Elements biscornu's + IHSW

This weekend is IHSW and, although the kids are home this weekend I still hope to mostly complete the two Elements biscornu's (I still need to buy new buttons for the centres but I'll do that when there is less snow on the ground). I may also finally get round to measuring out the fabric needed for my large project of the year and dying the fabric several shades darker to give it a nice background before I start working on it. 

Not embroidery related but still stitching: I need to appliqué the 12 months of Christmas project circle to a background so I can continue that, this will be done by hand so I also consider this stitching. 

A couple of days ago I made this and uploaded it to deviantArt but was too dead afterwards to also make a post here, so here it is after all:

It's freezing cold outside, with snow ankle deep on the ground and, as I've got pneumonia (on the mend though - the antibiotics seem to be helping), it's best I don't go outside unless it's a dire emergency. However we are running out of bread and don't have enough for lunch, so I had to bake something. Times like this I'm not really up to kneading bread so I dug out my favourite spelt bread recipe which requires no kneading at all!

This recipe is one ANYONE can make as long as you have the ingredients and an oven. The first time I made this I didn't include any of the seeds and it worked nicely as well, though I'd suggest adding a bit of extra flour to compensate for no seeds otherwise it will be too wet.

This time I pulled out all the stops and didn't just add sunflower, sesame seed and linseed but also pumpkin (50 gr) and poppy seed (15 gr) and I scattered sunflower and pumpkin seed on top as well.

I'm really happy how this one came out and can't wait to see the kids reactions when they get home for lunch as they LOVE fresh home made bread

 They did in fact LOVE the bread and it had completely disappeared by the next day!

All 4 sides are now complete. I had to do quite a bit of ripping as I'd miscounted the width of the darker blue one and also miscounted the hight of the green one. as I was lazy and didn't count the fire one but used the green and blue ones as guides I ended up with the fire one being one stitch too high AND one stitch too wide. So out it all came and I re-did the sides I'd miscounted. I also had to do a bit more ripping on two of the spokes of the fire one as I'd missed a corner stitch. After I'd taken the photo's I also noticed that I'd missed a single stitch on the dark blue corner spokes but decided that as it wouldn't be noticeable on the completed product I would leave it as is (on the fire ones it would have been noticeable as the backstitching would have been almost touching in places).

All I need to do to complete these is cut them out, stitch them together and stuff them.

For those of you wondering how my health is: The antibiotics have been doing their job and I'm much better - didn't need any naps today and haven't felt totally exhausted just by being awake and pottering around a little.