April Showers have brought May flowers

This is the kit I mentioned a few posts back, "Dana's Roses"--I think i'll rename it "Stephanie's Roses" when I finish it. I have been working on it just a few days now, and it so far it looks like just a blob of color. Isn't it funny how the colors you see on the photo so rarely are the thread colors. So far a lot of purple and navy, and when I look at the photo I see pinks, yellows, and grey. My blob below is the center of the chart above. I am excited to get to more of the pink petals and green leaves below.

Below is my latest finish, Prairie Schooler "Owl & Pussycat". I did make some changes to it, I left out the wording below the banner, and added more stars instead. I also changed the wording from gold to purple. It was a nice stitch, all of their charts are so simple with just the DMC colors and not a ton of back stitching or fancy stitches. 

And here is one of our beautiful Arizona flowers. This was on a cactus in my front yard, and it only bloomed for one morning. The outer flowers were a soft pink that is a little hard to see in the picture. We call this cactus our Octopus cactus, because all of its arms lay along the ground, and look like octopus arms there are so many of them.