3. Winter at Beacon House

Today I started "Winter at Beacon House," by Praiseworthy Stitches, partly because Rabbits' Guy requested a sampler with a lighthouse, ship and rabbits. This sampler has all of those and more, including little fish with eyes, a sampler alphabet, deer, dogs (to my sister: the one on the sled looks like yours), a beautiful bay, and various sizes of snowflakes, all smyrna crosses over 2, 4 or 6. I am using the exact shade of LL called for by the design. It's rainy and gray here today, so it was hard to capture the color, but Winter Sky linen is a lavender-blue shade. I am not using the recommended fibers at all, though. I'm using silks from my stash, including a lot of overdyeds--Silk n Colors from the Thread Gatherer. It pleases me that I had both the fabric (although mine is 40 count, not the 32 count called for by the design) and fibers in my stash that I could use, so I only had to lay out $5.99 for the magazine. Where I'm missing a color, I just sub NPI or AVAS from my stash. I had originally planned to use NPI and AVAS solely, but I decided that parts of the design, especially the beach, the bay and the house, really needed the variegated floss.


Here's the photo of the project in Just Cross Stitch Magazine, which a lot of us ran out to buy this month:


We have no new Happy Meals pets to show since yesterday's expedition, a Happy Meal for each of us for lunch, yielded another giraffe and a second tiger. I was going to dicker with them about getting something different, but as my closest McDonalds is off the interstate and it was full of tourists complaining about mustard on their sandwiches, I gave them a break. We had a good, heavy home-made breakfast this morning, so we'll have Happy Meals for dinner tonight--BF is almost as intrigued with the hunt as I am. I'm going to try a different McDonalds also.

Peaches is glancing at a well-chewed Cooking Light Magazine here; she recommends slimming down by eating the cooking magazine or cookbook instead of making a meal.


See you tomorrow!