A Rare Mood I'm In

I find myself in a rare mood these days... called "I'm Really Sick of Looking at Them, So Let's Pull Out Those Old Projects and Finally Get Them Finished Right Now!"
(Have you been there? Do you know what I mean? Can you relate?!?)

Suffice to say, I'm not the kind of stitcher that stitches one project at a time. HA. Far from it. As far as I'm concerned, starting new stitching projects is one of my all-time favorite things to do (right up there with eating chocolate and buying new threads.).

ANYWAY.... when the mood hits to actually finish some of those projects, I realize the rarity of the event, and I go with the flow and focus, focus, focus on finishing - before that fickle mood passes. And then of course, I can enjoy the finished project -- at long last - which give me immense satisfaction (not to mention justification to start more new projects).

Here's a project I had started a year ago and only had this much of it stitched, before I set it aside and it got "lost" in the project pile... (I think I even showed you a picture of it in a post and asked you to guess what the central flower would be):


I wanted to use sky blues and apple greens; create a bit of gingham ribbon; sprinkle in some fun blackwork floral motifs; and surround it all in a simple scalloped border. Often times, when I get all the separate parts of the design stitched, I can actually "see" the finished project in my mind's eye, and at that point, I lose interest in stitching the rest of it.

So...I was pleasantly surprised when I pulled this project out again this summer and continued working on it and realized how much fun it was to stitch. It was one of those projects where I enjoyed stitching each and every border - they were not too hard, not too tedious, and not too slow. IT WAS JUST RIGHT FOR A FUN SUMMER PROJECT.

Then I sat down and drew the center basket of blue hydrangeas so I could stitch them in the middle of the design. I waffled a bit between drawing a whole basket of flowers or just one individual mophead flower. (The basket version won, since it made a nice companion piece to my earlier PINK CYCLAMEN.) Here's the center basket, done in fresh blues and greens, with a tiny bit of periwinkle/purple:


And even though these flowers were tent stitched with 2 ply of DMC floss, it wasn't as tedious as I imagined. I just stitched them while watching tv and the time passed wonderfully....

So - TA DA! - here's the finished project, called BLUE HYDRANGEAS:


It's stitched on 24 ct. eggshell Congress Cloth, and the finished size is 10.5" by 10.5". It uses #8 pearl cotton for all the borders (with two fine metallics used sparingly), and then floss for the central picture. There's even a sprinkling of beads in a few of the borders.

So, happily, this pattern is now available on my website.
(And I'm on to finishing my next project. WOO HOO!....)