The time has come to announce my selection for the 2026 HAED SAL on this blog. Should I have done this last month when I announced it on my first Flosstube at the Cozy Oscoey YouTube channel? Yes, absolutely but December was a whirlwind of sickness, travel and trying to make the holidays magical and at the end of it all I realized I did not post anything to the blog for December so here we go. If you have not watched the video, please do! I love talking about my stitching plans! If you have watched it, this should come as no surprise, but I picked The Sun by Edvard Munch who is the painter who completed the famous “The Scream” painting.

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I picked this one because of a few reasons, the number one being that it really struck me when I first saw it. It is so different and clearly painted by a master painter. I wasn’t sure about how it would translate to stitching at first but ultimately decided that it would be beautiful and fun to work on. The color transitions are amazing and so far I have just worked on a little bit of the top left corner but once I get into the rays of the sun it will be cool to see how they blend. Another factor in my decision was that this was not an AI piece of art although I am pretty disappointed looking at the pattern to see that the artist is not mentioned at all as it should be. This piece may be out of copyright but the original artist should be credited nonetheless.

I am stitching mine 1 x 1 on 25 count easy grid because that is what I used for Innocent Dreams and I liked how quickly it went. This piece though has so far been super challenging for some reason. I really have only stitched some of the grey at the top left and I have frogged it once and just noticed a huge mistake half way through my stitches so I may have to frog the bottom half of my stitching. I am not brave enough to all of one color at a time like a lot of other stitchers in the 2026 HAED SAL group but I am working on all of a color in a larger section to keep things moving along.

So far I am about 150 stitches in and am working on my second color. It just looks like some splotches of grey so far but you can clearly see where the first ray of sun will go. I missed a stitch down in the 4th box from the top on the very left and will have to frog most of what is below it. I am tackling it this week and hope to make some significant progress on this piece in January. I am determined to finish this year! No major life changes are planned and now that I have a solid place to stitch again with good lighting it will be much easier to get through it. On a side note, I also want to finish Innocent Dreams this year so that project is not hanging over my head for years. I know that if I don’t get it done this year it will never get done!

Look for more updates on this piece as well as all of my other WIPs both here and on the Cozy Oscoey YouTube channel this year!

Which piece did you decide on?

Links:

@CozyOscoeyHobbies YouTube Channel

8″ Embroidery Hoop

Flosstube No. 1

Information about The Sun by Edvard Munch painted in 1909

2026 SAL For Heaven and Earth Designs

2025 SAL for Heaven and Earth Designs

It’s that time of year again! The new patterns for the 2026 HAED SAL have been released and sign ups are open through December 14, 2025. Don’t miss your chance to join me in stitching a new pattern this year! There is a Facebook group full of lovely people to stitch along with and if you meet the goals set by Heaven and Earth Designs you will receive free patterns at the end of the year. They also are giving out free patterns based on how many stitchers sign up for the SAL so sign up if you are interested!

For reference, I am just now barely finished with my first page of Innocent Dreams by L&L Designs for the 2025 SAL. I am stitching this on 25 count Evenweave 1×1 and it goes really fast when I am actually stitching it but I had to put it down for many many months this year due to our move and some life circumstances. I have been stitching on it most days for the past month and made significant progress. I usually can stitch about 300-500 stitches a day and Innocent Dreams is 85,264 stitches total so if my pace is 300 stitches a day it would take just over 284 days to complete which is totally doable. You would need to average 200 stitches a day to complete this piece in one year but HAED did release it early over the Christmas holiday so I feel like as long as you put in a longer day once a month it is feasible to finish Innocent Dreams within a year for even a slower stitcher. Keep in mind that even just finishing 6 of the 12 full pages is enough to win the prize of all the other pattern choices for 2025.

The patterns HAED chose for 2026 are all gorgeous! I am having a really hard time choosing which one to do so it will hopefully motivate me to work through my piece next year and finish it so I can receive all 12 patterns a the end of the year. Some of the pieces this year are cropped versions of larger kits and others are new never been seen before designs. The panda with wings is part of a larger piece that I absolutely love so I will try and do the larger piece. Same goes for the tower on the top right.

Once of the pieces I am seriously considering is Glistening Wings by L&L Designs. This pattern is by the same designer as Innocent Dreams which I was really happy with this year but it is a little bit more colorful and I think it would look great if I added in some sparkly stitches along with the called for threads. To be part of the contest you do need to use called for threads in the design by HAED but I will need to check if it will be ok to then also add in some sparkles to make the wings shine. I would double check though if you are doing a pattern to see if your substitutions are following the rules.

This design finishes to the above dimensions on 25 count with 87,020 stitches total. You would need to stitch an average of 240 stitches a day in 2026 to finish this piece by the end of December deadline. I looked at the floss usage chart and there is a lot of black in this piece which looks to be mostly in the outlines. It is beautiful and I do like the rendering so it will be a fun piece to stitch. It would be especially fun to stitch the flower on the bottom right after doing so much background with the leaves and sunshine on the rest of the edges.

The other piece I am strongly considering is Stone Cottage Keep also by L&L Designs. I love the flowers and have not done a landscape pattern yet so I would love to try one. In looking over the floss usage chart it also looks like this pattern does not have any black (310) in it which is fascinating to me as I have never seen a pattern without any black at all in it!

I was thinking that Stone Cottage Keep would finish a little bit smaller than Glistening Wings but it is actually slightly larger at 88,145 stitches. You would need to only complete one or two extra stitches a day at 241.5 stitches daily to complete it within one year so the extra stitches are not significant in terms of how much longer it will take to complete if you look at the daily rate. If you are nearing the end of December though and facing a time crunch that extra thousand or so stitches will make a difference in your completion success possibility for sure!

I will probably be on the fence for at least a couple of more weeks while I try and figure out which piece to stitch. Both are good choices and I love them. Hopefully next year I will finish mine and then receive all 12 pieces so theoretically it won’t matter because I will finish and receive all of them right? I will announce which piece I choose on my new YouTube channel Cozy Oscoey in another week or two so stay tuned!

Which piece is your favorite?

Please Note: HAED deadlines are firm and having a Facebook account is required. Please also read through all of the requirements as if you do not fill out surveys as required HAED will refund your chart purchase and you won’t be able to participate.

Links:

2026 Heaven and Earth Designs SAL

Cozy Oscoey

2025 SAL for Heaven and Earth Designs

Hello my stitching friends! I thought I would post an update on my progress for my 2025 Heaven and Earth Designs Stitch a Long project, Innocent Dreams by L&L Designs. I started this at the beginning of the year and although I made great progress at the start of the year life smacked me in the face and I couldn’t work on it again until recently. I now have time to work on it after looking at it longingly for the past few months and I am super excited about it! My original post is linked below.

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2025 SAL for Heaven and Earth Designs

I am not sure if you can even tell from my last progress photo posted to Instagram in February and below, but I added a bunch of one dark green color to fill in a bunch of gaps on the left bottom and top right.

Can you tell the difference? Even I am having a hard time but rest assured, I completed a couple hundred stitches at least and the left hand side is much farther down than before as all of the spaces were filled in and more was added. Hopefully next month I will have made more progress that the last 8 months total!

Another part of the project I am really behind on is bobinating my threads. I have really only used a few thread colors so far, mostly dark green shades, and I only have a handful of threads on bobbins in my designated thread box. For this project I decided to bobinate as I went as I wanted to get a quick start on it so my thread box still looks very bare.

I do have all of my threads though which is such a relief. I am super excited about all of the purple colors once they start needing to be used as purple is my favorite color! I will not start bobinating the remaining threads for a bit unless I need things to do during sports practices. For now I am working on one of my diamond paintings at sports practice because it is easier to transport than my stitching but I did finally break down and buy a pair of magnifying glasses for stitching on the go which I will review once I have used them a bit. If you are curious they are linked below in the links section.

This is what my piece should look like when it is finished. I am also super excited to see what patterns will be part of the 2026 SAL but I do not know when they will be released yet. Hopefully I will finish my piece this year and qualify for the other patterns but at this rate I will have to work really hard every day to get it done. I just got my final installment for 2025 and can’t wait to keep working on it!

My goal is to finish the first page in the next week and then add the full pattern to my pattern app (Markup R-XP) and see how many stitches I need to do to finish by the deadline of 12/15/2025. The first goal is to finish 6 pages and with the ultimate goal of finishing all 12 pages. Yikes!

Do you think I will finish on time?

Links:

Heaven and Earth Designs

Amazon Affiliate Supplies:

Magnifying Headset

Thread Storage Box

Bobbins

2025 SAL for Heaven and Earth Designs