Stitch from … New Things! It has been a pretty rough year for my husband and I. My husbands’ grandmother passed away in January, then his friend learned that he has an inoperable brain tumor and my husband’s good friends’ mother passed away two weeks ago, then my kitty that I have had since I was in 8th grade passed away just a few days later.

It’s been pretty rough. We are all ready for the upswing to start. On a more positive note, I got my IRS refund, regular paycheck and a bonus at work so I splurged a bit.

I bought:

Kitty’s Gift & Kitty’s Stocking kits by Mill Hill

Damask Square by Ink Circles (to go on that purple fabric I got in February)

Royal Orchid & Royal Capri Mill Hill kits

3 Floss(es?) - Weeks/DMC/Classic Colorworks

LHN Gingerbread Cookie pattern (for April’s ornament!) 

Progress on Tiramisu Another little update, I hope no one minds but I love doing a bunch of small posts instead of waiting for a big one. I personally love pictures so as long as there is a picture to go with a short little story then I’m happy! I had shown the floss toss about a month back on the Glendon Place Amazing Desserts Series that I was going to do.

It’s Tiramisu in case anyone was wondering. I’ve also got my eye on Pumpkin Swirl and Plum Pudding. Eventually… I got the amazing fabric from Crafty Kitten (peach sorbet)!

Here’s my start on it:

and as of last night:

Considering I completed the Seven Pines cross stitch in the middle of these two pictures (2 weeks apart) I am super pleased with the progress! I love love love working with the Dinky Dyes silk. It is so nice and smooth!

Just a small updated today.

I've been slowly working on my March ornament in between life things. It's a freebie called Seven Pines by Little House Needleworks. You can find it here: Seven Pines unfortunately she forgot to add the color numbers, so they are included in the post right after this one. :) 

This is a pretty quick and easy pattern, so if anyone is looking for something quick in between (or during) larger projects it's great!

Last day of the month means last day to finish my February ornament!

If you don't already know, I am participating in three different blog groups this year. Stitch from Stash over at Epic Stitching, One Ornament a Month over on the cross stitch forum I belong to and Finish a Chatelaine. I'm doing well on two of the three... I haven't gotten around to my Chat yet. I have until December anyway!

Here's month 2's ornament. It's called Snow in Love by Little House Needleworks. I'm really quite pleased with how it turned out. I did unfortunately get a little bit of nutella on it, but if I don't point it out I don't think anyone will notice!

A place for cross stitch stash.

I've been looking at these expandable sewing boxes for about 6 months now. I had originally seen one on ebay and fell in love with it. It's official name is Strommen Bruk Hamar, and it's from Norway (see the little red circle) and I have no idea how to make the "cool" "o" in Norwegian, so it's not quiet the official name.

I have a thing for storage containers. And i have been looking for one for months. They sell on ebay for about $100 plus shipping (so around $140) and that's just too steep for me. It is just a box.

Well, yesterday my husband and I were on our way to mail some things and we drove past a little shop that we drive past all the time (it's a junk store basically) and they had this displayed outside! I don't live in a very wealthy area so I told my husband "If it's less than $40 I will buy it." So we ran to the bank and did our other errands and came back to it. Me worrying the entire time that someone would have purchased it already.

Well, lucky for me it was still there and exactly $40! We brought it home and my husband cleaned it all up (it had been outside all day and who knows where before I bought it) and I added some lining paper on the top 4 drawers to make it a little more mine and ta-da!

I was able to sort my 3 boxes of stash down into just this one place! There only things that I couldn't fit are my boxes of floss. The top has all of the small things, needles, misc flosses, scissors, beads, etc. The second level has some fabrics & started projects (each has it's own plastic storage bag to keep everything clean & together) and the bottom has the fabric that wouldn't fit above and all my pattern leaflets and books.

This weekend my husband and I went on a romantic trip to Columbus. I call it romantic because it was Valentine’s weekend.

We managed to do a ton of things on our 4 day weekend, including the Franklin Conservatory (for wine & chocolate night) and the Columbus Zoo (in the snow, we had the park to ourselves basically, it was wonderful)!

Of course I had to look up cross stitch shops and lucky for me there was one! I called ahead to make sure they were in before we made the trip on Saturday (since the Nashville market was this weekend too, I wasn’t sure if they were going to be open). The picture above shows what I purchased!

The beads are for the Glendon Place project I posted about not too long ago and the threads were all on the suggested colors list for a bunch of Little House Needlework patterns I have hanging out in my stash. I needed some new needles so I picked up the Bolin ones (new to me, I’m loving them so far, they have a HUGE eye which is great).

For February’s stitch from stash challenge I added $16.20 this weekend (the needles don’t count against me since I did actually need them, and I would have had them on hand anyway).