He's Got the Whole World In His Hands

Well maybe, not the whole world, but as you can see, this little dragon has the Americas wrapped in his sinuous curves and his companion will handle the rest of the planet.  I spent an hour or so on my dragon this morning and made a fair amount of progress.  I still need to backstitch the land masses and the longitude and latitude lines.  The chart has all the back stitching done in DMC 823 but I am using DMC 3371 for the dragon, 823 for the globe and map lines and 890 for the land masses.  I think that this gives a cleaner, more distinctive look.  This is an amusing stitch and I look forward to adding it to my  little basket of smalls as a pin pillow.

I plan to spend the rest of my stitching time today out on the patio, working the remaining eyelets on The English Band Sampler.  But I have a number of errands to run first: the Verizon store to check out some new phones for when we renew our contract, the nursery for some garden and potting soil and some flower transplants for the front planter box, the post office to mail some postcard registration reminders for work and the hardware store to pick up some paint chips for the room I am renovating as an office for my husband.  I also want to make a lemon icebox pie for tonight's dessert and marinate some chicken for grilling this evening as well as weeding and planting up the front planter box.  So, a busy day ahead.  After a long winter of lazy weekends spent indoors watching DVDs and reading, it's nice to be active again.  I was beginning to think I'd take root on the couch.

And an update on my little silver cup from yesterday's post:  Every time I was dishes after a meal, I have been spending another few minutes polishing the cup.  I have been using Twinkle's silver paste polish since I didn't seem to be making any headway with Wright's liquid silver polish.  The cup is still pretty tarnished but I am seeing some improvement.  I wonder how much longer it will take to get it nice and clean and bright.  If any reader has a silver polish they swear by, I'd be happy to learn of it.  Otherwise, I think this project will require loads and loads of elbow grease.  I'll show another photo once it is all bright and shiny.