Another UFO killed off........

Happy Friday readers!    I'm happy to report some progress with my ongoing efforts to finish off some of my old stitching UFO's that have been sitting around my sewing room for years.    Back in 2008 I started one of those "house and garden" neighborhood samplers as a member of a group blog that Vonna from The Twisted Stitcher blog was organizing.   It wasn't a round robin, each person designed and stitched their own piece.  As usual I got carried  away planning the piece - I had big plans to do 3 rows of houses and gardens on a huge piece of linen.   Below is a photo showing how far this project ever got.   Everybody was in love with a big sampler someone in France had done with a Prairie Schooler birdhouse & sunflowers in the middle.  The chart with that birdhouse (Prairie Schooler Garden Samplers) was going for almost $50 on eBay at the time - way more than I wanted to pay but I wanted a birdhouse like everyone else.  Instead, I found a $6 Dimensions chart of birdhouses at Joanns and added my own sunflowers to it. 

As time went on I lost interest in this BAP but I didn't want to just throw out all the work I had done.  I thought at one time of filling it in with more houses and stuff in order to make the piece a semi-circular shape (I had to save the birdhouse part in the middle) but even that was too much work and never got done.   Last year I tediously frogged out part of that tree on the bottom so I could cut out the log cabin scene, the birdhouse and the little red millhouse I had designed.   Here's what I did with those salvaged pieces of stitching:

The birdhouse was made into a little summer wallhanging.......

I finished the little red millhouse with a pond and made it into a project bag.  I like to design and print  coordinated business cards that I use as labels on my bags.  These cards have little willow trees across the top.

The Prairie Schooler log cabin scene I made into a cube-style finish.  

It felt great to kill off this big old UFO and I salvaged some remnants of linen I can use for other projects - it's all good!

I'm also making progress on my old Teresa Wentzer Fruit Bellpull...this project is really tedious!  It's taken me almost 6 weeks to do my 3rd block - the Cherries.  It's been my TV project for the evenings when DH and I are watching TV.   This piece as designed has 6 blocks but there's no way I'm going to do all 6.  I've changed the order of the blocks from the design,  and I'm going to do one more block and call it done. I think 4 blocks will be fine.   That Cherries block was a real pain - here's a photo of what it looks like on the pattern book and below it is my piece.  In the photo from the chart you can see a lot  more color in the shading especially of the cherry stems. I'm using all the DMC as it's charted and I kitted this up over 10 years ago so I know it's not that the DMC dyelots have changed.  I'm just disappointed that the shading is so muted.  I had to go over some of the cherry stems with another shade of brown because you could hardly see them after I stitched them.  Thankfully the last block I've picked to do looks easier than those Cherries!   

Photo of cherries block from the book I'm using.....in real life those brownish/gold shades are muddied greens and the cherries are not "reddish" but more purple-pink.

My progress - 3 blocks done, one more to go!!

I've got 2 more little finishes to share....another project bag made out of a BBD freebie I recycled...it had been a pincushion but I didn't like how I had finished it years back so I put it into a project bag instead.   And I've finished off another ornament piece into a little pillow for the holiday bowl........

BBD "Eiffel Tower" freebie from a few years back.....now part of a project bag

Christmas tree is a motif from Sue Hillis Designs 'My Favorite Things'

That's all for today....I'm off to start on my final block of the Fruit Bellpull but I'm itching to start a new project!  It takes discipline to work on these old UFO's but I'm getting there slowly but surely.     Thanks for visiting!