IHSW, Ornament Check-In, WIPocalypse, and a Win

My only stitching goal this year was to keep up with the postings for all the SALs that I joined, I was keeping up just fine until this month.  Lots of life got in the way of just about everything not work related this month. I hope April's posting schedule is not indicitive of the rest of the year.

I am also way behind on my blog reading and commenting.  Please don't give up on me, I am trying to catch up on my reading, at least, and hopefully will be caught up by the end of this weekend.  I may not comment, but I am reading!!

So first up is my International Hermit and Stitch Weekend progress.  I worked on Kayann's Kreations' Elegant Doily.  Once again I stitched lots and lots of eyelets and while it's hard to see, there was definite progress:

Before:

And after:

I finished the eyelets around the diamond on the left and the row above the cut-out heart.  I have finally finished doing the pulled work around the prematurely cut sections so the stitching is going much faster as I don't have to worry about pulling too hard and pulling out the cut ends.

Next up is my April ornament check-in.  All of my ornaments can be seen in the 2013 Ornament tab above, but here is my April finish:

It is Cardinal Winter from Little House Needleworks' 2011 Ornament Series.  The word "tweet" didn't do too much for me, so I stitched a few more snowflakes instead.  I'm not thrilled with the spacing, so will probably add a couple more. 

April's WIPocalypse can be seen in the very imaginatively named "April WIPocalypse" tab above. There is not as much to show this month, but every stitch done is a stitch closer to a finish.

And last but definitely not least, Thank You, Julie!!!!  Julie the Red Couch Stitcher had a fabric give-away and I won this beautiful piece of 40-count Witch's Brew Newcastle linen from Silkweaver's.  It arrived in today's mail and I love it.  Here's the photo from Julie's blog the one I took, as usual, is bad:

I have a couple of ideas for projects on this but will have to think long and hard before starting one as frogging on 40-count is not fun!!  Thank you again, Julie.

Spring has definitely sprung here in central Virginia.  Our cherry tree was completely covered in blooms this year, it looked like a huge cone of pink cotton candy! The dogwoods are in full bloom, the hummingbirds are back and I have mowed the lawn for the first time with all the onions in the yard it smelled like I was mowing a salad actually some of the things I was mowing did look like greens that I had in a salad recently...

I am starting my new ornament today, a freebie from Waxing Moon designs called Summer Sparrow.  No, it's not a Christmas ornament but I'm stretching "ornament" to cover everything in my box of smalls which includes lots of things.  My stitch for next week is 99 from Ink Circles.