Sunday 26 June 2016

Poppy Dance - Marianne Broome (HaED)

Good evening...good to see you again!

Ok, sit yourself down.  Don't pick up that brew and make sure you have someone with you to monitor you for shock symptoms.

At the start of May, it dawned on me that my mum has only ever had one piece of cross stitching from me.  By that, I mean a decent sized piece not just cards etc.  She loves poppies and has a poppy theme in the lounge - well at least she did the last time I was there!  So...after trawling through ALL my magazines (not something for the faint hearted) and wandering through the internet, I kept coming back to the same design - Poppy Dance by Marianne Broome (HaED).

This seemed like a bit of a stupid thing for me to love so much as I have about 8 HaED's - three started but not even done half a page on them yet.  Anyway, never one to let something like not finishing a design to put me off, I decided to buy it.  I already had a piece of 28ct jobelan and the threads, so off I went!

I worked it out that there are 153,300 stitches in it and if I wanted to finish it by my mum's birthday in 2018 (not 2017) I would have to stitch 260 stitches a day EVERY DAY!  Well, I started and counted and counted and counted.  Then I decided that I was fed up of counting and so worked out that I needed to do roughly a page every month.

Well here we are at the end of page 2 and actually 12 days ahead of schedule at the moment. I cannot put it down.  I am finding that I am getting up earlier in the morning just so I can stitch before I go to work and stitching pretty much every night too.  At the weekend I am spending loads of time stitching.

I have also discovered that I LOVE stitching one over one! In fact I think I will restart Shakespeare's Fantasy as I was doing that 2 over ? tent.  I have already stitched about 20% of page 3 and am now halfway across the top row.

I suppose I had better show you some pics.

Poppy Dance

This is the design from HaED's website.

And...this is my progress so far.

Poppy Dance  (p2)