Another Finish and some WIPs.

Here is a photo of the finished Workbasket Quaker Owl.  I think it looks rather nice, especially when you consider that I ended up using three different dye lots of GAST Maple Syrup in the stitching of it: a dark dye lot for the outline [head, wings & claws], a medium dyelot for the eyes, and a light dye lot for the chest.  March's Quaker beast will be a bat and I have three cards of GAST Black Crow set aside for that project.

I am still plugging away at the Mint tea towel.  It has become something of a chore as I have lost my taste for the piece.  But it is part of a pair of towels intended as a gift and I really want it off my conscience.  I lost my way a bit at the top of the large leaf on the lower right, so I counted from my last solid reference point and stitched in the rest of the stem as my new reference point.  I'll be stitching the remaining leaves and flowers from there and when I stitch back down to the place where I lost my way, I will readjust the pattern to make it all come out sensibly.  Readjust sounds so much better than fudge, doesn't it.  It's all the confetti and fractional stitching that got to me as I attempted to stitch two leaves at once so I wouldn't have to change the thread in my needle so often.  I have learned my lesson: one leaf at a time and one row at a time.  It's the only way to keep everything in sync.

I have picked up the name tree for my son Sean again, abandoned over a decade ago when I noticed a small miscount.  Since frogging over one stitching is so very tedious, I set it aside for "just a little while".  Well, you can see how that worked out.  I started this ornament while he was still engaged.  He will be married 11 years in May and has three children ranging in age from seven down to two.  Now that I look at it carefully, I must have decided not to frog and to stitch the second S as a mirror image of the first, mistake included, and then just continue from there.  So, apparently, there's lots of readjusting going on with my current stitching.  Some weeks are like that.