When is a March a Crawl?

A March becomes a crawl when you don't spend a lot of your spare time stitching and when you do stitch it is only on the background. That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment with the July 4th March.

When we were last together, I showed you the beginning of the blue field on the flag that is stitched in a Gloriana silk. That part is now finished and I am so pleased with the color variations in the shading. A few white sequin stars and gold beads will be the perfect finishing touches for this part of the flag. I'm not quite ready to tackle the stripes on the flag and will leave that until later in this project.

Before moving on to the regal eagle, I decided to work some of the background. I wanted to get a feel for how to approach this pattern. Half of the pattern I stitched in one diagonal direction and the other half in the opposite diagonal direction. Amy calls this a pinwheel with stars pattern. The stars will be stitched in a Kreinik in those open squares. I want to stitch more of the pattern in the darker portion of the sky before I move on to the eagle. Maybe a little golf action on television this afternoon will help me accomplish that.

My sixth egg in the From Russia with Love series arrived in mid-February. This one is another beauty - white and gold with amber colored crystals. The background is alternating continental which I'm finding a little tiresome. I also wish that with the extra stitching effort that the pattern were more visible. Good old basketweave would have been a better choice (for me, anyway) for this background.

My excuse for not posting the last two weeks is that I was busy preparing for a huge yard sale that I had last Saturday. I spent some of my spare time over the last two months cleaning out closets and drawers and getting things priced. Andrew and Anna drove up from Jacksonville to help me. I couldn't possibly have done this by myself and they braved the windy, cloudy, sprinkly 33 degree morning of the sale with me. The sale started an hour earlier than planned. People started showing up at 6:30 AM when we were just starting to bring things outside. It was over by 11:30 AM and the remainders were packed up and taken to Goodwill by 12:00 PM. It was a successful sale and my house is hundreds of pounds lighter than before the sale. It's a wonderful feeling!

I've moved on from the house to the yard this weekend cleaning out pots and planters and getting the yard ready for Spring. My hydrangeas are starting to leaf out and the buds on the azaleas are almost ready to open. So many of our flowering trees bloomed earlier in February and now the forsythia, dogwoods, and azaleas are awaiting their turn to show off.

Hope Spring is beginning to make itself known where you live!