A Quick Breather

Work, work, work.  I got in to the lab this weekend to finish up an experiment.  The computer is here at home tonight, since I need to write a mastodon presentation due Thursday.  I just needed a quick break and I figured that I'd stop by and write a quick hello to everyone.  Sorry, no blog-visits until Friday, I'm afraid.

Last week was pretty productive.  I am slowly getting the CRC acorns together and learned a few tricks on the way.  Here is the first trial acorn: Rest.  You can see all the pieces ready to go - batting, mat-board pieces, felt caps, stitched fronts and cotton backing.  I think that cutting out the mat-board is much more painful than all the sewing that goes into finishing up the ornaments in the end.  LOL

 

A pile of acorn fronts waiting patiently for their backs.  I love that Vickie always tries out fun linen colors, even though it can be tricky to gather all of them.

Finally - fronts AND backs are done.  Now I just have to figure out what I want to use for the hanger and the edging.  I did not find anything that got me real excited in the home stash and you know what that means - time for a shopping trip.  Maybe on Friday....

For the hangers I am contemplating using some pretty, brown, shear, wide ribbon and use it to tie the ornaments to the display (whatever that will be...  LOL) rather than use a loop to hang them.  I figure that it will be easier to get the ornies to face the way I would like them to.  Plus bows would be so pretty!

Our work crafting group is expanding and we are having a great time.  It is so relaxing to get in a few minutes of stitching in the middle of the day, while catching up on life, news, science, books and everything.  Today, we were all pretty somber since it was Monday and we ended up laughing hard after just 15 minutes.  It was great!
We do also get a lot crafted.  Hip^Hip is working an a very pretty Scarlet Letter sampler (I think this is the one) - amazing, since she just started stitching about a year ago.  She is a quick stitcher and she is fearless, a great combination!
Road Runner is crocheting baby blankets galore - she pretty much has a manufacturing process going; she is really pumping them out!  They look great.
The Barbarian hangs out with us and solves puzzles.  That is probably harder than crafting, as much as we chit-chat while we all hang out.
The Boss is stitching a beautiful, large fraternity crest for her son.  It looks really good.  She has also been working on a really involved book-mark for her daughter, so she has a couple of projects going at the same time.
I tend to stitch smaller projects at work.  I had been working on Sweetheart Tree's Halloween Quadrielle, but I had to take a break.  It felt like I was ripping out as much as I was stitching...  To avoid getting completely depressed, I put that to the side and started on Sweetheart's Chickadee Winter Welcome instead.  It showed up that was a good switch, since I got it done in about two weeks.  
Here is the stitched piece (You can click on the photos to have a closer look on and drool over all the beads and sparklies):

I did one small change to the design; I switched out "Welcome Friends" for "Welcome Winter".  

Here is the linen piece mounted on the precut mat-boards together with the mounted backing fabric:

Finally - the winter chickadee is hanging out with the autumn pumpkins and the summer sun-flower.  I started on the spring kit on Friday and it is coming along pretty quickly (knock on wood).  I will change the "Welcome Friends" to "Welcome Spring" for that one.  I think that I will try to display all of them together hanging on a ribbon - it looks great in my head, but time will tell.  I am excited though!

On the home-front I still keep neglecting Fremme's "blue sampler".  Instead I decided to stitch on a Samsarah Xmas stocking.  It is a lot of fun and it is honkin' HUGE.  Look at the small leaflet up in the left hand corner - that is a letter size booklet!  It is stitched on a pretty coarse linen; 20-ct Guacamole WDW linen.  The floss is Caron Collection Watercoulors.  This floss is cool; it's a three-ply hand-dyed cotton.  One ply is about the same weight as #5 pearl cotton or six plies of cotton floss.

I am, however, getting a tad tired of cover pics that have completely different colors than how they show up in reality.  Since I am really looking a lot at color when picking out designs, the cover pics that are not showing me the truth makes me tired....  Anyone else out there having the same problem?  for this design, I loved the soft pistachio green of the linen, but that is not quite the shade of the cut I got.

Here is a close-up showing the effect of the variegated floss.  I love how the greens turned out - just wish that the red had shown the same beautiful shading.

Other than that, we really need rain badly here.  They have the record for the wettest summer in recorded history in Stockholm, while we haven't gotten a drop for over a week now.  Everything is wilting in the garden - no surprise, since our temperatures are up in the 90:s and flowers and leaves are getting burned into smithereens.  We have been promised a cold-front, but nothing noticeable has come by yet.
I did take some garden photos one early morning last week. I love the lazy looking passion flowers!

DH  took about 20 photos of this little bunny that hangs out around our house.  He is quite a bit smaller than Bubba and Princess....  So very, very cute!  I love the good-bye waves by his little white tail when he takes off.

Well, I'd better unpack the work-computer and get a few slides written before bed.
I hope that all of you are doing great!  And thanks so much for all your sweet congrats on my last post - that really meant a lot to me.
Take care and Happy Stitching - I really hope that I will be able to visit all of you soon,

Happy Easter Stitches

I hope that you had as wonderful of an Easter as I did.  It was very relaxing and we did the usual things - cleaning bird cages and working in the yard in the fantastic spring weather.  

On Saturday, we had our annul garage clean out...  say no more..  Well, I lied - I will keep on talking about it!  I love DH and he is perfect in all ways, with the exception of one.  He can not, to save his life, put away things after he is done with them.  That includes trash!  Needless to say, the annual garage clean-up is not fun.  After it is done, I always say one of those things that many of us have promised ourselves never to say: "Can we keep it like this for a while now?".  Yep, I have turned into my mother and I don't even have kids.  (This year I was a bit crankier and threatened him that I will make him help me sort through my mess in the the stitch room!  He declined... LOL) 

Anyway, the cleanup reminded me about a funny story that a friend told me the other day.  She took her three young sons through the Wendy's drive-through to get them milkshakes.  She was driving her husbands car for the day and he pretty much uses his car as an rolling garbage-can.  For some reason, one of the lids popped off one of the milkshakes in the back-seat, so she pulled into the parking lot to clean up as much of the mess as possible.  As she opens the back door, empty soda-cans and a large assortment of additional trash falls out, whereupon her 5-year old pipes up: "This car is a hoarder!".  Hilarious and what a great excuse!  I asked DH if his garage and my stitch-room are hoarders.  He seems to believe that our mail box is a hoarder, since we keep getting a bunch of packages...  Hmmm

I have no good segue here, so without further ado, here is my finished Easter display.

It feels like I have been looking for a nice dowel-tree or other "non-Christmasy" display tree for ages now.  I would like not to pay $150 and up either, which seems to make the hunt even more interesting (= dragged out).  

The branches I ended up using can be seen as a homage to the traditional Swedish påskris, even though it is pretty much always made up from pussy-willow branches.  We often decorate the branches with painted eggs and dyed feathers.

 A close-up of a few of these neat little designs.  CEC is such a great company and I adore pretty much almost everything they publish.

Have I mentioned before that I love to assemble rounded ornaments?  The curves make finishing really quick and easy. 
If you have not tried it our before, here is how it is done:  Simply cut out front and back from acid-free mat-board (I get mine from Michael's). 
Used the cut-outs as templates to snip out light-weight iron-on interfacing in the same shape for both the stitched piece and your backing fabric.  The interfacing not only gives some additional stabilization to the fabric, but also helps center the design over the mat-board. 
After that, simply stitch a running stitch between your seem allowance and the interfacing (make sure that thread ends on front of fabric/linen).   Pull thread-ends so that fabric snugs up around the back of the mat-board and tie a knot.  Lace piece for an even snugger fit (or if the shape is more complex). 

Pieces are ready for final assembly!

I cheated by hot-gluing ribbon cuts to the back piece.  I found some cool ribbons and stuff at Hobby Lobby, so I had a lot of fun adding the hangers made from plain ribbon together with some extra cuts from ribbon with an interesting structure for the greenery on top of the carrots.

Even better - I found beaded trim!  I had wanted to use beads for my edging, but I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of beading ten ornaments.

Below you can see the result of the beaded trim whip-stitched to the ornament during the assembly step.  I made things easier by adding a glob of hot-glue in the very center between the front and back.  That way, I did not have to make sure that the pieces were properly aligned while concentrating on stitching and there was still give enough between the pieces that I could hide the ends of the trim.  Easy-peasy!

I treated myself to this fabulous wind-chime on Friday.  I am still going through a period in my life where relaxation has ended up being is one of my highest priorities when I have time.  What makes time slow down in a more relaxing way than a wind-chime?  I wish that you could all hear the deep and vibrant sounds generated by this mega chime.  It is gorgeous - like meditation on a hanger!

On Sunday, after a successful cage cleaning session, I finished a sweet little quickie.  This is The Easter Rabbit Sampler by Goode Huswife.  Isn't he cute!?  I think that he deserves framing, so I will have to go searching for that when get a chance.

 

The inspiration for the design comes form the adorable painting below.  This is one of the earliest American portrayals of the Easter rabbit.  It is a reward of merit completed by Johann Conrad Gilbert (Southeastern Pennsylvania active 1775-1810). With a low estimate of $800-1,200 it sold almost twenty-fold to Winterthur Muesum for $23,700.  You can read a bit more about this sweet delivery bunny  here.

Speaking of bunnies, our Easter beasts are pooped!  Here they are hanging out behind the couch after a hard day filled of naps interrupted only by and munching breaks.  Oh, to be a bunny! 

Take care and Happy Stitching til' next time!

Check out all these cool blogs!

Happy Monday (I have 2 hrs left here...) too all blog-peeps out there!  I hope that you had a great weekend and that you had to clean a lesser amount of bird-cages that I did.  DH is out on business travels again, so I spent a long Sunday cleaning the house.  It was actually quite enjoyable and all the critters have had fun scrapping everything down while I was away at work today.  The state of our house strives towards entropy much faster than it does in the rest of the universe, I have noticed.  Well, enough with the cleaning monologue and the nerdy science jokes...

I almost fell off the couch today when I saw that I have 99 followers.  I am so glad and so humbled that 99 people have signed up to follow this adventure.  I truly appreciate it more than I can express.  

So.... I really should sit down and think about a fun give-away.  I will see what I can come up with.

I did also get my first ever blog award - I am thrilled!  Heather, from It's Geek To Me, e-mailed to let me know that she has given me the Liebster Blog Award!  Thanks so much Heather, this will be fun!

So now I have to do the following (shamelessly copying the fine-print directly from Heather's blog here):

"Liebster is a German word meaning favourite, dearest or beloved. The Liebster is awarded by bloggers to other new bloggers who have fewer than 200 followers, to help spread the word about their blogs and to help them gain wider recognition.

The Liebster award comes with four conditions that each recipient must satisfy when accepting.

1. Choose 5 up-and-coming blogs with less than 200 followers to award the Liebster to

2. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.

3. Post the award on your blog. List the bloggers you are giving the award to with links to their sites. Leave comments on their blog so they know about the award.

4. Share 5 random facts about yourself that people don't know about you.

So, here are 5 of my Fave-Under-200 blogs (Hmm, should I have checked that they will accept the award first maybe?  Dunno, I am new to this.  Well, I'll take the chance!)

Here they are, in no specific order:
-  Stitching with Kittens!  The blog title says it all!  LOL  She has stitched plenty of fabulous pieces - I can only dream to get pieces on this level of advancement accomplished one day.
-  Diane at Nan's Needlework Notions.  Diane is so talented - her finishes are absolutely perfect, not to mention that she has a knack for picking out the cutest designs.  Right now, she is showing off some Easter decorations that are to die for!  Nan is also the host of The All Year Long Christmas Stitch-A-Long.
-  Ruth of The Musing Badger.  Stitching and reading - can't get much better!  She is participating in the Pratchett Reading Challenge 2012 and check out her gorgeous Beatrix Potter - love those colors!
-  Marsha of Everybody Loved Clark.  She just came back from a trip to Arizona that looks fantastic AND she got to visit the Attic - lucky girl!  Absolutely beautiful stitching is not the only craft Marsha does, but she makes soaps too.  And she loves bees, which is why I usually refer to her as Bzz*Bzz*Bee...
-  Blue Star Stitcher shares photos of the neighbor wildlife (including love-birds!) and she has a huge heart that she opens for needlework that need an adoptive home.  Do you ever think about what will happen with your stash and finishes in the future?  We can only hope that there are more people like Blue Star out there.

Well, the next one is trickier.  5 random facts coming up:
1)  I love hot-dogs with mustard!  I don't really eat them especially often, but I love'em!
2)  I "almost" became a LNS owner a few years back.  My friend Pink tried to talk me into buying a store that was closing down with her.  Luckily, we decided not to and then the economy tanked, but it was a fun dream.
3)  I love opera - I wish I could sing like that.  When I was in high-school, I used to sing the aria of the Queen of the Night in the stair-wells while running between classes.  I was not half-bad... htne I became an engineer (read between the lines here).
4)  My dream house is a southern Victorian wood house with painted details, wood-work like an ice-cream cake, and a wrap-around porch.
5)   I miss the ocean pretty much daily!

So, I finally decided to start on a new "official" project and pulled the Shepherd and Shepherdess miniatures out of the stash.  I started with the tricky shepherd and his chubby dog - pony... ? .. you tell me!  The stitching is a bit slow, since it is over-one on a fairly larger count linen, but is does look sweet.  Not looking forward to the large, green hill though.  The chart is a bit tricky to read.  It is hand-drawn and the green and red in the honeysuckle border are a "V" and an up-side-down "V" respectively.  I am not a fan of ripping over-one... LOL I got a bit stitched, but then it got put away in a corner, so that I could spend some time on the EMS sampler before the April part would be published.

I did manage to get part 3 done; the left-hand side of the basket and the blue flower sprig were the assignments for last month.  Since this pic, I have down-loaded part 4 and the fun continues!

 

The is ending up much smaller than I had envisioned.  (I would recommend actually stitching this on a larger count, if you decide to work on this piece.)  It is petite, not a whole lot longer than 12 inches, but I love it!  Check out the crazy amount of colors that go into this beauty.  Piles and piles of DMC.  Luckily, I am stitching with one strand, so it is not too bad.  Yesterday I managed to finish the pretty little brown bird in the upper right corner and the upper flower border is finally done.  That little bird is too pretty!

Next part will be the one with the mushroom.  I am trying to come up with something else to stitch instead.  I mean, I like mushrooms and all, but maybe not in this sampler.  I think that I did find a nice butterfly that can come and live here instead.  any other suggestions would be of great interest too!

Since I am hopelessly behind in my photography, I can only show you this pic of the "half-baked" CRC carrot ornies.  I can report that all 12 motifs from the three booklets have been successfully stitched up and they are eagerly awaiting the finishing party.  There really are no excuses..  I have all the mat-board parts needed, I picked out my backing fabric..  I am still contemplating whether I should finish the edges with cording or with beads.  And am I efficient enough (read "lazy") to use the glue-gun instead of sewing each ornie together?  Plus, I do need to pick out a suitable ribbon somewhere.... decisions, decisions.  I am excited about adding all the beads and bling, though!  I guess that will be my carrot!  (Bad pun alert - heheheh.)

 

(Note how cheap I am with my linen - each precut from Silverneedle was meant for one ornament.  In other words, I have enough pieces to stitch each ornament at least one more time.  Maybe next year.. :-))

Here is an example of adventures waiting to happen when you live with a bunch of shredders.  This poor blue bird doesn't even know what hit it, while peacefully sitting on its nest.  The card-board, linen, floss, and the glass-beads (!) have all been eaten up by one or two of my little angles.  My reactions are surprising even to myself sometimes - I could tell that DH was so sorry when he fished it up from behind the couch and showed it to me, but I just shrugged and started thinking about possible way to salvage the piece.  Luckily, I generally enjoy the process of stitching and making more than decorating and displaying, if that makes sense.  Anyway, I am thinking about making one of those pretty little pin-pillows that are so in right now - you know the ones that have a piece of cotton sewn onto the linen on the front (yep, I know that my description totally blows, so check out these examples on Karen's Handiwork blog instead.)

 

I am very pleased to report that no angel has showed any sign of tummy aches after the disappearance of the glass-beads.

The spring bulbs are almost bloomed out in my garden now.  This pretty pink double-petaled tulip enjoys the mild spring, together with some neighboring fuchsia single-petals.

I managed to get all the pansies and the violets in the ground too.  the ones in the pots look fine, but the plants that I sat in the ground don't look pleased at all.  Life if tough, little violets!

Spring is in full swing indoors too.  The birds are getting anxious about building nests and they have started to court each other.  They strut about, fluff their neck feathers and bob back and forth - all to impress each other; scaring away the competition while impressing the potential partner across the room.  I know that they aim to look super cool and majestic, but mummy just laughs and thinks that they are the cutest little down-balls ever.  Mothers!  So they are absolutely adorable, but a great deal less easy to handle.  They get very territorial and aggressive during this time, so I have grown a good collection of bite-marks on my right index finger during the past couple of weeks.

Here they are - guarding their club house with talons and beaks... and dirty looks.

Well, it is bed-time yet again.  I will try to round up Bubba so that we all can go to bed.  (That sounds easier than it is - it generally takes flipping over both couches in the living room upside down while trying to herd her towards her room.  Well, I'd better stop talking about it and actually start doing it.)
Have a great week and Happy Stitching,