And more projects from the couch...

No, it didn't take me six weeks to make dinner, but life has a way of intervening in one's good intentions. Anyway, to pick up where I left off (at the end of September): October brought two designs from the JCS 2013 Special Halloween Issue. First I fell in love with this enchanting creature:

Matilda Hornbuckle

Notforgotten Farm

Light Mocha Cashel/DMC

And then came this one:

Happy Halloween

Silver Creek Samplers

Light Mocha Belfast/DMC

I was disappointed to find that neither of these designers are included in the 2014 issue; though there are a few nice designs in it, none of them are nearly as compelling as these two were. Oh well, considering what I brought home from Celebration (and what I did with some birthday money I got from my parents) I am in no need of further distractions from my huge stack of potential stitching projects!

So once Halloween was dispensed with, I moved on to a bit of Christmas stitching:

Tree Reindeer (Freebie)
Daffycat (Sharon Bennett)

Linen scrap/CC, WKS, GAST

I love these annual reindeer designs Sharon so generously shares. Can't wait to see what this year's will be!

By the time I started this next project, I no longer needed to be stitching from a prone position, not that I don't ever do so now by choice. I think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most perfect stories ever written. So when this next design came out, it went to the top of my stitching list. 

Christmas Spirit Sampler

Elizabeth's Designs

Vintage Country Mocha Belfast/GAST

I overlooked the instructions which said it should be stitched using one strand of floss, and it was only when I was close to running out of the Midnight blue for the wording that I realized my mistake; however, since I did it on 32 instead of 35 count fabric two strands looked better anyway, and 123 Stitch came to the rescue with a pretty close match. A few notes for anyone who might want to stitch this - the flowers on either side of the heart at the top are not charted, though they are present in the picture on the front of the chart, so I added them; also, while the trees and birds reverse direction when the pattern reaches the middle of the design, the boughs of holly all faced the same way. This seemed odd to me, so I reversed the graph and put two facing each direction on either side of the crown. I don't always need things to be symmetrical but in this case it seemed better to me this way.

Hope

Chartmakers

Scrap of Newcastle/GAST & WDW

I found this diminutive lady in a half-price bin at my late, lamented LNS before it closed last year. The rusty metal frame was included with the chart. I keep meaning to see if there are others like it. The designer wasn't familiar to me. Well, I just decided to Google it, and according to the Internet, Chartmakers was an earlier incarnation of Kathy Barrick Samplers/CHS.  Sounds like it could be true given the style, but one never knows what can be believed on the Internet - in fact, here's one of my favorite admonitions:

And with that, I'll end for now. I have more projects to show, but I'll leave them for another day.