Stitching Again at Last

It has been more than a year since I was able to see well enough to actually stitch, so these are my first two projects. These designs are Freebies from Cross Stitch & Needlework Magazine.

Stitched on 14-ct Charles Craft Light Blue; finished stitched size 2-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches

I substituted the lightest red and the light green.

Stitched on 14-ct Charles Craft Oatmeal Fiddlers Cloth; finished size 2-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches

Ditto re the lightest red..

I plan to make these into Thank You cards. I bought some heavy weight light yellow scrapbooking stock for that purpose. Now just to glue or use double-sided sticky tap to hold everything together.

For my next project I've gone back to a kit I bought and barely started stitching 20 years ago: Jannlynn's Woodland Creatures Christmas Ornaments, no longer available. The thread has long since disappeared but the DMC colors are listed - which I have ooodles of. However, I find I just can't stitch on the included 18-ct navy Aida. I used to have a very strong glasses prescription which causes considerable magnification, but no longer. Suddenly everything is so much smaller and so far I haven't been able to adjust when it comes to fabric court.  Turned out I had a (probably equally old) packet of 14-Count Charles Craft navy.  It'd look great, but I can't  even see the 310, 433, 898, 3371 etc. on the fabric, making trying to stitch those colors basically impossible. Though my eyes are working much better now than in the past 2 years, they still aren't healed completely. I'm still dealing with severe dry eye caused by some of the eye drops, and resultant cornea issues that often cause everything to look blurry and/or haze, even IF I can get them in focus. I've got some of the lighter areas of the raccoon's belly stitched, but I'll either have to scrap it entirely or start over on a lighter color fabric. The light blue is too light (actually much lighter than it appears above) so I'll have to experiment. Actually, I don't know why I'm even stitching these as ornaments since I haven't decorated for Christmas in say the past 20 years either. But I do like cute creatures. I still have some Linda Powell creatures I stitched 25 or 30 years ago. :D