First post of 2013

I said I was going to finish this page by the end of the year, as you can see, that didn't happen! However I am close, and I would have finished it by now, if I hadn't got distracted by my New Year start. I'm now 3 and a bit pages behind (chances of me ever catching up = zero) as the latest page was released on the 1st of Jan. I'm a little concerned as the latest page has the beginning of some writing on it, and I don't know what it's going to say, and I don't know if I want there to be writing on my stitching. I'll wait and see what it says, but it has put my off a little bit!

Secondly, my new start for the New Year, shes lovely! Another Hannah Lynn by HAED (as you can possibly tell by the bold black outline and nothing else). I'm tent stitching over 1 on 28, and had forgotten how fast that goes when you're doing blocks, I feel like I'm flying through this. I know it doesn't look like much, but I've only had 4 or 5 hours on it, and by my standards this is really fast! I've set myself the goal of the top row of black (5 and a bit pages) by the end of the year, and at current pace I might actually achieve it. It's not often I set myself a goal that's actually achieveable!

Now some other bits and bobs, I don't know how many people have heard of TiltonCrafts run by the lovely Shelley, but she does some gorgeous charts and has recently mentioned that she's found some lovely Sailor Moon inspired artwork that she's thinking about charting, but she didn't know how popular they'd be. I think they're great and said that there are a surprising number of geeky stitchers, but I'm curious, how many of you would be interested? Also, while I'm sharing cross stitch designers who are incredibly bad for my bank account also head over and have a look at Sarah's painefreecrafts who also has some gorgeous charts. Sarah's only been running for a month or so, so she hasn't got many up on her site yet, but she's got three that I'm going to end up buying pretty much as soon as they're on the site because I'm already absolutely in love with them, and many more that will make their way on to my bucket and wish lists.

Thanks also to those of you who showed an interest in a stitchers retreat and said you'd be willing to help me out by answering questionnaires and such, I'm really grateful and will contact you when I've got my butt into gear and started sorting stuff out.

Finally, there is apparently a slight issue with blogger at the moment where you can't upload pictures if you use Internet Explorer. Blogger are aware of the issue and are apparently dealing with it, but as it's now the weekend the general advice is to not hold your breath for it to happen any time soon. In the mean time, it's only a IE issue so if you're feeling brave download another browser temporarily and that works fine, I'm currently using Google Chrome. I know that may not be relevant to many, but it took me a while and a lot of getting frustrated with blogger to find out why it wasn't working and how to work round it, so I thought I'd share