Scary monster and progress report

Look what we found wandering across the pavement on the way home from school :

This is a larva of an Elephant Hawkmoth , isn't it amazing ? This one is about 3 inches long and the fatness of my ring finger , so quite small actually . It cannot be called a caterpillar as it's moth offspring rather than butterfly

My husband discovered one in our garden a couple of weeks ago that was at least twice the size . It scared the bejeebers out of him as it was scared and had drawn it's head up like this

Because it was so big , he thought he'd stumbled across a snake as he met it face on lol. The one we found in the garden had disappeared by the time I thought to take a picture of it , so I was quite pleased to spot this one . Not that you could really miss it. The kids are fascinated by bugs and things , so we brought it home to look at it for a while . It is now outside in the rough location the other one was ,so should be ok.

Anyway , I've had some more stitching time on "Christmas Recipe" as I've decided to call it . did some last night and today .This is where I'm at now

I think it will take longer than 45 hours to be honest , but I am enjoying at the moment . I've decided to do the back stitch as I go along , the thought of doing it all in one go makes me go cold. I'm also going to stretch it a bit and put some boxes in for our names to make it a bit more personal.

That's all for now.