I just realized that it’s been a while since I last showed you my progress on my Autumn Cross. The biggest reason for that is there hasn’t been a whole lot of progress. Typically I can stitch for 20-30 minutes before leaving for work. I haven’t been able to do this since January, however, so nothing really got done on my cross.

Then the hives made their appearance. Due to all of the stress and craziness I broke out into very itchy hives. That was it! I stopped working overtime and I backed out of as many commitments as I dared. So now I have my stitching time back in the mornings!

So, on January 17th I had this much done:

As of March 22nd I am this far:

I guess that’s a decent amount of progress considering I felt like I haven’t hardly touched it. My next step is to start the lettering that goes on the upper-right hand part of the cross. I have to have the words in before I can do a lot of the back stitching.

Just as a reminder, this is what it will look like when finished:

As you can see, I have very little done on this overall. I was feeling good about my progress, too, until I just looked at that picture. *sigh*

I do have one other exciting cross stitch-related news item to share.

The first project that I ever started for myself was a kit called “Gettysburg.” I think I started it around 2003, but kept putting it down to work on projects for other people. I finally finished it in 2007, but never fully finished it. This is what it looks like:

This poor piece has been sitting around for the last ten years waiting to be framed. The bad thing is that it’s yellowed quite a bit since this picture was taken. Well, for Christmas I asked Jay for a gift card so that I could get this piece framed. The cats gave me the gift card and they were very generous!

I had been looking for a ready-made stock frame, but just couldn’t find anything that really made me happy. I’ve had this picture in my head for over ten years about how it would look when it was finally hanging on my wall. After searching and searching I finally decided that I would stop being so stingy and use the majority of my gift card for this piece. This past Monday I went to Hobby Lobby on my lunch break where I ordered a custom frame and mats for this piece. They should be in next week!! I can’t wait!