La Vie en Rose!

  Hello to all.  Just a bit of good news that I wanted to share about my stitching designs - I am so happy that a major French publishing company, Editions de Saxe, which produces a number of beautiful creative publications, is interested in buying two of my designs!  They will, hopefully, appear in early 2013 - one for Valentine's Day, and the other a spring project.  So, I will have plenty to do in the next month or so, as I will also be stitching and finishing the pieces (which I quite like to do anyway, since that way I can see if colors etc are not working too well.)
  I only discovered French needlework magazines towards the end of last year, by chance really online, and I fell in love with them.  The designs all seem have a kind of typical French elegance and charm, even the simple ones.  They often also feature just a single color, or sometimes several shade variants of one color, and it is amazing just how effective this can be.  I also like the fact that most of the designs tend to be stitched on linen (often quite high-count, too) - in gorgous subtle shades of ivory, taupe, grey or natural.  Aida fabric does not seem to be all that popular - nor are lots of fractional stitches and backstitch.  This suits me - I find doing lots of backstitch totally boring, although I know it does have its place!
  If you would like to check out some of these magazines for yourself, here are a couple of websites.  A really good one, in English and several other languages, is the Italian needlework site, http://www.casacenina.com/. There's a lovely French magazine called Creation Point de Croix, which also has an English site, at http://www.creationpointdecroix.com/ .  Editions de Saxe, which I mentioned above, site is http://www.edisaxe.com/. This site is in French, but if you have some basic knowledge of French, or a French/English dictionary, you should be able to navigate around the site without too much trouble.

  Just a picture to finish off with - this is one of my little artworks, which I did a while ago;  it features two of my favorite subjects - cottages and teatime!  I am planning on adapting this into a cross stitch design - hopefully once I have completed these magazine projects, and also the Sweetheart Cottage design I am currently stitching.
  Hope you are all having a great week - and please let me know what you think of