August WIPocolypse #2 - Jeanne

Well I was on the last day before the cutoff for the first August update so now I have to do the second one a day or two later!  Did you know we're having a blue moon now?  It's the second full moon of August hence it's called a blue moon.   And it's a lovely one too....I was taking a walk last evening and admiring the moon and thinking about Neil Armstrong dying.   I wonder what it's like looking up and seeing the moon and knowing you've stood there??  I know a lot of you are too young or weren't even born yet in 1969 but I remember clearly sitting in my living room with my parents and siblings watching him step out and making his famous statement.  The picture was so fuzzy you couldn't see much but it was thrilling.  Back in those days EVERYbody watched all the TV coverage of the space flights.   It makes me sad to think he's gone now.  A lot of our real heroes are quiet, unassuming people who don't want to be celebrities yet have done remarkable things.

Well I don't have a lot of stitching progress to report since my post 2 days ago of course.   I made a decision this morning to trash the ornament I was stitching on the light green linen.  I was getting close to finishing it but the more I saw of it the less I liked it and I began to hate it.  I finally decided that was enough so I've thrown it out and will pick something else.  No sense wasting my precious stitching time on something I don't love.   Onwards!

I thought I'd share another old UFO with you today.  I was reminded of it last night reading the post from Carol over at Stitching Dreams - she stitched a lovely small with a PS birdhouse on it. I haven't worked on this project in probably 2 years but it's part of my WIPocolypse list and hoping I make some progress this year on it.    Remember back when everyone was doing those neighborhood round robins a few years ago?  Well I started my own....and like I frequently do....I went overboard.  I gridded off a big piece of linen with 9 squares figuring I'd have 9 houses in my neighborhood surrounded by trees and other fun stuff.  What the heck was I thinking?!?   Here's a photo showing the middle and lower rows.  There are some PS charts used here and a big tree from a BBD chart. My plan was to have a creek run across the bottom that would end in a little pond at the right at the mill house.

During the height of the 'neighborhood' craze everybody was wanting the birdhouse from Prairie Schooler's Garden Samplers on their neighborhood as someone in France  ("Stitcher Zero" who started the fad)  had done that and everybody loved it. Well 'Garden Samplers' at that time was going for $45 and up on eBay because of the demand...so I adapted a little $6 chart from Michael's instead and put that in the middle. Last year I had a thought maybe I could just finish the lower row of this BAP and cut off the rest of the linen and call it done. I had forgotten about the birdhouse and I didn't want to trash that. SO....I played around in Microsoft Powerpoint and had an idea I could make this arch-shaped along the top. That way I wouldn't have to stitch the entire top row of the 9 squares, and just finish what was left under the arch. I can have arch-shaped mats cut to fit and I think this is a good solution.

 

 

So that's my plan now and maybe I can finish this off before the linen starts to rot LOL.   It's slightly further along than this but I haven't taken a photo of it in a long time.