Mad as a March hare

I haven't done much stitching this month (I've not been well) but I suspect that I'll be able to do my usual smoke and mirrors trick and make it look like a lot!  Let's face it, I do that most months!

I've mainly been stitching my Summersville squares, because that was the only thing I could really concentrate on for most of the month!  It's been a case of 'do a dozen stitches and then wander off for a cup of tea' for the large part but it's amazing how much you can get done that way.  Before March started I'd already embroidered these squares but don't seem to have blogged about them:

Square one - my first car was apple green but, sadly, it didn't have pink tyres...
And Yvonne is moving into the house with the cross stitch roof any day now!

Square two - the sun is filled with colonial knots and has a lovely texture.

Square three - Nicky's called dibs on the top floor flat of the multicoloured block, she'll be moving in soon!

Square four (the first of the March squares) - the arch round the library door took hours to do but I love it!

Square five - it's hard to see in this photo but the tyres on the bus are stripy.  If you click on it you should be able to see it in more detail.

Square six - the pale cottage in the bottom right corner is in a conservation area, no bright colours allowed.  And the house in the top right corner is Father Christmas' summer retreat...

I love stitching these squares and playing with different colours and stitches - in square six I used 35 different colours/shades, no wonder they take a while to do!  Eventually it's going to be a quilt but there's a lot of work to do before I'm ready to think about putting it together, good job it's intended to be a long-term project!  There are photos of the backs of all the squares in my Flickr set, if you're interested.

I've uploaded the photos of the Summersville squares to my blog, rather than using Flickr (which has become my method of choice over the last couple of months), so that you can click on them and see them in more detail.  Out of interest, which method do you tend to prefer when it comes to blog reading?  Or are you not fussed either way?!

I've made a pin cushion (although that was a February make and a March reveal) and a thread catcher (and spent a ridiculous amount of time editing videos of Archie running across the front room towards a line of biscuits!) - more of that in my last post.


I've also managed to add some more hexies.  The last time you saw it, it looked like this:

and on Friday it looked like this:

The colour is fairly accurate in this photo, for once!

Not much progress - only twelve hexies added in a month!  I've managed to add some more since then and it now looks like this:

And the back:

I need to press the seams of all the hexies I've added this month - it's easier to do them as they're joined (ish) than all at the end.

It hasn't taken that long to add another eight hexies (plus the pieces that square off the top and side), maybe six hours of stitching over the weekend?  (Just goes to show how little I'd done in the preceding three weeks!) I think it takes around half an hour to attach a hexy when I'm stitching along three sides but one (bottom row, second from the right) took twice that!  I've no idea why it took so long...


Archie spent quite a lot of time on lookout duty yesterday:

The Easter Bunny, you say?  No.  Haven't seen hide nor hair of him but I'll keep an eye out.

I might look like I'm sleeping but it's all part of a clever ploy to get EB to appear.

Well I don't know how he got past me, I've been here the entire time!  He's obviously more sneaky than he looks...

Enjoy your Easter eggs - I can hear a caramel bunny calling my name!  I think I'll go and 'visit' her and then catch up with some more Fresh Sewing Day posts - fancy joining me?!