text: I made the pattern back in 2017, did a very fast color check with Mom on the art, and then filed it away until this month. Stitching her up went alright, I ran into just a little problem with my own design calling for many of the whole stitch colors to become their backstitching outlines. Of course for maximum cleanliness I like to do my backstitching last but it left quite a few dangling threads waiting for me to finish one section of whole stitches before I could tack down the backstitching and move on. I also ran into the issue of the metallic threads for this one. I originally wanted to do all of the metal/armor pieces in metallic, but the immense amount of partial stitches as I was working was a real pain. Plus - I had done the crown first and even though I think it's ammmaaaazing with the gold sparkles adding them in really took away the color shading. I decided her gauntlets couldn't have the same silver throughout or it would make all of the small stitching extremely pointless. I settled for outlining them in a thin silver instead.
  His artwork was just a little bit larger than the coaster's circle allowed for, so I ended up cutting squares, especially at the bottom. I think it turned out fine all the same. I did argue with myself a while on how best to insert this into the coaster. I could have force the bottom upwards more to remove the diamond/weird edge look, but that would waste soooo much of Excalibur's stitching. As it is I chopped some of Excalibur off to keep her quail hair included.
  
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  Okay, so the timing of this post might seem a bit odd – especially because there are little tiny snowflakes falling to the ground as I type this, but I’ve had so many questions about our covered deck plans that I figured it was about time I shared what the heck we’ve been up to in our backyard this Summer.
  If you hadn’t already heard through my Instagram stories or random mentions through my Weekend Reading updates, you’ve likely guessed it from the title of this post – we’re building a covered deck. So why the 7 foot trench running across most of our backyard? Good question! The answer is a bit of a long story really, but the gist is that Brady plans to build a second garage out back here and wanted to run the utilities from the house to garage site before we covered them all with a deck.
  And so, before we could even start construction on this deck, we had a whole lot of prep work to get everything ready. In addition to running the gas, electrical and plumbing to our future garage site (which took weeks in and of itself), we also ran a gas line to the new deck space so we could hook up a BBQ as well as a patio heater or gas fire table.
  Of course, we also had to demolish and haul away most of our existing concrete patio to allow access for the support piles that needed to be drilled underneath. Oh my gosh, was that a ton of work!
  Finally, we utilized the help of a structural engineer to design the actual build plans for our covered deck. Brady being an engineer himself (though not structural sadly), he’s always a stickler for doing things the right way – because the structure of our covered deck is going to be tied into the structure of our house, it’s really important that the design is planned and stamped by a structural engineer so that we don’t compromise the integrity of either structure. The back and forth of all this planning was a lengthy process and took much longer than either of us had expected. In fact, it took so long that we’ve officially run out of Summer, making most of this a project for next year now instead. Though we’re definitely disappointed that we won’t see this built before Winter hits this year, especially after all that prep work, in the end we decided it was better not to rush our design choices and give ourselves the extra time to plan out every little detail.
  For now, we’ve got the structural bits all planned out and we’re going to work on the design details over the Winter here so that we’re ready to go with it all as soon as Spring rolls in next year. And so, I don’t have any pretty design details to share with you today, but I do have the structural plans so that you can at least have a glimpse into what we’ve been up to out there.