Very litte progress and the reason why

Quotes to Live By - May 4th

Here it is Monday morning and I can honestly say that the progress on my stitching over the last week has been minimal but there is a very good reason for that and I will show you what has stopped by stitching.

Quotes to Live By -- this was the project that got all my stitching attention this week and you can see I didn't have a lot of time.  I am now working on the background of the design and the back stitch so I hope to have this one done very soon.  

Quotes to Live By - May 13th

It isn't taking me very long to actually get the background done so I hope to be able to get this done during this week and then maybe get working on some of my other projects over the weekend.

This coming weekend is a long weekend here in Ontario and I have to say that I am really looking forward to it.  I hope to be able to spend some time stitching and hopefully make some good progress on a couple of the patterns that I have on the go.

Other stitching news -- last weekend I was talking with an artist about some of her designs so you may be seeing a few more original patterns being stitched in the near future from me.  I am looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Schlock with Dice

I didn't mention something that happened last weekend while we were at a convention so figured I would write about it here. Schlock with Dice, is a piece that I stitched based on a pin by Howard Tayler.  I stitched this and loved how it turned out so I always wanted him to see the piece but didn't know how I would ever get it to him other than just putting it into a parcel and mailing it to him but that required me knowing where to send it. A week ago we were at a science fiction convention and Brandon Sanderson (author) was there and he knows Howard Tayler as they do a podcast together. I decided that I had nothing to lose so I asked Brandon if I could show him something based on Howard Tayler's art.  Brandon agreed to spend a couple of minutes and after showing him the piece, I gave the piece to Brandon and he is now going to be showing it to Howard.  I have to admit that there was a lot of excitement after this because it means at least Howard is going to be able to see the piece I stitched.

The reason for not stitching much -- As I have been saying my cross-stitch time has been really limited over the last couple of weeks and now I can show you the reason for that.

Old windows

new windows

I haven't been able to do a lot of stitching over the last couple of weeks as we have been preparing to get new windows and balcony doors in the entire apartment. Sure it doesn't sound too bad at the beginning when you think that finally the windows shouldn't let a lot of cold air in and the screen on the balcony door will get fixed. 

The work that is involved to prepare your apartment for getting the windows is a lot of work.  A lot of the instructions you get (4 days) before they replace your windows are common sense.  We have been working on getting ready for this window replacement for a while as the overall project has been going on in the entire building for over a year now.  So we finally heard that our windows were going to be replaced on the 12th of May (weather permitting).   Over the last couple of weeks we have moved a lot of the furniture around in the unit as we needed to ensure that everything was between 3 - 4 feet from all the windows and balcony doors.  Thursday of last week involved putting drop sheets over everything to help prevent the dust from going everywhere.  Another reason for the drop sheets was to prevent things from blowing around as they take all the windows out at once and then put all the new windows in. 

The end result is some really nice windows but of course now we need to put all the furniture back where it was.  We are going to be taking our time doing that because we are also going to continue to clean up and organize things.

So while getting our unit back to what we want I am also going to try and get bits of stitching done some evenings.  I now have some work that I need to do for clients before I can do any of the organizing so I better get that done.