Sunday Slow stitching projects a new beginning and a completed stitchery

Today I am homesick for my northern roots, it's late November, less than a week till Thanksgiving and I long for the crisp cool air, rapidly falling leaves of assorted colors and the familiar surroundings of New Jersey, instead I'm in the land of perpetual green aka Florida. Today I can fool myself just a litte, it's a gray rainy autumn day, I'm inside where the ar conditioning is cool so it feels like autumn, and the leaves of my sycamore tree have turned the usual paperbag brown and mostly fallen to the ground so it looks like a northen autumn day until you step outside and are hit in the face with the humidity and warm temps and know it is autumn in Florida. After twenty odd years in Florida I am always surprised when the homesickness grabs hold of me.

On this rainy Sunday I have started stitching the hand embroidery for the third block of the Hocuspocusville quilt. I had this all ready to begin a few weeks ago but I started on the Holly King and just kept on stitching. As you can see I'm off to a slow start but than thats what Sundays are all about, slowing down, resting and taking time to breathe and do some much loved hand stitching.

Here is a look at the Holly King, all the hand embroidery is done now I need to decide how I want to finish him.

 After looking at the piece for a while I think I should have crayon tinted his face so I decided to eventually make another.  I'm not sure if I mentiond this in a previous post, the pattern for the Holly King is from Urban Threads which offers patterns for hand and machine embroidery. Here is a link 

http://www.urbanthreads.com/

I plan to keep stitching on block three for today and I am linking up here once again for Slow Stitching Sunday http://www.kathysquilts.blogspot.ca/

October Ort Report

Wow! Are we really 12 days into October?  This month is flying by so quickly I feel like my head is spinning.

I've been getting some hand embroidery stitching in when I can, made some progress on a few projects thanks in part to my participation in the 2015 TUSAL, not sure what that is well click on the link and see for yourself http://itsdaffycat.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-totally-useless-stitch-long-2015.html

Here are my Orts for the October 2015 New Moon, you will see some browns, red and greens among

the black threads. I finished the second block to the Hocuspocusville Quilt, I'll be starting the third

Block 2 Hester's U-Pick

block shortly I needed a break from all the black thread and those tiny letters which seen to go on forever.
I did get in some stitching on my Holly King piece, the pine cones look a bit wonky right now but once the holly and mistletoe leaves are stitched they should look fine.

Holly King

I noticed when I'm working on an embroidery piece some days I get into such a state of calm and quiet my needle seems to flow through the fabric without me even noticing I've made so many stitches until I come to the end of the thread.

My ort jar is filling up nicely with only two more ort reports for the year I hope to achieve a full jar this year.

October 2015

My busy season is coming up and if its anything like last year for most of November and December I won't get in much, if any stitching progress made.