Weekly Stitching

So how do you follow a massively successful weekend of super-speed stitching? Barely stitch at all during the following week due to work issues...at least that's how I seem to roll.

I left Alice and the B's off here:

And stopped here Friday night with barely any progress:


For some weird reason, I had a hankerin' for working on Sleeping Beauty Castle this weekend and I managed to get all the stitching done:


And just as I figured, the backstitching is an utter nightmare! Not only is it incredibly difficult to figure out what colors to use because the instructions are far from clear, the pattern quality is so poor that I've made a ton of mistakes. With backstitching, mistakes are incredibly difficult to fix since it gets embedded inside your regular stitches, so I haven't been fixing too many mistakes unless they've been really bad, which also means tons of frogging on areas that have long since been completed. On top of that, up close you can't even see the backstitching at all, so I have to keep holding it away from me to make sure I'm in the right spots. To be such an easy project, it has been one of the hardest I have ever done. The camera picked up the backstitching way better than the eye does.

Had I not kept falling asleep during some of today's Disney movie choices, I probably would have gotten more done, but probably not much more. This one is really wearing me out. With all the backstitching, I'm really no closer to finishing it than I was when I was still stitching the body. I think it's time to put it back for a while again.

Bam FINALLY got his haircut this weekend! Between the storms of two weeks ago and last weekend's fireworks bonanza, I couldn't put him through more stress. He's been rockin' full hippie mode for weeks now and no more excuses. I'm not sure he realized what was about to happen.

The haircut was bad enough because Zach's old face clippers, which I typically use to cut Bam's entire body, wouldn't work, so I had to go full clipper on him as well as tons more scissor work on the tighter areas, which meant I had to go even slower than normal. By the time the haircut was done and bathtime was over, he was royally pissed. He's chewing me out here:

I hope he doesn't hate me forever, but I'm kind of wondering with those eyes:

He is pretty evenly cut though, big clippers and scissors aside, it just looks rough in these pics because he is wet. Poor little guy. When all was said and done and we had been sitting still for a while, then he decided to have a panic attack and it took forever to calm him down. Bam has always been the perfect dog while getting a haircut while Zach was an utter monster, biting and twisting on me the entire time. But I never got the "Bam eyes" before and I felt like he was screaming at me to stop torturing him. I obviously wasn't, but he literally had me in tears more than once. He was probably to busy goading his brother before and now he can focus his evil-manipulating skills on me. It worked. I can't take it again. Next time, I'll let a complete stranger handle the Bam eyes.