I've added 3 new finishes to the gallery today.

The strawberries were fun and pretty quick to do. The cross stitch was fun too. I messed up the polar bear a little. It isn't noticeable, but it is a little annoying. I didn't notice the mistake til I was almost finished with it, and it didn't feel interesting to rip out stitches and re-do them. So he is what he is!
There is a little drama in the embroidery world too. I checked flicker and saw this picture. You can read the note.

Finally, I finished something. I've been spreading myself over several projects this week, so the finishing is a bit slow.

This is the first of 3 stumpwork strawberry designs I am working on. They are pretty quick to do. I did all the leaves for all three of them together last night - there are 5 of them, so maybe I will have two more finishes pretty quickly now. This was fun to make, and I like how it came out.

I finished this little cross stitch project last night: The colors were great fun to work with. I'm a sucker for the bright colors.
I also have an embroidery in progress. I haven't come too far on it, but it will get all my attention for a few days at least. The animals are going to be the challenge for me. I am planning to do them with padded thread painting. I'll be selecting the colors by myself, so it's going to be ineresting! :) I am using some photos as my guide, and I am also getting some help with color selection using the cross stitch pattern program. If you make a pattern off the imported image, you at least get an idea what colors to use. And finally I got a picture from a reader for the April Reader's Gallery! Arellys has stitched the MP3 player freebie from this site. Click the thumbnail for the big picture. She made this for her 2 year old who loves his MP3. Aren't the little notes on the sleeve great? I'd sure love more pics from you all out there for the gallery! Just email me them or send me your links where I can download them. Doesn't matter who designed it or who stitched or for what purpose! :) I'll include your links if you give them to me too.

I've been working on the site these past few days. I'm starting to get the re-directs going from my old blog, so people will be landing here instead. While working on that I found 3 free patterns that didn't get added here, and I found 3 little mistakes regarding 3 other freebie pages, so that's all good. Also I added a section on the side bar called "What's new". Basically it is just a short cut to see the most recent things that have been added to the site. This only has 6 items right now, so they fall off the list fast. I might make another page somewhere with a longer list. I know it can be hard keeping track of new things with all the different sections on the site, so I'm just trying to make it easy!

I'm going to say this, and I will leave messages in appropriate places but please do not link directly to my files. That goes for both the jpg's and the pdf's. It isn't appreciated. Yesterday we saw 12 people download one of the embroidery patterns via hot-linking on the old site, and that is going to stop. I got the network admin beside me, so we will fight this. You are of course, welcome to spread links to patterns and pictures, but link to the page, not to the file.

It feels a little redundant to post pictures two times, once in the gallery and one time here, lol. Although I have a feeling I worry about that far more than anyone else does! :) But here are my past two finishes in any case:


I'm having a bit of fun with these. Switching to daylight savings this week through me off, so it's nice with something a bit easy when I'm tired. I haven't started anything else yet, other than another one of these, but I have some ideas, plus I will work on a tutorial for the April stitching articles this weekend.

I kept busy yesterday: The bunny is the first of four I am going to do for a "Little Book of Bunnies". It's almost too cute for me to handle, but it's fun and pretty easy anyways. I am using a lot of paint for the background on these. I am planning on doing some sort of decorative border once I work out the size of the pages.
The house ornament is for a little tutorial I am going to put together for making this or another felt ornament. Also there will be instructions for how to accurately cut those tiny pieces of felt. I think I had some vision in my head that I would magically already have the tutorial written when I finished the ornament, lol, but no such luck. Probably Monday.
I hope all are having a great stitchy weekend! Pictures from yesterday:

I'm happy to say the feed is finally working for the blog entries. Just click the icon to see the feed. You can choose subscribe with your google reader or whatever else. If there are other problems, leave a comment or send me a message. The link to get to the feed is www.theflossbox.com/rss.xml
I don't have any stitching pictures just yet, but I soon shall. I've been working on two projects, and one of them is nearly done.

The easter bunny brought me the flu this year, so I sort of fell away there for a couple days. It set me back a couple days with the stitching, but I'm working now to catch up a bit. I finished the armadillo and wolf project. This was a bit different for me. I went for a bit of realism with these two critters. It wasn't really that hard to pick out colors or make color fields for them. I like the wolf's head and legs best. The armadillo which I did first, showed out to be a bit tricky. I don't really know what I was thinking when I was stitching it, but the ridge area turned out very strange. I went back over with trying to fix it a bit, but it got harder and harder to stitch through all the layers, so I had to give up. It looks ok, but I'm not volunteering any close-ups of it! ;)
I haven't managed to work on much else except a small start on a new cross stitch project. There isn't much to see yet. After all the browns of wolf though I am looking for something with a bit of color. I put up a challenge design for April yesterday, which I hope some of you will stitch! I am planning do that too. I intended it to be a project for trying some different stitches and textures on.

I finished up the abstract flowers yesterday. I just felt like doing something with a bit of bright color and trying a few stitches.



It was fun to do. I used 12 different stitches in the flowers.

Here are a couple pictures of blue waters and blue skies. (Can one ever get enough of those?)