This piece has been a comedy of errors. All blame is mine, as I appear to suffer from an inability to count properly when tired. The hat is slightly off, a few stitches are done in the wrong colors, and when it came time to backstitch the coffee cup, I did it in dark blue instead of dark brown because I was too lazy to go find the brown. I did purposefully stitch the dashed line in gold braid because I thought it would be prettier than if done in brown floss. The border? The …read more

When I was looking for some needlework to do last summer, I decided that giving counted cross stitch another try would be fun. I had tried it a decade or so ago, and was not really that excited about All The Counting. Off I went to one of my local craft shops to look through their patterns. Counted Cross Stitch must not be as popular right now (at least in our area) as it has been in past times, because usually the main offerings for needleworking are in kit form. I wasn’t sure I wanted to …read more