A Finish to Be Shared and Others That Are Not… Yet

I lost a lot of ground last week, both at work and in my stitching, due to being sick. I went to the monthly stitching group last Friday night with Anna, despite having been sick for three days. I managed to get in two finishes – one cross stitch and one sewing – neither of which I can show yet because they are gifts for someone who reads this blog (*cough* Christine *cough*). She knows that they are coming, but she knows neither what design I chose for the cross stitch nor what the fabric of the sewing project looks like, so I’d like to keep it a surprise until she receives them. I’ll be sending them out today. Yes, it took me several days to actually get good pictures (I ended up scanning the stitched piece last night because the pictures didn’t turn out well enough to suit my tastes) and package things up. While I was at it, I packaged up a little parcel of goodies for Anne. It’s only a few leftover stitching supplies and she knows that it’s coming, as well, although she may either have forgotten or given up on me by this point as it has taken me over a month to get it ready to send out.

So, after a successful stitching night, I ended up with quite a headache. Actually, it had started on my way there. Well, to be more precise, it started while we were at the bank talking to someone about moving over our mortgage to take advantage of the great rates right now. We left straight from there to go to stitching and I took some Tylenol sinus formulation on the way. The pain caught up with me a little while after I got home from stitching. And lasted through Saturday. Into Saturday night. After having thrown several different medications at it, both over-the-counter and prescription. I took the heavy duty prescription Saturday night at bedtime and when I laid down, the head pain suddenly became nearly unbearable. Fast forward to when I wake up Sunday morning and I have no pain, but I have this really bad feeling that it’s going to come back. And it did indeed. By the time Sunday evening came, I had thrown everything that I had in my entire medicine drawer at that stupid, stubborn migraine and I was starting to contemplate a visit to the hospital. I mean a full-blown, travel to a hospital 45 mins to an hour away where there’s a good headache clinic, get hooked up to an IV and get this thing stopped, visit to the hospital. Fortunately, by Monday morning, I had the situation under control.

That is one migraine cycle that I do not want to repeat. Ever.

Anyway, despite the migraine, I stitched. Yes, I can stitch with a migraine. People find that rather bizarre. Since I had finished my current project on Friday night, I started a stitching bookmark for my step-mother-in-law. Yes, another bookmark. Considering she asked me to stitch one for her, I figured I actually owed her at least one that was stitched, in addition to all of the other miscellaneous crafted ones. I started it on Saturday and finished the backstitching on Monday. It was a quick and easy stitch, even though I did several color changes in the process. It’s stitched on a Charles Craft bookmark blank which looks really garish in the wrong kind of light, as Anna can attest to from when I brought it out at stitching in October, but it really isn’t that bad in natural light. Honest. And I think I’ve grown to like the bling.

This is from the leaflet named Bookmarks Galore, published by Leisure Arts:

The quarter stitches on this one killed me. Quarter stitches on 18 count aida. And they were everywhere. Seriously, who designs for aida with so many partial stitches? Every serif you see on the lettering was composed of partial stitches. Every rooftop and flag on the castle? Partial stitches. It was a bear. And so was all of that backstitching. At least the results were worth it. You can’t tell, but the lettering is a dark blue, not black. And there are actually two colors of blue in the O. I might try one more time to get a better scan or photo of this one, for the sake of posterity. You also can’t see the details of the lace very well, so I should probably try scanning it against black and see how that works. For now, though, this is the best I have. For anyone who is interested, I felt that I needed to get rid of the two gold colors used in the design because the bookmark base was silver. These colors were used in the gateway to the castle, as well as for all of the lettering. I substituted two shades of gray for the gateway and two colors of blue for the lettering, plus black for the backstitching of the lettering.

I have now started another stitched bookmark for Nan, but there are significantly more color changes in this one, so I don’t feel an immense pressure to finish it on time. I still have a little over 3 weeks before they arrive for an early Christmas visit to exchange gifts. In the meantime, I’m also working on the Just Nan piece for my mother, just to give me a break from aida for a little while.