Happy March!

Well folks, we've made it through another leap year and into another March.  A fine month if I do say so myself.  Here's hoping your March will treat you well.

I've been cleaning.  Maybe it's Spring.  Maybe it's a fear of what might be developing sentience in the corner of Chez Hovel or under the bed.  Anyway, I wonder why it is that cleaning leads inevitably to chaos.  I worked in a pair of kitchen cabinets and on the kitchen table and somehow that spread boxes and piles and bags (and dust) throughout the hovel.  I got somewhere.  I suppose I'm satisfied with what I did, but now I have spare boxes and piles (and a certain amount of dust) in new parts of my life.  Sigh.

I didn't even get to the fun part of cleaning -- the stash sort.  Oh come on, you know you do it.  Stash accumulates where it ought not be and we all tackle it with great joy.  If you leave it grow long enough, putting it away is a bit like shopping for it all over again.  Well, it is for me.  I get that whole stash-shopping joy all over again.    Anyway, this spring cleaning thusfar has afforded me no such joy.

On thing awaiting "organizing" in the stash pile is a new acquisition of mine --

Yup.  I got a new canvas.  Hee heee.  Technically, it's not mine since I got it for a friend.  Stash that's destined to become a present isn't really stash, right?  (ahhh, rationalization -- my middle name)
Here it is with the first round of its thread pull --

The velvets are for the pig, the non-sparklies (floss, Bermalana, and Mandarin Floss) are for the bulk of the dresses, and the sparklies (Flair, Sparkel Rays, Neon Rays Plus, Fyre Werks, and Silk Lame) are for all the little decorations on the dresses.  I'm quite looking forward to getting going on this.  Do you suppose that despite its size I can complete it this year?  I'll take all good wishes... I think I'll need them.

Possibly I can also rationalize starting the farm-girls-go-to-the-festival piece by proving that I finished something --

Yup, after at least a year, my little moose ornament is done..... courtesy of my buddy, Jenn, who finished putting the slated gobelin in the moose.--- it's her own fault.  She knows I can't see the gobelin and yet she convinced me it was the "perfect" stitch.  Do you have those?  Not friends that lead you astray, but stitches that quite simply escape you?  Mine's that danged gobelin.

I've even made some progress on my Prairie Moon piece --

I'm actually kind of surprised how much I'm enjoying working on this.  It's in what I think of as Jerimiah Junction colors and I'm generally not the biggest fan of those.  And ya'll know ho w I feel about fiddly color changes--- and every blasted building and decoration is in another color in this one.

But just to show that I can't control myself even with plenty of things underway and a really cool pending new start barely cool in its shopping bag -- I've also started an xs piece called Welcome to the Nuthouse by Waxing Moon.  I have had it for years and kept getting thrown off by the threads.  It is charted for Sampler Threads and in between when the model was stitched and when I went to start it the colors had changed so much that I didn't fancy them so I was on a semi-occasional hunt for replacement colors.   Finally I've found a mix I rather like.  Sorry though, it's not even worth showing a pic since I have made it a grand total of maybe 30 stitches in so far.

To add insult to injury on the stash/startitis/need to clean front, I also recently acquired other stash too--

These canvases come with matching blown glass ornaments--- if you are calculating that means I have twice as much stuff to find a place for the the Hovel.  I plan on having great glittering fun with them nonetheless

I have to admit that the above items are from a probably 3 weeks ago.  I kept losing the pictures.  More recently I also picked up some xs I'd been eyeing --

I'd been thinking about doing something in honor of my great Aunt Kayte, and this is just perfect.  She and Uncle Leo had a white house the backyard of which was focused around a walkway lined with giant camellia trees (they seemed giant to me at the time -- I suppose they were about 7 or 8 feet tall).  I know since this is Peony Hill that they aren't camellias, but I won't tell if you won't.

ttfn-- gotta run -- but I wish you well on cleaning or stitching or whatever excitement you have planned -- go March!