WIPocalypse Report 1 and Other Updates

Happy Monday to all!  

After a long period of excessive stress, frequent sickness, and very low energy, I am finally feeling like myself again!  I have lived with periods of depression as long as I can remember and I generally just power through.  I have always assumed that people just aren't "happy" all the time, so I haven't really thought much about how things are, but this time my down-period felt unusually long.  Coming out of it again makes life so much easier and a great deal more enjoyable.  General chores don't feel like overwhelming tasks and I can enjoy everyday things again, like hanging out with the birdies, snuggling with bunnies, and I even took a walk for an hour all by myself yesterday - the weather is just too good here to pass any outdoor-time off right now.

Other things are making life pretty great too:

- Littlest Sis started her new job today and seems to have had a positive experience so far

- My mom and dad have bought tickets to come visit us here in KY in May

- I am taking vacation on Thursday and Friday to go for a loooong stitch weekend up in Ohio with a bunch of friends  (I have already pulled out the projects that I will bring to stitch on)

- We finally got to stitch over lunch today!  (I am almost done with Fresh From the Garden)

- I finished my first 2012 project this week - WIPocalypse was a good idea

- I bakes Swedish cinnamon rolls yesterday and they turned out all right!

Well, let's jump to it - here is the WIPocalypse update for this moon, the magpie from Madame Chantilly's Keys collectors.  The progress in the beginning of the year:

First I frogged quite a bit of the wing-stitches that I did not like.  Then I added blending-filaments to the dark blue wing feathers and the key ring - a pain to stitch with, but well worth the extra blood, sweat and tears.  :-)  The border had to be adjusted to fit the frame and I felt that a yellow rose was a better fit with the blue over-dyed linen than the original pink would have been.

And here is the finished piece.  I have collected key charms for a few months now - Michaels had quite an extensive collection of pretty keys.  The frame is a key rack from Sudberry house (for cheap from e-bay) and the hooks were bough at K-Mart of all places...  I love how it turned out, but unfortunately I can't hang it up anywhere, considering all the beaks and claws that fly around the house.

Here is a second finish.  The Swedish wool pin-cushion has finally been assembled.

It is much larger than it looks - it is huge!  Look at it hanging from my kitchen chair (yes, my kitchen table frequently becomes transformed into a sewing station).

And a third finish; I did manage to finally slap together the Mad Hatter black-work purse from Nostalgic Needle (it had been sitting in the finishing pile for 2-3 years).  It was a pain to find the right backing fabric for it and I am still not so sure that I picked the right one.  Once again, I tried to step out of the comfort zone and opted to go with a color cotton print instead of the black and white toile that I originally considered.  Oh well....   I am not planning on checking out the back too much, so I guess that it'll be all right.  Note that I covered up the entire edge using beads - I had bunches of fun finishing up this piece.  (I am planning on posting a tutorial on the finishing work sometime soon, if anyone is interested.)
I started stitching on the companion piece, Off With Her Head, a few years ago, so maybe it is time to dig that one back out again.

 

The latest start is the Folk Art Needle Box by Hillside Samplings.  This was one of the limited edition collaboration kits (number 6) that Hillside Samplings and Liberty Hill released together back in 2002.  This one took a few years and a bunch of luck to track down, so I am super-excited about finally starting on it.

Other than that, things are definitely all right.  After a very warm and sunny weekend, we got a chilly night.  This is how I found one of the flocks when I uncovered the cages this morning:

There are 4 small, cold parrots huddling together in the photo - see if you can find them all!  :-)

DH (doesn't he look evil here, kinda' like Dexter...) still claims that he is the Alpha-bunny.

 

The bunnies don't seem to agree...  Princess looks skeptical and Bubba looks terrified.

Well, that is it for this round! Time to get some stitching in before bed-time.  I am watching Back to the Future II on DVD while writing this - "Manure! I hate manure! " Good times!!! 

Good night and Happy Stitching in your dreams,

Happy New Year & Happy New Stitches

I am wishing all of you a wonderful 2012, with fabulous experiences, joy with family & friends and a growing stash and many happy hours of frog-less stitching!

I have enjoyed the break from "real life" immensely.  With my new job-position (many hours of seemingly fruitless labor) and getting sick when I had the least time, I have been chillin' out the past couple of weeks. 
We did not decorate the house for Christmas at all this year, but escaped up to Avon Lake where MIL and FIL live.  We had a great time, the weather was good, we got spoiled something crazy and it was good to just take it easy, lay a puzzle and sleep without an alarm-clock for a while.

I just have to show you some of the wonderful gifts I got:
From DH (aka "Alpha Bunny") - very pretty jewelry (this is what I got after we got back into the store to exchange the original design.  I was so impressed with DH's initial pick, except that my skin-tone is too yellow/green to get away with wearing anything yellow.  These white beauties were picked out instead.  DH mentioned that they were not in the store when he was shopping, but that he would have picked out this set if it had been available at the time.  Isn't he great!?)

BTW - I have just noticed how asymmetrical my eyes are compared to each other.  Maybe age related, cuz I've never noticed before and I haven't switched faces yet.  When I asked DH, he said that "people are usually not perfectly symmetrical"... hmmmm - thanks, I guess?  LOLMIL and FIL spoiled me with, among other things, a pair of seriously cool shoes and a gift certificate for a lot of moolah that can be spent at the Fat Quarter Shop!  Yay!!!

From mom and dad in Sweden - super-cute winter accessories (again, please ignore the asymmetrical eyes...) - and perfect timing too; it snowed here today!  After being up in the mid-fifties all December, 2012 hits and we already have school closings...  (no, the snow did not stick to the ground.  But which school opens on Jan 2nd?  That is just cruel...)

I also got this little tin with candy from my favorite Stockholm coffee-house and bakery, Vetekatten.  I love it - it is so adorable and really cool that it is so realistic!!!  I try to get at least one visit in every time I go home to Sweden - next time I'll take some photos that I can share with you.

 

Yep, I was really lazy over the holidays (I was even off from work today), but I did get a few things done too.  I won't bore you with photos from my clean fridge (LOL!), but here is proof that I did re-pot a bunch of very sad and cramped flowers and also some babies that I got from MIL over Christmas.  Note the bunny-glasses in the windowsill!

I got a couple of old-fashioned looking butter-containers for cheap at TJ Maxx and they are now housing my mini St Paulias that needed divided.  I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.

 

 This is not even all of them.  Luckily, I am giving a few of the larger ones away, so I don't have to keep a jungle on my kitchen counter....  (that''s where DH's booze lives, after all... LOL)

 

I did also get reminded gently by Littlest Sister that while the Niece had a "First Xmas" ornament in the Christmas Tree, the Nephew did not...  Well, enough said - I managed to slap this one together in a couple of evenings.  It was tricky to combine the border with the ornament and have enough space to squeeze in the text, but it did turn out LL RIGHT.  I changed a few of the colors to tone down all the pink.  So, Nephew did not have his very own ornie on the first Christmas, but I have a feeling he won't remember...

The design, Peace Stocking, is a freebie from Brook's Books that can be down-loaded through "Meagan's Brooke's Books Interactive Yahoo! Group" (you can find the link to sign up on the right hand side on Brooke's home-page).  You have to be a member to access all the goodies.
I did also get myself in gear and finished the stitching on this little wool-embroidered pin-cushion kit from Sweden.  The front has been stitched up fro a while, but I wanted to stitch something on the back too, so this is the design I came up with.  Not bad, considering the fact that I was running out of most of the colors at this point...  Now I just have to run the piece thought the sewing machine for a couple of minutes and that should be it!  (The piece of paper in the front is my design draft...  I am quite an artiste, right !?  LOL)

I did manage to finish the Brightneedle sampler while at the In-Laws.  I am still a bit on the fence about how I feel about it, but I am thinking that if I switch the color of the stars or snow-flakes or whatever they are, I may get something that looks better.  Thoughts?
(I need to post this on our Brightneedle board one of these days, btw...)

This is probably the hardest thing I got done - L-bugs birthday gift.  From her blog I had found out that she loves Hello Kitty.  Well, that made things easy - find a cute purse and key-head and stitch up a Hello Kitty coin purse real quick.  I was a bit nervous about the finishing step - especially adding the zipper, but it was a piece of cake, thanks to several great tutorials out there on the net.  This tutorial was the one that I ultimately followed (I have learned that I can not seem to follow tutorials unless they have plenty of photos and use really pretty fabrics... ).
In progress (L-bug loves polka-dots too, so I was lucky to find a charm-square in my stash):

Finished!  (Yes, I added the personalization after the purse had been sewn together.  Why make things easy?)

 Together with its pals!

 Lisa was really happy and impressed that I made the purse, great to hear from her as she is a seriously accomplished quilter and seamstress, so that was a lot of fun!

 We were really good - we started on our new project - the Blue Ribbon Box.  We will be taking this class in March and it is a pre-stitch, so we decided to bite the bullet and add yet another WIP to the pile...
Here is the progress - note the super-cute floss-holder that L-bug made for me!!!

And that leads me into Measi's WIPocalypse!  This sounded like the coolest idea, so I signed up.  I think that I should already have published my WIPocalypse list, but better late than never, right?

2012 WIPocalys Project List (all of these are already WIPS - not that Measi's rules says that they jaust have to be WIPs - not that they need to be finished in 2012 - whiew!)
1)  Nephew's birth sampler needs personalized (design from Prairie Schooler)
2)  Scarlet Letter's Wisdom and Innocence bell pull
3)  Eva Rosenstand's Wren On Branch bell pull
4)  Sandy Orton's American Sampler
5)  SALs: Bent Creek's Snapperville and Moss Creek Design's She Maketh Fine Linen'
6)  Teresa Wentzler's Peacock Tapestry
7)  Permin's Stockholmia
8)  Scarlet Letter's EH 1669 sampler
9)  Brooke's Books Designs' Wedding Sampler
10)  Moss Creek Designs Ukrainian pockets (have to check on the actual name
11)  Madame Chantilly's Keys Collector

Is that it?  No, I have even more grand plans for 2012!  I do also have a
2012 Finishing List
1)  Acorns from Cross-Eyed Cricket
2)  Blackwork Angels from Prairie Schooler
3)  A Sailor's Huswif by Needle's Prayse
4)  Patricks Woods' The Mermaid's Two Tales
5)  Nostalgic Needle's Off With Her Head purse
6)  The Heart's Content's Sewing Clamp~Sampler Bits
7)  The Swedish Wool pin cushion (see above)
8)  BOAF Xmas pic
9)   Fremme's Christmas Tree picture
10)  Burda Christmas Heart

...AND we all love to start on new projects, right?  Well, here it is, the
New Starts 2012 List
1)  Just Nan's Halloween House
2)  Merry Cox' Victorian Carrier
3)  Patrick's Wood's Blue Ribbon Sewing Box (see above)
4)  The blackwork petticoat (?) from Fine Lines Magazine
5)  Carriage House Samplings' Shores of Hawk Run Hollow (SAL with Valerie)
6)  Reticello pin-cushion (me "new technique" project for 2012)
7)  Willing Hands' Hydrangea Clover Cutter Necklace
8)   Scarlet Letter's Shepherdess
9)   Fremme's Altona Pillow
10)  Hillside Samplings'  heart needle-book (?)

Well, with that, it's past my bed-time yet again.
Take care and Happy Stitching!