Moyland Castle Part 1

I hope everyone had a great weekend! I did. I finished Moyland Castle Part 1 :)

It is amazing how the backstitching really brought the castle to life. The border should be gorgeous too. All the empty spaces are for beads. Lot of bling!

Last week I also finished-finished a garden piece that I stitched last year. I love to garden and thought this piece turned out pretty cute. It was from a Cross-Stitch and Needlework magazine-maybe May 2010??

Lastly, a picture of our cute puppy on her back. She sleeps like this quite often and looks absolutely silly.

Have a great week!

IHSW April

I hope everyone had a great weekend and had some time to stitch!

I worked on Moyland Castle this weekend (and last weekend when we were in Charleston for vacation). The sky is such a vibrant, pretty blue, and I am almost done with the first part too! Yay!

I am going to continue working on this piece until I finish part 1, and then it will be time to work on Japanese Garden :)

Have a great week and I look forward to checking out everyone's work!

Easter finish

I hope everyone had a great weekend! We had beautiful weather for Easter. Sunny, and not too hot :)

I finished a quick little Easter stitch from Bunnies by Prairie Schooler. I loved the duck pulling the bunny :)

I also worked on Hillside Travelers last week and finished off the top half of the design. The bottom half should be fun with all the cute little animals :)

 Lastly, a picture of Mandy:

 When she looks like this (and she does a lot), I feel compelled to play with her! Have a great week!!

Liebster Award!

I was awarded the Liebster Award by Carol at Stitching and Stashing and Shebafudge. I want to say a big thank-you and apologize for taking so long to post it :)

Liebster is a German word meaning favorite, dearest, or beloved. The Liebster is awarded by bloggers to other new bloggers who have fewer than 200 followers to help spread the word about their blogs and to help them gain wider recognition.

The Liebster award comes with four conditions that each recipient must satisfy when accepting.

1. Choose five up-and-coming blogs with less than 200 followers to award the Liebster to.
2. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
3. Post the award on your blog. List the bloggers you are giving the award to with links to their sites. Leave comments on their blog so they know about the award.
4. Share five random facts about yourself that people don't know about you.

It seems like every blog has already been awarded the Liebster award, so I am going to pass on nominating blogs :)


Five random facts about me:
1. I strongly dislike burnt food and will not eat it. My Dad knows how to brown my bratwurst perfectly on the grill-golden, no burnt marks or any hint of blackening.
2. I love rice, especially if it has some sort of sauce with it.
3. My wedding dress was champagne colored. I refused to buy a white wedding dress. White is not one of my favorite colors, and I generally avoid it.
4. My favorite season is fall.
5. I am 29 and have never cooked with chicken-lol. In general, I don't cook many meat dishes-something about meat, and I do not need meat with dinner every night. A big bowl of rice, with a sauce and veggies works great for me. I will work with sausage and hamburger meat though (especially for chili). Good thing hubby will cook with meat otherwise we would be eating mostly vegetarian, which wouldn't bother me : )

Cross-stitch update!

I'm back with lots of cross-stitch pictures! So, pictures first:

Moyland Castle: The open areas in the front lawn are going to be filled with beads. It will be very sparkly!

Japanese Garden: I previously mentioned that my Mississippi Mud had the zebra stripe thing going on, and I then ordered replacement Mississippi Mud from two different places-no luck though : ( This bad thread was really disappointing me and ruining the pattern for me. Finally, I ordered Caron Waterlilies Kelp to replace Mississippi Mud, and I was quite pleased with the result. I used Kelp in the right tree. It's not a perfect match, but much better than the Mississippi Mud, and now I can't wait to get back to stitching on this one : )

I also worked on a couple of month patterns:

March by Little House Needleworks. I loved the little sheep in this pattern.

April by Lizzie Kate. I made several color substitutions using DMC variegated thread.

I also started Hillside Travelers by Little House Needleworks. I am stitching this on 32 count lambswool jobelan. Much to my chagrin, I found a dirty black spot on the fabric, slightly above the right tree in the last picture. Boo! I have not idea how it got there, but hopefully it will come out.

That was a lot of pictures!

My public defense went well last Thursday, and now I need to finish the corrections on my dissertation and tidy-up my lab notebook. Last week, I did not have time to stitch anything because of my defense, Mandy, and hubby's parents were also here visiting. Mandy is definitely better at housetraining. Now, she will go to the door when she needs to go out. Yay! This week should be much calmer, and hopefully I should be able to stitch more. Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!