Stitching update time! My goal was to update once a month but we were so busy in the garden that I barely got any time to stitch until a couple of weeks ago. I had to pause all work on my birthdate alphabet sampler to work on a present for my mom for Mother’s Day.  I didn’t finish it in time but I should have it complete in the next week or so.  I found this cat butt pattern in the Freudian Stitch shop on Etsy. My mom is not a fan of cats and I have been giving her cat things just to make her laugh.  She loves my stitching so when I saw this pattern I knew I had to stitch it.  I showed it to her on Mother’s Day (unfinished) and I should hopefully finish it soon.

I am really enjoying stitching the cat butt pattern.  It flows really well and I love how easy it is to count the stitches in between the cats.  I have had to substitute a couple of colors since I could not find them in my gigantic boxes of thread and I didn’t have time to go to the store until after Mother’s Day.

I went through my stitching boxes yesterday to see what I could find in there and I am ashamed to admit I have several WIPs that I had forgotten about and several patterns with thread in various stages of being kitted up.  I am a huge fan of the Heaven and Earth Designs website and have purchased quite a few (ie more than 10) of their patterns.  To date I have finished exactly one of them.  It still isn’t framed properly but it took me three years to stitch off and on and I am super proud that I actually finished such a big project.  It was the Cairns Bird Wing pattern by Teri Rosario and I loved stitching it.

I have this huge project I started about three years ago called “Computer Wizard” by Randal Spangler.  It is a gigantic project with about 90 full pages of stitches to do.  I have completed about half of a page of it which seems crazy with all of the time I spent on it.  I have not worked on it in a few years though but I hope to put it back in the rotation soon.

Here is a picture to show the scale of “Computer Wizard” My cat butt project is on a standard hoop and will fit into a 4×6 picture frame when it is complete.

I worked a little on my alphabet birth date project but most of my limited time was spent on the cat butt project.  I am really please with how the alphabet project is coming along.  I just wish I had more time to stitch it but as soon as the cats are done I will switch back to this one since it needs to be finished ASAP and it doesn’t require using a magnifying light. My eyes get tired really fast using the light so I can’t stitch as long as I want to.

Progress! I extended the blue border and got some of the yellow squares complete.  Hopefully I can finish this block and another by the end of June.

Half kitted thread set for “Sundae Delight” by Randal Spangler. I have quite a few of his pieces.  I love his work!

This is a piece I bought of of Etsy a number of years ago.  It is a Halloween Dachshund sampler I got from Plum Street Samplers that I started when I first started stitching and forgot about.   I spent more time than I should have carefully placing these stitches but I looked at it again and I am not sure if I cut my fabric large enough so I will have to measure it out again to double check.

This is another Randal Spangler piece.  It is a quick stitch, which in Heaven and Earth Designs means it doesn’t always use the full picture and the colors are not as detailed but it still has quite a bit of confetti and details.  It is called “Literate Dragon“.  I am having a really hard time with this one.  I picked the quick stitch so that I could finish it in about a year.  There are only four full pages and a few not even half pages so the pace wasn’t super fast but it is proving very difficult to stitch.  I am having a hard time finding my rhythm and every time I pick it up I just get frustrated and barely make any progress.  I am going to try again in a couple of months depending on my progress with the alphabet piece.

I have a few other pieces I have sort of kitted up, patterns that have been printed but no thread purchased and possibly a couple of starts still stashed away but I was a little overwhelmed by how much I need to work on when I went through everything so the rest of it will stay on the back burner for a while. I also need to desperately organize my extra thread, fabric and random stitching accessories and hopefully now that we have a dedicated sewing space I will finally be able to organize it instead of having my stitching stuff stashed all over the house. My goal is to have the sewing room organized this fall once everyone is in school and I have more time (ha ha!).  Now off to work on my cat butt project!

Happy stitching!