Progress on #1, Start #2, and Some Kits

Hello all!

I have very little progress to show you, and a very sad picture - my camera did not like the lighting or the color of the fabric for my 'A is for Anchor'.

I'm stitching it 3 over 2 on a piece of 28 count mushroom Lugana.  It's a pretty, pale, brown-grey neutral.  I made a mistake or two and had to fix them, plus got distracted by something else new, so obviously I didn't get far.

Here's my second start - I began it yesterday:

It's the kitten in the teacup on the cover, and it's for my sister.  I had planned to do only the kitten and the cup, but when I showed it to my sis, she loved the daisies and the teapot and all of it, so there we go :D  It's only going to be 8x8 so I maybe can manage to get it done for her Christmas gift.  I've got most of two daisies done so far.

Here is what has been distracting me, though - I got this box in the mail :D :D :D

Yep, I got my first diamond painting kit!  Whoo hoo!  I've wanted to do one of these forever!

Here's the picture I'll be doing:

And I got the bigger picture off the actual site:

These are pretty much the same as a computer-generated cross stitch chart, so it will be fairly pixellated, but I think it will still be pretty. My sister has already asked for the finished piece but we'll have to see about that!

Here's the contents of the box - one canvas (12x16 for this one), a pair of tweezers, what I thought was one triangle tray but turned out to be two, a packing sheet/list, a pack of teeny ziplock bags, and a whole whack o'beads!

You peel back the paper to get to the sticky canvas, and put the beads on with tweezers.  It's really just like a cross stitch chart, I swear!  And the bead colors match DMC colors, which is pretty cool.

Here's where I was a day or so ago.  I'm further now but I haven't taken another picture yet!  Lots of pinky-grey for a white cat with blue eyes, lol!

I thought it would be slow and cautious with the tiny diamonds but it goes pretty quick!  I really like it - I've ordered a smaller kit with the square diamonds, and another with the round diamonds so I can see what those are like.

I also promised to show some of my new China printed cross stitch kits and they've started to arrive! I think I'll show one a post until they are all here :D

The first one came with a pattern but no picture so once again I got the picture from the listing.  It's called 'Beautiful Wolves', at least on the listing I bought it from.  I've seen it with other names.  I will tell you right now, it is not this big.  I did realize that before I bought it, so I'm not upset like some people have been.  These listings can be dangerous - the sellers just use photoshop or something like it to put the picture into a frame and show it in a room - no matter how small it actually is, it always looks huge!  But you can find the actual size in the listing if you pay close attention - it's often in small print toward the bottom.

These wolves are the first kit I started to buy when I discovered these type of kits, but at the time (it was years ago) I couldn't figure out the site as it was all in Chinese, and they weren't on ebay yet. Translating it was no help.  So I didn't get it and I was quite pleased to find them on eBay recently.

Here's the actual kit:

It's about 18x18 and there are 44 colors.  Lots of purple, which I saw on flosstube videos of this kit so I was also not surprised.  I don't mind some lavender-y wolves, though :D  This may be the kit that gets started once 'Sunset Birds' is done.

I'll be back with an update on the new project (and maybe the cat) and another kit, somewhere around the 10th!

Happy Stitching :D

Tama