Quick Marcus update

Just a quick morning update...

Marcus is doing much better. The fever has broken and he's lovely and cool. His breathing is still a bit rough and he's feeling fairly fragile, but he's our Marcus again, thank God.

He's having a nap now, so I'm off to try to catch up on some sleep.

No stitching today

I'd hoped to get in some stitching today and maybe watch the cricket, but our almost two year old son spiked a temperature of 39.5C (103F) overnight, along with poor oxygen saturation and bad coughing. It was decided his ear infection had migrated to his chest and we spend about five hours at the Starship Children's Hospital while doctors tried to decide if he has pneumonia or not.

They eventually sent him home, but looking after him and trying to recover from getting up at 4am were my priorities today. He's still a sad little monkey, but nothing like as bad as he was overnight.

Full details are at my Livejournal for anyone who wants to know more.

Needlin' On

Somehow I always manage to lose my packets of needles after I've used just one. While I prefer using a #28 tapestry needle, especially on 1 over 1 projects, lately I've been using a #26 because that was all I could find.

I was going out to buy some late Christmas presents today (long story that I really don't want to go into) and remembered the shop I wanted was close to one of my two LNS. I'd buy some more #28 needles.

I usually buy John James needles, but remembering what I've heard said about Piecemakers being very good, I took a packet of those instead. I was a little startled about the difference in price, but I'm delighted with them.

They slide through the fabric so easily and are a lovely length. They're just so nice to use. I've been converted.

I restitched the section I had to frog yesterday and I'm off and running again with Defender of the Kingdom.

(As for the Christmas shopping, the shop I wanted to visit was closed for the extended Christmas break so that was a bust.)

Attack of the Frogs

I started working on Defender of the Kingdom again today, but unfortunately didn't get far. I started stitching a fairly confetti section and then found it wasn't meeting up where it was supposed to do. I tracked it back to find the error - near the beginning of course - and frogged it. (Never fun on 25-count over one.) When I went to restitch it again, the thread frayed and broke.

I've decided to take that as a sign and I'm reading my book instead.

Dawn Star after 4 weeks

Here's my latest progress on Dawn Star.



I've finally introduced another colour other than pale grey and pale pink, which is nice.

I started out planning to work on a page at a time (which is why there are those grey blogs down the bottom), but realised I didn't want to risk getting vertical lines in the stitching from the page intersections. So I cut the page in half horizontally and taped all the top half pages together to make a long strip. (If that makes sense - if not I can post a picture.)

I've now finished the first of those half pages with the exception of one colour which I'm missing. Floss is really expensive here in New Zealand (the equivalent of about US$1/skein), so wonderful Lana from the Heaven and Earth BB is sending me the ones I'm missing for this design. Unfortunately, that included the one colour I needed to completely finish that first page. I should have it by the time I'm next working on this project.

I'm also starting to see a bit more of the shape of the design rather than just background now, which is a lot of fun.

Hello stitchers

Since so many of my stitching friends all have blogs, I decided to set this up for talking about my stitching. Everything else will still be on my Livejournal, but I'll try to keep my stitching updated here.

Right now I'm working on Dawn Star, which is a custom design of my own from the cover of an upcoming Catherine Asaro novel, drawn by Stephanie Law. I got special one-off permission from Harlequin, who own the copyright, to covert it and stitch it for myself.

I find taking photos and downloading them on to the computer to be a bit of a hassle, so I'll probably only do photo updates once a week, but we'll see how it goes.