WIPocalypse May Check-In

Greetings, fellow stitchers!  Can you believe that it's May already?  So wonderful to be having longer days and warmer weather.  Unfortunately, I did not stitch as much this past month as I would have liked to.  I went to Texas for a week toward the end of April, and I frankly expected to be able to have some down time for stitching.  But, it just didn't work out that way and I barely stitched at all that whole week.  Add in a few busy weeks with my hubby having a medical procedure and moving my older son out of his apartment at college, and you have the makings for a slim month of cross-stitch.

Still, I made a LITTLE progress on most of my projects.  First, this is the AAN stylized tree design that I have been working on:

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I'm happy with how this one is coming along.  I love the colors, and it's an easy stitch (nice, easily definable blocks of color) for those nights when I'm tired.

Next, I got one more sheep finished on my Little Sheep Virtues -- this one is March, and the virtue is Peace:

Although I have not kept up with my loose goal of doing one sheep per month, I'm still glad to have finished Peace.  The little sheep in this one has the cutest wreath of leaves of leaves and flowers around his woolly neck!!  Here is how the whole piece looks so far:

Finally, Tyler's Lion.  This is the HUGE sampler by My Big Toe where the motifs are based on ones used in the weaving industry in the 1800's.  I haven't worked a ton on this piece lately, but I've almost got the huge center house and trees motif finished.  This sampler does not have a lot of backstitching, but backstitches connect all of those little leaves to the trees, so I need to finish that on the right-hand tree, plus finish that bit of fence at the bottom.

Well, that's it for my progress this past month.  Hopefully, I'll have more to show in June.

Now for this month's question.  Measi has asked:  What designs or themes do you really wish you could find?  What do you think is missing among stitching designs?

Hmmmm.  Well, in general, I have no complaint about the number and variety of cross-stitch designs out there!  It is crazy how much is available these days!  But, it just so happens that twice in my stitching life, I have had occasion to look for a design for an anniversary sampler.  The first was years ago, when I wanted to stitch something to commemorate my parents' 40th wedding anniversary.  The second time was just recently, when I was looking for a design to stitch to celebrate an anniversary milestone of my own that is coming up later this summer.  Both times, I searched and searched and just did not find very many pleasing designs.  There are TONS of designs available for weddings, but not much specifically for anniversaries.

In fact, for the piece that I gave my parents, I ended up modifying a wedding sampler that I found in a magazine.  I loved the design, so I changed the words of the poem so that they were more fitting for an anniversary, and then I included my parents' names and the span of their marriage.  It came out great, but I did a lot of work modifying the design.

For my own anniversary, I think I've mentioned on a past post that I am using EMS's Anniversary Sampler.  I know, it's called an anniversary piece, right?  Yet, the actual design was charted as a BIRTH sampler.  No problem there, except that the alphabet provided, while beautiful, is too large to stitch two names in the heart.  But, I can use a different alphabet and that shouldn't be a problem.

Other than that, I think it might be nice to see more collegiate sports themed stuff.  I've seen a few motifs, but for a college kid or sports buff, it might be more practical to make stuff like towels or smaller pieces with the school's emblem or logo.  However, this design gap probably has more to do with the cost of licensing those kinds of designs than anything else.

Well, that's it for me for May!  Have a great stitching month!