The culmination of some very Slow Stitching on Sunday

I did it!! My Anniversaries of the Heart by Blackbird Designs is DONE!!! I put the final stitches in it last night and I'm whisking it off to Bev at Joanns this afternoon to be framed.

As best as I can figure I started this at least 2 years ago. The copyright on the first pattern is 2010, but I know I waited until at least the fourth or fifth pattern was released before I started. Now I've worked on lots of other things during this period so an accurate accounting of how long this took me is impossible. My goal at the beginning of 2013 was to finish this by the end of 2013 and I am very very very  very very happy that I met it.

Now it became apparent when I started personalizing my sampler that the gals at Blackbird Designs have bigger families and more information on their families than I do. I ended up with several large open areas that I had no personalization for, so I decided to add some little sayings - like this month...

and these two months- November and December - both had big spaces I had to fill. I took the easy way out and used short phrases so I could stitch them over two threads.

And the last double section provided numerous challenges as a result of mistakes I made. The biggest one was I stitched the house 5 stitches to the left of where it should have been... and I stitched it twice as I had problems with the thread colors. When I went to add the personalization I was smacked between the eyes that I had 10 less threads to work with - arghhh!!! There was no way on God's green earth that I was going to pull out that house, so I spent hours figuring out how to work around my error. In retrospect I may have spent more time figuring out how to work around the error than if I had pulled out the stitches.... oh my goodness I don't want to think about that!!

Also as you can plainly see my name takes up waaaaaay more space than "Barb Adams". In the end I am happy with my personalizations and changes I made. It truly makes it my sampler.

So now I can finally engage in some guilt free cross stitching. Every time I've picked up another project in the last couple of months I could hear this one whispering "you said you finish me before the end of 2013"... and now it is silent... yeah for me!

Hope you are having a great weekend.
Happy stitching-
carol fun