My Rug Continues..

My work is progressing on my Christmas rug but a couple of days ago I ran into a tiny snag.

As you can see in the bottom right corner, the stitching is extending past the corner.  This illustrates my new helpful hint: always check to make sure your fabric is the count you think it is!  I was happily stitching along the bottom and decided to count Christmas trees since I was getting close to the corner of the fabric.  Usually when I do this I find I only have a couple of motifs left to do and I have a small amount left to stitch until I get to the corner.  This time (for the first time ever) I had too many motifs!  I suddenly realized that I had mounted 48 count gauze into my frame instead of 40 count gauze!! I counted to make sure and, sure enough, it was 48 count.  This is not a problem for me this time because the room I am making it for is a small room so I am not upset about it, just surprised that I made the 

mistake in the first place.  Luckily for me I don't have any counts of gauze smaller than 40 count so I couldn't accidentally mount one of the lower counts.  This would have been disastrous as the rug would not have fit and I would have had to start over.  Therefore, lesson learned - always count my gauze first and don't assume that I have the right one.  I do have all of my gauze labelled but this piece had been mounted in the frame for several months and I must have mounted it thinking of doing one of my rugs designed for 48 count then picked it up for my Christmas rug.  I think if I mount a gauze that I will not be using right away in the future, I will pencil the count onto the frame so that I can't forget.
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Once I figured out my mistake, I had to frog out the extra stitching.  As you can see, I still have some frogging to do but decided to stitch the corner so that I would know how far to take out the rest of the stitching.  My finished size for the rug will now be approximately 3 5/16" x 5" (8.4 cm x 12.7 cm).  I am stitching it to go into my Santa's Cottage.  The little cottage is quite small but still 1/12th scale.  It only has one room upstairs and one downstairs.  I will be creating two room areas on each level so they will be small compared to the rooms in my Beachfront Mansion.  Therefore, it may be a blessing in disguise that I have stitched this on 48 count instead of 40.

This rug obviously will not take up the whole of the gauze, so I am planning to stitch some of my 48 count Christmas stocking designs and 48 count pillow designs around it before I take the rug off of the frame. In this way I will use up much more of the canvas and will just block everything at the same time when finished.  It will be interesting to see how many designs I will be able to stitch around it...