Fanciful Butterfly Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Spring has been showing itself around here. We've had bright blue days with temperatures in the 40s for the last couple of weeks, with one snow day a week to keep us on our toes.We're up in the mountains so it's not unusual for us to get snow storms up until June. I want to get the snow because we're in a severe drought, but it sure is nice to get those beautiful, warm days! And I love it as our days continue to get longer and longer!

I've just been flitting between projects that grab my interest. I finished my Fanciful Butterfly cross-stitch project.

Fanciful Butterfly

This piece finished at 5" square. I love all of the details! I've put it aside for now, but will probably stitch it into a project bag at some point. I'm really enjoying getting back into cross-stitch so you'll be seeing more of these projects in the future! Micheal's used to have a lot of great sales on handwork kits and, being a sale whore and a hoarder, I have a large stash of projects to choose from.

I've also continued to make progress on my current sweater, I See Spring designed by Joji Locatelli.

I See Spring by Joji Locatelli

As you can see, I now have both sleeves finished and I've made some progress on the body. All I have left to do is finish the body and pick up the stitches around the neckline and knit a couple of rounds of garter stitch to stabilize the neck. I want to finish this sweater up in the next couple of weeks because the Grocery Girls, the knitting podcast that I love, are having a knit-along for the Comfort Fade Cardi designed by Andrea Mowry and I want to join in. They're having a zoom cast-on party on March 19. I ordered yarn from a company in Canada and it's scheduled to arrive on March 18 so I might possibly be able to cast-on with everyone else. If it's late, no problem. I can catch up since we have a couple of months to knit the sweater.

To keep my roving interest satisfied, I've also picked up a couple of new projects. The first is a project that I started many years ago and then put aside. It's a felt applique Christmas banner:

I really love doing felt applique and have mostly made Christmas ornaments. But it would be a really bad idea for me to put up a Christmas tree with my current cats, so this Christmas banner will be something fun that I can put up and enjoy for Christmas. I'm not sure why I hadn't picked it up in so long because I'm really enjoying working on it now. It still has a ways to go since it has about 120 felt pieces and I'm currently working on piece #13.

My final project is a new long stitch project that I pulled out of my stash.

Scarlet Macaws

Long stitch is a form of needle point, done using all of the same materials as regular needlepoint, where you make long vertical stitches rather than the regular small diagonal stitches. As you can see, these projects are very quick to do (I started this one after finishing my butterfly cross-stitch, so less than 2 weeks ago), but they can still have a lot of detail. And the vertical stitches really look cool. When I finish this, I'll put it aside for a while, but will probably end up sewing it into a tall tote bag with a zipper closure that will fit the cross-stitch frame that I use. Currently, projects using this frame are stored in a regular open-top tote bag, but I like having my project bags securely closed to I'm more confident that I won't lose anything. I haven't lost anything yet, but I'll still feel better with something more secure.

That's all for this post. I'm really enjoying the variety of what I'm doing right now. But, as usual, the list of projects that I want to work on is so much longer that what you're seeing. It's so hard to pick what to work on! So I'll just keep plugging away.....

Nancy