Excited for Autumn

This is my first bloom out of the sunflower patch, so excited! Though the seed packets lied in the 6 to 7ft tall claim, mine are only about 4-5ft tall. But still pretty,maybe it's just the heat that is stunting their growth. There is a little bee perched on the bottom left of the sunflower, see him?

These are all my recent finishes. By showing you them here in all their unfinished glory I am trying to shame myself into actually finishing them into something pretty and display-worthy. People ask me all the time how many cross stitches I have hung up in my house. Well i've been stitching for 20 years now, so you would think I have more than a few. But really I only have maybe 15 out on display. I know I have stitched more than that, so in a recent clean up of the craft room I did a count of my finishes, and WIP. I'm gonna take a deep breath now and admit my secret....I have THIRTY FOUR finished/not finished peices stuffed in a bag on a shelf in my craft room, and TWENTY SEVEN works in progress....EEK! So my goal for the year is to get every single finished pieced out of that bag and up on a wall, made into an ornament, or given as a gift by the end of this year. I didn't put all that work into them just to have them sit in a bag. Though most of the joy of stitching for me is in the stitching itself, not necessarily the finished project. I am still pondering a way to hold myself accountable on the finishes. I'm thinking a little sidebar list, where I can cross out the finishes as I go.



And this is my Mount Everest cross stitch. It is a Sandy Orton design, Autumn Sampler, measuring 14" by 18". And it's not solid stitching. It has little designs that are fun to finish, but lots of details and backstitching, and thread changes. So this is the piece that has taken me 4 years to get this far on, and will probably be another two before it's done. I am reconsidering doing the other 3 seasons ( I have already started the Spring Sampler).

On the non-stitchy front this is what has been taking up the rest of my time. We adopted a new bunny, Gypsy. Who so far has done very well with the chaos and children and dogs in our household (I was a little worried we would give new bunny a heart attack).

Also I finished Zoey's door this week. I chickened out on painting Tinkerbell on it myself, and instead found a cute wooden cut out to glue on (like the letters for her name). I also painted a cloud of glitter/fairy dust around her that doesn't show up very well in my pics. I'm just happy she has a door again.