WIP pictures

I have now fully complete one go-round through my rotation. With no tweaking! I love it, I absolutely love it. So, here's a few pictures.

First up, Through A Mother's Eyes by Paula Vaughn. My mom fell in love with this years ago and I said I'd stitch it for her. It truly is lovely, but the color chart is a PITA!!!! Anyway, this is the right outermost edge of the bride's veil, half the window and a good start on the mirror.

And this is HAED's Spring Cameo. Artwork by Deb Grieves. This is she at 3 weeks of work. Now, all 3 of those weeks were extraordinarily busy with me feeling very drained at the end of every workday. Doesn't make for good stitching progress. I had hoped to be nearly ready to start another page by now. Ah well. Life goes on. Isn't she pretty? She'll have a nose before I move on to my next slot.


And this one is a new start!!!! It's my next work project, A Favour by HAED, artwork by Leighton. It's in the Pre-Raph section on the website. This is the top left corner, a patch of the sky. It's nearly 500 stitches. I'm trying a different method with this one, going across and/or down 2 blocks at a time. It's working well. I did all of that in about 5 hours, so I started using that method on Spring Cameo yesterday and I feel like I'm making progress faster. Yay me!!!!

Today is turning into a bad day fibro wise. Took me forever to wake up, feel like I got run over by a Mack truck and my leg muscles are on fire. I'm thinking it's my body's reaction to having been pushed so hard for the whole month of July with History Camp.

SBQ and a new start

Today's SBQ was suggested by Von and is:

Many of us have a few pairs of embroidery scissors and some even have a "collection". How many pairs of scissors do you have? Feel free to share a photo of your favorite pair or pairs with us!


I have two pair of scissors that I use all the time. One set is the obligatory stork that every embroider/stitcher has probably had at one time or another. The other set- my FAVORITE set, is a Victorian reproduction. The scissors are just perfect for me, on the small side and very very sharp. They hang in a pewter chatelain around my neck so I never lose them and pesky brothers can't play with them. Here's a picture of them. They are very high quality, made in England and I highly recommend them. I also have the needlecase that's pictured at the bottom of that page as well as a thimble and 3 pincushions. The thimble is a reproduction of the one cast in commeroration of Victoria and Albert's wedding in 1840. (btw, all of the Beautiful Girlhood stuff is of the highest quality)


And my new start!!! It is HAED's "A Favour". The one by Leighton. Finished the gridding on it and then got nearly 300 stitches in! Started in the upper left hand corner because I wanted to work on the sky. It is so beautiful! It's my work project so progress will be slow. I'll take a picture when I bring it home. If it'll come out.... The sky colors are very pale, 927, 3742, etc.

And it's raining again. It's been raining off and on since 5 this morning! If it keeps up we're going to have to completely re-arrange History Camp Friday...

SBQ- Framing

Today's SBQ was suggested by Cathy:

When you get a project professionally framed do you get glass inserted
into the frame? Why or why not?


Yes, I do! The house I live in is rather old and was not built very well. There is dust EVERYWHERE. I don't want this dust on my stitching so I always always always have glass put in whether it's professionally framed or I do it myself. My pieces are far too precious to me to let my dusty drafty house mess them up and dull the sparklies.

And my Countrystitch order came yesterday!!!!! It's so pretty. I'm thinking about doing the PR "Dawn" fairy on it...

Stash order!

Ooh it felt so good!!! Placed my first order with Cajun Crossin' just a few minutes ago. The shop exclusive kit is just TOO CUTE to pass up! I already have fabric at home that I'll use. I don't really like Jobelan, which is what the model is stitched on so I'm going to use some white Monaco that I have in stash. As far as evenweaves go, that's really the only one that I like.

Also bought my first skein of Vikki Clayton silk. I chose Blueberry Creme. It's a really pretty blue and white and it reminded me of the Greek flag. I'm using the PR freebie Arabesque alphabet to stitch some Christmas ornaments for my two best friends. One of them is Greek and I'd been having trouble coming up with the right color. Blueberry Creme fits the bill nicely.

Now if my Countrystitch order would just arrive...

A Cajun tree!!!

Mary at M Designs has created a special shop exclusive tree for Cajun Crossin'. It says "Cajun" and it's stitched with an exclusive Vikki Clayton silk dyed in Mardi Gras colors. (purple, gold and green). I'm getting one!!! I may even stitch two, one in the Mardi Gras silk and one in a variegated red that would capture all the color variations on a boiled crawfish tail.... That seems fitting to me since the topper charm is a crawfish.

Oh great, now I've made myself want crawfish!

SBQ and Happy Dance!

First the Happy Dance! It's been nearly 3 years in the making. Finished it Tuesday and I'm STILL on cloud 9! TW's English Garden Sampler. It was started before I knew about framing margins and I ended up not having enough fabric to do the outer border. To be honest, I don't think the piece looses anything without it. Sorry for the funky folds, draping it over the couch arm and back was the only way I could get enough light!


Today's SBQ was suggested by Carol
and is:

Since you started blogging, have you noticed any difference in your stitching habits? Tell us about them.

I have noticed some changes but I can't say it's due to blogging per se. It's more due to finding all of the message boards, which then led to blogging about my stitching. I've tackled more complex projects, I tracked hours on one and I've started a rotation. So far I'm VERY happy with the rotation and don't have any plans to tweak it. I do also stitch more since I've plugged into the online communities. That I can blame on blogging and the boards, lol.





And one more picture! This is St. Basil's Cathedral after one rotation, which is two weeks. I didn't get as much done as I had wanted to though due to interference known as real life. It's stitched 2x2 on 32ct Belfast "Jamaica Sparkle" by SW.

Long time no post

It's been quite busy for the last week and a half. One of my co-workers was out last week so I was in the gift shop by myself. That's another one of my beefs with her- how she will take off work for every little church thing and leave us to take up the slack. Taking time off when we're gearing up for History Camp is not exactly a nice thing to do. We ended up staying late Thursday to do things that we hadn't been able to get to earlier in the week because she was gone.

Haven't done much stitching at home due to the being busy and just being too tired in the evenings. I am stitching tonight though! I'm staring the next slot in my rotation, PV "Through a Mother's Eyes". This piece is for my mother. She fell in love with it years ago and asked me to do it for her. I've had it in stash for quite a while so it's nice to know I'm finally going to get going on it. Tomorrow I will post my end of rotation pic of St. Basil's. Since I haven't stitched on it since Wednesday I didn't get nearly as much done as I had wanted to. I'm also getting a new camera before the end of the month so my picture quality is going to improve greatly. Have my eye on the Sony Cyber-Shot 600.

In other news my sister and I, our mother and 2 of our friends drove to Baton Rouge last night to see the Michael Buble concert. FANTASTIC!!!!!!! It was so much fun and well worth the wrung out feeling I have today. I have discovered that Remeron taken at 1:30am and having to get up to go to work don't mix. I woke up just enough to tell my sister that I wasn't going to make the morning and then promptly went back to sleep. Woke up at 11:15, just in time to eat something and get ready for work before she came back to get me. Tonight I'm going to take it about 9:30-9:45 and see what happens. Preferably closer to 9:30.

And my best friend Ria is coming to see me in September!!!!!!!!! We've been trying to find good dates for a year now and we finally found it! She'll be here for 2 weeks in the middle of September and will get to see a good variety of things. I plan to take her to the alligator farm, to Natchez, maybe up into Natchitoches, down to Baton Rouge and N.O. and whatever else might strike our fancy. She wants to learn how to crochet so I'll be teaching her how to do that also. And fill her full of good Southern cooking!