are drawn and the stitching is done.

This page says: Where the needle goes, the thread follows

It’s a wonderful project, time-consuming but worth every minute (or hour) of it. Once it is all completed, there will be a design with finishing instructions available, but that might take a while.

Next one up is, very apropriate for the season, a Christmas WIP. This is the three Santa’s design in our Christmas book of the year: Sint Niklausbuch by MWI Stickgaleri. We discovered this book in June and it’s been a smashing hit ever since. This is a book of which I could stitch every single design that’s in there. As you can’t see any faces yet, it’s a wee bit hard to distinguish the 3 santa’s, but believe me, they are there.

That’s it for today, I have a great WIP lined up for tomorrow. Gotta think about which one I’ll save for Christmas day. Maybe a Christmas project that I start on Christmas day? It’s been a tradition to start a Christmas project on December 25th for quite some years now. And trust me, it’s not for lack of projects hanging around the house, screaming to be started. They sometimes remind me of the Mandragora’s in the Harry Potter movie. Some of them are really loud you know .

Edited December 22nd:

for some reason I saved this as a draft instead of publishing it. So I’ll just publish it tonight and have another post tomorrow . Enjoy.

I just realized that there are only 5 more posts left, I’d better go look around to the best WIP’s I have to share . Which means if you do the math, that there may actually be more than 25 WIP’s in this house. Hmmmm, food for thought for 2010.

This is a good oldie, Jeannette Douglas’ s Stitching Treasure. Beautiful, beautiful design, lush silk threads and heaps of specialty stitches. I got more or less stuck with the over one stitching. Which is a pity coz I have seen this one finsihed with the embellishments and the box and let me just tell you it is drop dead gorgeous.

OK, I have no idea why this picture looks so weird. I’ve uploaded it twice and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. You’ll have to believe me that the original is much, much better looking .

I need to think some more about the next four WIP’s. There are at least 2 that I know I want to share, as for the other 2, I’ll have to make a choice. The good thing is that one of the WIP’s shown in this series is no longer a WIP anymore. It’s all done, but I can’t show it for a while.

It seems that the snow around here is a work in progress as well. If I thought that driving away through 50cm of snow on Friday was bad, try driving away through 35cm of frozen snow instead on Saturday. Definitely not my cup of tea. I managed to park the car yesterday evening, courtesy of a snow shovel that I got from mom and dad, otherwise I really don’t know what I would have done.

Last night and today it has been snowing on and off and I think we gained another 15cm. Needless to say, I didn’t went outside to actually measure the amount of snow > It’s been pretty crazy, no buses outside, hardly any cars, it’s really quiet and I think most people stay inside. I just got settled on the couch and stitched.

As for my WIP’s, here are another 3 to share with you. First one up is Indigo Rose’s Folding Cross Needlebook. I haven’t touched this one in quite a while, so it might even be a UFO, but I found it in my drawer and just labelled it as a WIP. There’s a bit more to do, I really should sit down and get it done.

Second one is from Indigo Rose as well, it’s a free graph called Cranberry something. It was in one of our newsletters and apparently, I started stitching it and then….. Well, I don’t really know what happened after then. Just another one of those projects that need a wee bit more time. This one even less than the first one.

And finally a project that is not an Indigo Rose one, but one by a dear friend, Lisa from The Primitive Needle. It is called Yule Sampler and has an alphabet and lots of motifs. I started this last year in October after I got back from St. Charles where I met up with Lisa. As you can see, I still have quite a bit to go. There is an uppercase alphabet, a lower case alphabet and numbers 0-9. You do the math, this one will take me a while to get done.

Miss Murphy sends her best wishes, she’s too busy catching up on beauty sleep to come to the blog herself. With all the sleep she’s getting, she’d better be a gorgeous kitty cat when all this snow is over.

I am all caught up now, will be back tomorrow with day 21.

I am running a bit behind with the days of Christmas, first there was the newsletter for the shop to be written, lay-outed (if that’s even a word), copied and made ready for mailing. That pretty much took up the first 3 days of the week. So  on Wednesday I delivered everything to my beloved copyshop, and thought that the stress was over.

Well, I hadn’t exactly counted on this:

This is the view from my kitchen balcony.

And this is from my office at work, that bike you see there, was parked there in the morning and this was around 2pm. It really is a lot of snow .

That’s right, that is one foot of snow at least. And let me tell you that it is highly unusual to have that much snow over here. Especially in December. I can’t remember the last time we even had this much snow here in the northern part of the country, let alone when that happened in December.

It meant that I had to dig up some old boots, plow through the snow to work, getting snow inside my boots as there was more snow than they could handle. No busses were driving, hardly a car on the streets and some poor souls who were brave enough to go through this weather on bicycles. That evening, I couldn’t even go to the shop as it was simply not safe. Nothing had been done to the roads and people were more or less told if you didn’t have to leave your house, then don’t.

Friday morning it all looked better, they had prepped the roads and it made a big difference. So in the car I got and I drove out of 50cm of snow. Don’t know if I want to experience that again, but I made it. And thanks to a wonderful customer and her husband, all the newsletters were in their bags by 3pm that afternoon. Mom and dad brought them to the postal office as I drove home early as there was more snow falling and I wanted to get home before it was dark.

This morning it looks as there hasn’t been more snow, it just froze a lot over the night. I am waiting for some morning light before I make the trip again and want to make sure that the roads have been prepped (they scatter salt over the snow/ice to melt it down). We’ll see.

Fortunately, I discovered that there are enough WIP’s in my stash to keep me occupied even if the snow got up to 3 feet and I wouldn’t be able to leave the house LOL. Here’s another one that I found, it’s BeeKeeper’s Cottage by Shepher’d Bush. I honestly don’t remember when I started this, but it seems that every year, I add another band and then put it back in the drawer again. It’s a lovely design though, and the fabric is handdyed and great to work on.

And of course I have a canvas WIP too (actually more than one, stay tuned there will be more on this weblog). This is a Christmas cracker design that I started a while ago. At the time it seemed very important to start it right away. Apparently my priorities shifted after it was started.

My apologies for the bad lighting and I realize that I should have taken a close up as you can hardly see that it is started anyway.

That’s it for now, I know I’m still a few days behind, but will rectify that in the upcoming days. Have a great weekend and stay warm.

This is cheating a little, as this project has been shown before and I haven’t stitched a single stitch ever since . However, I am running short on time today, just 50 more minutes and December 15th is gone, so I thought I’d better hurry.

It’s one of the threadpacks by Little House Needleworks and I am stitching it over one. As with many of these WIP’s, now that I see it, I’d love to finish it. Oh well, there is always the new year.

And contrary to what you might be thinking, this is actually antique white linen. The lighting was just really bad.

Again a combined post as I was doing other things yesterday, basically being snuggled up on the couch as it is getting colder here, winter seems to be setting in. Miss Murphy and I were in a kind of hibernation, she on and in her woolen blanket and me on the couch. I did a wee bit of stitching, but not much.

Which is why it is so great to have a stack of WIP’s that you can still share when you have no new stitching to share. The first picture is from Carriage House Samplings’  Matter’s Choice. I can’t remember when I started this, but it’s been a while. I am stitching this on 40 count linen over 1 thread with soie surfine handdyed thread by Tentakulum. After stitching 2 projects over 1 on 40 count for others, I decided that I needed one for myself. And as houses are my favorite things to stitch, this was an easy choice. As you can see, I still have hours of fun with this design ahead of me.

The second WIP for today is Quaker Seasons of Friendship by R&R Reproductions. Again, I started this more than a moon ago, and it hasn’t been worked on for a while, but everytime I look at it, I love it. I have decided that I will continue with this Quaker project instead of Moulin Rouge. We’ll see how long it’ll take me to get it completed. The fabric is a wonderful 50 count Italian linen and again it’s soie surfine handdyed threads by Tentakulum. One of the advantages of stitching on 50 count linen, is that it uses very little thread . In case you need an excuse.

Just 11 more days to go before it’s Christmas, I can hardly believe it. Still so much to do.

Either I started this project a really long time ago, or I have never shared a picture of it on my weblog. In any case, this is how far I am today. It’s a lovely piece, I have wanted to stitch it ever since I saw the first picture of it. It took quite a long time to arrive, but when it did, I gathered my supplies and started. Of course it has been terribly neglected over the past months (I am pretty sure I started it sometime in the fall of 2008) but I hope to pick it up again.

I stitched Kitty Cat Row a long time ago and have wanted to stitch another row for so long. When this one came out, I just knew I had to stitch it. We’ll see when it gets done, but I inted to enjoy every minute of it.

Today’s WIP is almost 2 years old. I started this around the time of De Handwerkbeurs in Zwolle in 2008. Thinking I’d be able to whip it up in no time. Halfway through my first snowman, I realized it would take considerably more time to get this done. Over the past 20 months, I have worked on it several times.  The last time was in January this year (oops, that’s longer than I thought). In a few more months we’ll have De Handwerkbeurs again and I am doubtful that this project will be finished.

I have quite a few more projects and new workshops that I need to stitch before I can go back to my WIP’s. So my snowmen will have to stay in the closet for a little longer. But I know they’ll be done at some point. Hopefully in 2010, now that most of the body is stitched, it will go a little quicker.

Though you can’t see it, the fabric is a wonderful iceblue Belfast linen. And the overdyed threads are Weeks Dye Works. Remaining threads are Venus. Good thing these snowmen can’t melt .

Yesterday went by in a flurry, meetings at work, application for a course next year (work-related), lots of writing to do for newsletters and in between I cooked diner, managed to get some stitching done and cleaned up the livingroom. The paperversion newsletter for the shop is due soon and that’s always a big task. However, I have decided what needs to be in this newsletter, I planned the dates for the workshops and found the pics I need, so that’s half of the work .

Miss Murphy was quite annoyed that with all this blog posting that I’m doing, she hasn’t made an appearance yet. I told her that she isn’t a WIP, but more like a permanent fixture but that didn’t do the trick. So here’s a pic of Miss Murphy watching me while I was making the preparations for diner last Saturday.

(“I am not sure what is going on, but I sure don’t like all the hussle and busstle. Where is my woolen blanket anyway?”)

Now that Miss M is happy again (thought I’m sure she’ll have a hissy fit over the picture as it’s not her good side) we can continue with WIP’s. There are still a few more to be found. This has been my One Strand A Day project for the beginning of 2009. I started really well and think that over the first 3 months I really did one strand a day. I am about halfway done, so if I use the first 3 months of 2010 to do the same, I might even get this finished next year. It’s a design by Marjorie Massey, though the name is beyond me at the moment.

And since I didn’t post yesterday, here’s another WIP for today. It’s a Goode Huswife design and again, the name is just not stored on my internal hard drive. I am stitching it with DMC colors on 40 count linen. I started this after I had finished this project. I was so consumed with stitching that covered the linen that I couldn’t help myself and started this project. Needless to say, it’s been sadly neglected due to other obligations and interests . I’ll have to see when I will I can pick this up again. It’s an octagonal design and I remember that I thought it would be nice to keep the shape when finishing it into a pincushion.

That’s it for now, I am going back to my Hedebo stitching. Gotta finish band 3 before tomorrow evening.