This is one of the very few stitching projects I had started at home, right before my birthday in April this year, but I hadn't been able to work on it very often. Since I've lost my shop and have all this free time again I irresponsibly sat in front of the TV for the past two days and finished it. Easily I did 15 hours of work on this in the last two days. This gives me motivation that I CAN finish all the projects I want to finish, as long as I can sit mostly uninterrupted. :)
 
This is a Panna kit - my first and perhaps my last. I ordered this in the fall of 2017, I think November. I kept up with the shop each time it was overdue. All throughout 2018 we sent emails back and forth. So, Panna is out of Russia. The mail from Russia is apparently quite slow? And then it ended up shipped to the wrong location. Instead of forwarding it to the correct location, whoever those people were shipped it back to Russia. Which was another long process. Then I think, at some point, communication failed between my seller and whoever they were dealing with at Panna / their own supplier, because things just fell apart. The seller apologized and gave me a full refund, and I reordered this dang kit from someone else, and now it's mine. Finnnnaaaalllyyy!! Over a year of waiting, it was here!
 
Now I'm sure you all realize I have a ton of other projects that have been sitting in my to-do pile for way longer than a year, but this one tried to escape me. I was less interested in the kit itself when it arrived than I was simply accomplishing the goal of getting it. And once it was in my hands I could see all the weird little problems it had. Very thick stitching. Weird rose colors. A distinct lack of glitter?? This had to be fixed. So I got fixing.
 
The background half stitches were changed from 2 strands to 1 strand. The roses were changed from dull white with gray and yellow speckles to the correct, and absolutely necessary, pink. I added Kreinik blending filament to the white border frame. I took out the green and grey from the sky (???) and replaced it with an orange/yellow blend. I changed the positioning of some colors, mostly minor, like a stitch outside of an outline.
 
Now it's all finished. I'm a desert dweller, grass is a rarity for me, and it's better this way; bugs eat me alive and out here at least though the bugs want to kill me I can see them trying to do it. In the grass and lush greeny places like in this piece, it's just bug city. I would be dead without knowing my killer, for sure. All the same, I think this hits exactly on the aesthetic I need in my life. Cute little cottages. Glittery frames. Pink roses.