ACNH - Tom Nook

February - Tom Nook (Nookling's uncle) who owns the island and bank where you pay your mortgage.  
His office (desk) is located inside the Resident Services Building.  I have designed the ATM (bank machine) because Tom loves his bells (currency in the game).  

I was so excited to stitch Tom Nook that I accidentally placed him in the wrong open space, by the time I noticed he was half stitched and I didn’t want to frog him..  He was supposed to be 2 spaces to the left of the Nooklings, but it is ok because all of the open spaces are the same size. The bell bag icon is still in the top left corner attached to Tom’s space.   I still need to stitch the background before backstitching around him. 

Here is the whole project so far.

ACNH - Nooklings

 Last Friday night, I finally started cross stitching again on my ACNH SAL.  I took a break before starting the special monthly characters because I wanted to design some backgrounds for them.  Stewart designed characters to fit inside the 12 open spaces on the island.  I'm using blue fabric and don't want it to look like water inside the island.  I thought I would just fill in around each character with a solid or variegated colour, but you know me, I have to  make it more complicated and personal.  I finally decided to design a background from the game to fit each character.

I’m not allowed to use Stewart’s images on my blog, please go look at Cunning Cross Stitch to see all of the special characters and his island layout.

January - Nooklings (Timmy and Tommy) are the first 2 special characters you meet in the game.  They are at the travel agent counter helping you choose your island layout and name and design for your character.  

After you are on the island for a few days, they eventually become owners of the Nook's Cranny store. 
Stewart created the characters to fill up most of the space, but I wanted to add something from inside their store as the background.  There is a huge green wooden cabinet with glass sliding doors where we can buy medicine (white/blue), tools (red box), trees (yellow pots), flower seeds (white/yellow), wallpaper (green/yellow rolls) and flooring (brown). 

Here is my finished January square, I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Gardening and Puzzles

 I took a bit of a break from cross stitching.  It is finally summer weather here in my part of Canada.  Dave & I have been busy every day planning and planting annual flower seeds.  Some of the seeds I collected from my flowers last summer.  I love the satisfaction of growing my annuals each year from seeds.  Dave retired at the end of April, so he has more time to spend in the garden this year, we added 2 raised vegetable garden beds to our backyard.  We started planting vegetables from seeds (peas, beets, yellow beans, carrots, radishes, lettuce and herbs) and a few tomato and pepper (sweet & hot) plants from the nursery. We still need to start the corn.

Here are the 2 metal raised vegetable garden beds we bought and assembled.  The lettuce was bought at the grocery store. They were hydroponically grown, so they had lots of roots and we just transplanted them into the ground.

They had to be covered for several weeks when we still had frost every night.

I buy lots of wall garden art at the dollar stores.  We used magnets to stick the sun onto the metal.

We also tried one of the Ravensburger Escape puzzles.  This is the one we chose, called Space Observatory.

It only has 759 pcs, so we thought it wouldn't take us very long to build.  We were so wrong.  It is the first time we built a puzzle and didn't complete the border first. Some of the border pieces can fit in different places and because it is a lot of dark colours it was very hard to see any patterns.  We built most of the border and then added pieces next to them to make sure they were in the correct spot. We still had to move some around half way through. We enjoyed the assembling part of the puzzle. It was challenging enough and we enjoyed the image because it doesn't look exactly like the box cover. 

Here is a close up of the box image.  I won't show a photo of the completed puzzles in case someone is interested in assembling it themselves.

Dave & I both didn't enjoy trying to solve the puzzles to escape. We used the hints on the website. Some of the puzzles, we understood how they got their answers, but a few of them we didn't.  We both decided not to spend money on another one of the escape puzzles. 

We will continue buying new puzzle designs we like or just re-do the ones we already own. 

Miss Witchy and her Sister - Happy Dance

Last night, I finally completed the two witch mice.  I will cut the whiskers to the right size after they are assembled.

Miss Witchy Mouse

Miss Witchy’s Sister Mouse

2000 pc puzzle - completed

Dave & I started the puzzle on May 3 and completed it a week later on May 10.  It was challenging, but not impossible. We don’t like puzzles with lots of one colour (sky or water).

I like to put all of the puzzle pieces in a zipper bag, so we don’t have to tape up the boxes.  

We have been buying puzzles for many years and always buy new ones every year, but we also keep a lot of our puzzles to build again. If we don’t like the puzzle or think we don’t want to do it again, we put them aside and later mail them to my mother-in-law.  

Miss Witchy and her Sister

I decided to take a little break from my large Animal Crossing project and stitch some mice.  Wednesday night, I started 2 mice because they use most of the same colours.  I am stitching them on 28ct Jobelan light gray. 

Miss Witchy Mouse 

Here is my progress after 2 nights.

and Miss Witchy’s Sister Mouse.

Here is my progress after 2 nights.  As you can see I focused mostly on the first mouse.