I haven't spent anything on cross stitch stash this month! I am still well within my £180 budget for the year, although this will no doubt be spent when I'm in the USA in November!
I have stitched on the following items this month:
"Santa's Journey Afghan" by Margaret Sherry (UFO)
Dusty's RR piece for Needlecraft Haven "Welcome RR"
"Spot of Summer" by Drawn Thread (finished)
"Three Little Maids" by Heritage Stitchcraft (UFO)
I don't seem to be stitching as much as usual at the moment - things are quite hectic! However, I am sticking to my UFOs, and not buying any new charts/kits to get my stitching bug back...
I'm looking forward to seeing how everyone else has done this month!
I haven't had much stitching time again this week, but at least you can see it's an owl now!
Next week's rotation piece is "Count Your Blessings" by Silver Creek Samplers. This is how it looks before I stitch on it again:
"Count Your Blessings" by Silver Creek Samplers
I picked up my "new" car the other day...and I love it! It is a Toyota Yaris, and it is a lovely car to drive. The petrol consumption is really good, and it drives well on the motorway. I have bought a new Bluetooth stereo for it, as it still has the original stereo fitted, and this will be fitted by the shop next weekend - I will then be able to listen to music from my phone again!
My running is going extremely well - I managed to run 5K yesterday! It felt so good to actually achieve it, whilst only on Week 8 of the programme. We still have 5 sessions to attend before we complete the programme, but I now know that I can run 5K comfortably... I now have a Garmin sports watch to monitor and record my runs, so I can give myself targets :-)
I have started Bullet Journaling. This is a method of organisation and productivity that I'm finding very easy to maintain, and also very useful in day-to-day life. It basically involves writing everything in one place so you never misplace it, or have to search for notes or lists in various notebooks or folders on your PC. I have bought a notebook, washi tape, page markers and pens to help with my organisation. If you're interested in finding out more about this, watch this video:
My daughter comes home from Uni next weekend (for good)...so we will have a busy house again. It is also Darwen Live next weekend. This is a local music festival, where bands from around the North West of England play on the stage that is erected in the town centre, or in one of various venues. It is usually a very busy event, with lots of drinking involved!
I have managed to finish "Spot of Summer" by The Drawn Thread! It didn't take very long to do...
"Spot of Summer" by The Drawn Thread
I didn't have much stitching time this week, but at least I did get this finished.
This week's rotation piece is "Three Little Maids" by Heritage Stitchcraft. This is how it looked before I started stitching on it today:
"Three Little Maids" by Heritage Stitchcraft
I have bought a "new" car! It is a Toyota Yaris, and it is ten years old, but it has low mileage for its age and it runs beautifully... I pick it up on Thursday... My current car, a twelve-year-old Fiat Punto, will be used by my OH for the time being.
I am now running for 25 minutes at a time (roughly around 3.3K). We are in week 7, and some of the group managed to run the 5K on Saturday. I feel I could manage it if I tried, but I want to stick to the Couch to 5K programme to ensure I am comfortable with running for an extended period before I attempt it!
Even though I am doing all this exercise, my diet is a bit up and down at the moment - probably because of all the bank holiday weekends we have had recently! As a bit of an incentive, I have bought this plaque from Handmade from Zoe with Love - she has a page on Facebook:
I have been AWOL for a while... The time has gone by so quickly, and I lost my stitching bug for a short while. However, I have been doing some stitching:
Santa's Journey Afghan by Margaret Sherry
This was my last rotation piece before I lost the bug... I did manage to get some of it stitched that week! I then stitched a wedding card for my work friend/colleague, but it got lost in the post (and I forgot to take a picture of it before I sent it...) so I'm going to stitch another card for her. I'm a bit miffed that it probably ended up in someone else's house, or even worse - the bin - but I'll get over it...
The piece below is a round robin piece belonging to Dusty in the USA. The round robin has been arranged through the Needlecraft Haven Yuku group. This is a lovely design, and I have stitched the bottom left corner:
I am going to be stitching on "A Spot of Summer" by The Drawn Thread for the rest of this week. Here is how it looks before I stitch on it again:
It should be finished by the weekend...if I can get the time to stitch!
We decorated the living room over the Easter weekend. It is now a pale lilac, with a cream colour on the ceiling. It didn't really need decorating (and there are rooms in the house that definitely do need decorating!), but we had bought some new curtains that were purple, and they wouldn't go with the peach colour on the walls! One of those "it seemed like a good idea at the time" moments...
My running is going well. We (the running group) are now coming to the end of Week 6, and are now on continuous runs for the remaining 3 weeks of the programme. If you had told me back in March that I would be comfortably running for 20 minutes without stopping by now, I would have laughed at you! I am definitely getting hooked, as I have signed up for the Race for Life (to raise money for Cancer Research UK), and also the Color Run (correct spelling) - both 5K runs, and the Color Run involves being covered in different colours of powder paint as you are running!!! I have also rearranged our weekend in Edinburgh for my birthday, just so I can do the 5K celebratory run with the running group! The weekend in Edinburgh will now be in September, and we are going to Windermere in the Lake District for the weekend after my birthday - so we're getting an extra weekend away...
