Snow Day, Cabinet of Curiosities Top Frieze, While Rosy Cheeks Sampler

Today is a snow day at our house. Not that is doesn't snow in Utah, it does. We have more than 5 major ski resorts less than an hour from my house. But today it decided to snow and snow and snow - starting early in the morning and filling all of the roads with about 10 inches of the white stuff and it is still snowing about 8 hours later. We decided that selling embroidery supplies as fun as it is, was not as important as staying safe. So I am warm and dry and stitching... Life is good.
Here is photo of the front yard just a few minutes ago.

I was able to spend some extra time working on my casket pieces. The top frieze of the casket is finished. I love all of the leaves and spangles in the bands. I did learn a few bits along the way, like making sure to put plenty of basting lines on the silk to be sure that the embroidery didn't wander into the areas where it is going to be covered later.  Oh well...The leaves are surface embroidery so they are quite flat but the rest of the casket is going to have much more dimensional embroidery Now to start the designs on the rest of the casket. The floral frieze is next. The designs are in my head so we shall see just how hard it is going to be to get them out of there.

Because I am going to be starting on the next sections of the embroidery and there are going to be many colors in each section, I needed a better way of storing my threads so I could get to them easily. This set of metal basket from JoAnn's is going to be perfect and it was on sale too. I have sorted the threads so each of the color families is in one basket and I can see all of the wonderful threads together. That will make it easier when I want a specific color but don't know which of the textures that will work best.

 While Rosy Cheeks Sampler is finished. I am in the process of editing the instructions right now and then I can send the pattern out. It has taken so much longer than I thought it ever would but since I decided to use so many specialty stitches the pattern is about 30 pages long. It can be done in just cross stitch or as many or as few of the wonderful unique stitches as you want.