Thank you all for your lovely comments. It helps keep the motivation going. Unfortunately I'm back to work this week (

) and so I'm not getting time for stitching.
Squirrel wrote:A Treasured Time I have been reading in detail as I have it in my stash and would dearly love to start it now.

I'm looking forward to seeing your updates when you do start it! Its a lovely design to get lost in stitching, but it is very very detailed. However there are so many 1/2 stitches to off-set the details and blended threads that it stitches up fairly quickly.
Squirrel wrote:Thank you for the tip about the different shades for the first house you did.
You're welcome....it only became an issue because I don't trust kits to have enough thread so I convert to DMC and the conversion didn't work well here. If you use the threads that came with the kit, you'll be fine.
I don't like kits...I wish they would make more charts available that are also available as kits. It seems that kits are taking over the cross stitch world

.