I Stitch therefore I am

Do you ever feel like that, that you spend far too much time thinking about or working on your stitching, or is that just me!

I'm pretty proud of my progress this week actually, having moaned at the weekend that I hadn't achieved much during International Hermit and Stitch Weekend I then had quite a productive week. I had a day off during the week and apart from a couple appointments had nothing that I had to do, so I got stuck into my stitching, and it's actually starting to look like something, which makes me very happy. There's definite tree development, it's a lovely twisty oak tree and you can see the trunk taking shape now. And you can also see, which I'm much more excited about, the start of the castle in the background. To be fair, if you don't know what you're looking for you probably wouldn't spot them, but I do and yay! For those that aren't sure, the red smushes to the right are the turrets of the castle and you can see the beginning of the grey stone work, although I only started that colour last night, so there isn't much of that yet.

As is always the case, I've spent a week on this and got completely addicted to it again, so it's going to get a second week. I'm going to have to get back to Lancelot & Guinevere eventually (and I will, I haven't fallen out with it) but at the moment I'm indulging my addiction to Dragon Rider.

In other news, do you ever get really surprised when you see yourself mentioned in someone elses blog? I see people mention each other all the time, recommending sites or showing off the work of their friends etc, and I've mentioned other blogs in the past for no other reason than what they're working on is pretty and I want other people to see it, but I get strangely surprised and really excited and flattered when someone mentions me, especially if it's completely out of the blue. As you may have guessed from my ramblings (there's a reason why my blog was originally called Random Ramblings) I had that happen this week by the lovely Norwegianstitch so I'm going to return the favour and give her a mention. She's got some really cute kits at the moment!

And while I'm talking about random referrals, I'm going to give another one, have you ever checked out The Manbroiderer's blog? He does some absolutely gorgeous stitching and so fast as well, definitely worth a visit. Perhaps I ought to start doing a blog of the month, this month I have mostly be following... And Fast Show fans out there here the voice when they read that?

Anyway, after quite a long and rambly blog, have a lovely week, I'm enjoying seeing everyones progress, I'm actually feeling a bit guilty because I discovered you're only allowed to follow 300 blogs so I had to delete a few no longer used blogs from my list before I could add some new ones. Anyway, happy stitching!

Dragon Rider and IHASW

Another International Hermit and Stitch Weekend has been and gone, and unfortunately I didn't manage to get much done. One way or another it was a busy weekend so I didn't get much of a chance to. You can see a small smush which, I believe, it going to be a tree trunk, so at least I know what I'm stitching! I try to start these pages with a colour that's relatively spread across the page so I've then got something to count against when I'm adding more colours in. I know it doesn't really look like it at the moment, but this is actually two different colours, although there isn't much of the second colour in there now.

Did everyone who joined in have a good International Hermit and Stitch weekend? I've seen loads of progress so far and I hope left comments for everyone that has posted (if I've missed you I'm really sorry), and everyone has made me feel quite ashamed of my tiny amount of progress.

Having said that, I'm off to do some stitching now, have fun all!

A Moment of Indecision on Winter's Majesty

I had a moment of indecision about my stitching this week, as the title suggests. I started stitching on the third page this week, then decided that I really ought to do some of the back stitch instead because the idea of doing all the back stitch for this at once is just wholey depressing!

So, you can see the red smuch where I started on the third page, when you can't really see where I've started doing the back stitch on the bottom right page. I looked at the chart and though 'ooh, actually, that back stitch doesn't look too difficult, I was expecting it to me much more complicated', what I didn't notice was that a lot of it's in metallic gold :-( It's not fun! Then I fell out with it, because the chart says you should use two strands of the gold, so I started doing that, and decided that it looked far too bling and was far too difficult to stitch, it was shreading my stitching and shreading the gold thread as well so I unpicked that (that was fun) and re-did it with one strand. But I'm now trying to work  out whether I've done it in 1 strand or two because each strand is made of two strands and I'm basically very confused by it all and decided that I'm just going to do it my own way!

In other news, it's International Hermit and Stitch this weekend so let us know if you're joining in and have a happy stitching weekend. I'm back onto Dragon Rider this week for my hermitage, woohoo!

And finally, Bev has got annoyed with blogger and moved over Wordpress and to celebrate is having a giveaway so why not go and check out her new blog here and sign yourself up for her very generous giveaway.

A Choice of Teas

We now have a choice of teas and I'm a little under a third of the way through, with 6 teas to do and a title!

I'm quite enjoying this one, it's like working on lots of little projects, so I'm getting lots of little finishes, which is fun and gives me a sense of achievement on a regular basis.

Considering just how much I hate doing back stitch (and don't we all!) I'm actually pottering along quite nicely with this one, I've never done a Bothy kit before but it's quite nice,e asy back stitch, not ending up randomly in the middle of stitches or anything like that, which is what I always dislike about backstitch, a stitch rarely goes across more than three stitches at once. The most fiddly to date has been oddity for back stitch, although it looks brilliant now that it's finished!

Can you guess what it is yet?

Another page finish, woohoo! And once again, I'm seeing the picture more than I can when I'm actually working on the stitching so, here we see the moonlight shinning through the trees, and a tiny little bit of dragon wing on the top right hand of the page - I'm all excited because there is definite dragon showing on this page, but I'm now going down rather than across so it's going to be ages before we see any more of the dragon!

This page has taken me about (and this is quite approximate) 42 hours (5 more than Lance & Gwen because it's been so much more confetti - and I had to frog one colour three times), which is a bit scary, because it makes me realise how long this is going to take me to finish it. It's 21 pages, but only 12 of those are full pages, at a rough estimate that means that I've got a little under 700 hours to go. Not even vaguely scary!

I've had a little flurry of page finishes just recently, which means that it's now going to be absolutely ages before I get any page finishes at all! So I'm going to have to keep coming back to these posts, just to remind myself that tehy do happen!

I'm re-organising my rotation a bit, I've decided (for now at least) to have two focus pieces and they will be this (Dragon Rider) and Dictionary of Tea, due to the fact that these both have intended homes, whereas everything else I'm just stitching because I like them, hopefully one day they'll look nice or my wall. So the plan is a week on this, a week on DoT a week on Lance & Gwen, a week on this, a week on DoT and a week on Winter's Majesty, repeat adinfinitum (spelling? It looks weird!) until I either finish something or get bored and change my plans.

I haven't had much opportunity for commenting this week, due to a major falling out with my computer, so please be assured that I have be looking and that everyone's stitching looks incredible!

TUSAL of June

And while I'm on the subject, how is it June already? I seem to have mislaid 2011!

I don't think it's got much fuller this month, which is odd, because I thought I'd managed a decent amount of stitching, but never mind.

Here's to a better, fuller month this month!