I’m a bit late with this post as I’ve been trying to finish my October cross-stitch, I finished it at the weekend. It’s one of the set from Snowflower Diaries, they’re free on her facebook page. For some reason this one has felt hard work, I nearly packed it away for later a couple of times until I gave myself a stern talking to and buckled down to finish it. I think part of the problem was that I’ve a couple of really pretty autumn ones I want to make before it’s winter!

This also wasn’t my favourite design of the set. I made a couple of changes – the hedgehog and the snail shell for some reason were in DMC white, now I know hedgehogs are lightish, but they’re not white! I changed it to a light beige colour, though it now seems to blend in with the linen a bit. The flowers were a strange colour scheme but I left those as they were. I found some floral cotton for the background which picked out the pink and the gold of the flowers nicely.

I stitched some of the variegated ric-rac round the edge, I bought it at Yarndale – I love this stuff! This one is dusky pink, peach and brown. I added a bow and a button and it was finished.

With my October one finished I could finish my arrangement of cross-stitch smalls;

I made the pear a few years back, the gold bee was one I made for my mum many years ago, it matched a cushion I made her. The cat is from even further back, I probably stitched that in my 20’s, in was a UFO in my workbox until I turned it into a small last year.

I stitched the daisy last year, it hasn’t appeared in my monthly collections for a while as it went into hiding in my sewing room! It re-appeared over the weekend so here it is! The blackwork sheep was a practice piece for an Embroiderers Guild Group Challenge.

The bumble bee remains my favourite of all my smalls.

I’m not going to even try to stitch November and December in time as there’s others I want to do first, hopefully I’ll stitch them in time for next year!