A Mix of Beauties & Cool Stuff

Hi all,

L-bug and I are up in the northern parts of Ohio - on our way to the Blue Ribbon Box class!!!!  Can't wait.  The car leaves in 45 minutes!

Anyway, last week I found come neat things on the internet that I wanted to share with you.  Maybe these are old things, but it's the first time I have found them.  First off, this is a really pretty piece by Amy Mitten.  I have looked at her things for years and I love how she uses mystery and crime as a part of her designs. (I think that Wyndham Needleworks carry most of her kits.)  This one is new to me and I found this video very cool, the Mystery Mansion Needlework Kit:

Here is the original mansion - I had no idea!  (Her are the links to part 2 and 3, how fascinating is this!?)

I also ran across this gorgeous paperclip art; Scherrenschnitty by Clifford Nevin (look here for more of his gorgeous work).

 Look at the fabulous detail - carefully coffee stained.  After the birds and branches were cut out, part of the stain was selectively removed with a wet brush and details were added with a pencil..  So delicate and the colors are just beautiful!  If you have an extra $650 scrapping around, this beauty can be yours!

Remind you of anything?  This is the super pretty (and impossible to find) Birds in the Bower by The Goode Huswife published back in 1999:

I can only assume that both Gavin Nevin and Anne Brown drew their inspiration from the same piece of antique art.  It would be fun to see it, so if anyone knows if there is an "original" out there, please leave a comment!

Deb posted on her blog, Stitching Threads Through My Life, about a really handy cool cross-stitch word generator (thanks so much to Deb for refreshing my memory).  I love the result and  how the text came out, but I did have some serious problems printing the finished text.  Thanks to having ample experience with printing stuff that does not want to be printed, I got around the problem like this: Copy and paste line by line into Word (a bit tricky to mark the lines in the generator program, but it is possible), mark and cut all the lines you just pasted into Word and re-paste back into Word as an image (chose option "paste special") - now when you print both grids and text will show up on your page.  This is what I got in the end:

Now I can finally figure out how to stitch the border for the Snapperville piece - I can see light at the end of the tunnel!  :-)

And don't forget to go check out Deb's blog and say hi to her!  You may already know her from one of her previous blogs, but she started Stitching Threads Through My Life on Dec 31 last year, so she is celebrating her 1/4 year anniversary in a couple of weeks.

Lastly, for those of you who enjoyed the embroidery tattoos, but are (like me) too wimpy to get one - below is the less permanent option; cross-stitch nail polish!

All right, that's it for now.  Can't wait to share all the fun stuff we will be doing in class today as soon as I get a chance to sit down by the computer again!

Take care, have a wonderful weekend, and happy stitching,