Today's discussion topic is:

"Which designers have you discovered lately?"
Not sure that I have discovered any new designers lately. I have found one blackwork designer a year ago:

Cliffside Stitches cliffsidestitches.com - I have been collecting weekly SAL pdfs from their facebook page www.facebook.com/groups/976911076971090, but I haven't stitched anything yet.

Been too busy trying to finish up my backlog of WIPs and there is still a huge stash of charts purchased over the years that I haven't even touched!

~~~~~WIPS~~~~~
1. Elizabeth Almond's "Save the Stitches", begun in 2014. I worked on blocks 91 - 95 (out of 131) this month.





2. "Kingdoms of Life" by Stitchonomy, begun in 2023. Using the kit provided (an oatmeal Aida and DMC colors) plus a select few skeins of grey and greens for the changes to make my biology major mind happy with how the individual organisms look in real life. I finished the fungi this month, where I made a few color modifications and fudged several spacing issues. Only the animal kingdom left!




3. "Royal Gardens", a mystery SAL by Fox & Rabbit, begun in 2023. On a pale green 32ct Lugana (it said "sapphire" but it doesn't look blue to me! Are there green sapphires? Apparently they are very rare in nature www.gia.edu/sapphire-quality-factor Who knew?) and Threadworx variegated thread (1048 "Woodland Green"). I worked on ensuring that the left-side border would meet up with the bottom border. (It as ONE stitch off so I need to figure out how to edge the design between the borders in the bottom and left sides to meet up properly. AARGH!).



4. "Faith, Hope, Love", a mystery SAL for 2024 by Fox & Rabbit. On antique white 28 ct Lugana using a Threadworx variegated (Autumn Leaves 1039) and three DMC colors (436, 975, and 310) that closely match some colors on that Threadworx floss... I'm on schedule here - May's installment is due out on May 1...



~~~~~
On the non-SAL (and inactive SAL) front:

• The Glendon Place "Hope & Strength" piece still requires extensive beading.
• The Lakeside SAL "Login" still languishes untouched.
• My traveling needlepoint was taken out in March and put right back in the project bag. I need to sit down with the chart and sort and label large hanks of numbered threads by color so I can actually stitch! I wanted to set a weekend aside in April to do this, but eclipse-mania, household guests for the eclipse weekend, and several weeks of intermittent power failure meant I didn't get around to it. . AAARGH!.

And that is my April report... On to May!