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!

Wha-bam!!!

DH claims that "wha-bam" can mean what ever I want it to mean.  Not quite sure what he means by that - he is pretty hard to read sometimes - but that is now today's official title and here we go:

Yesterday's finishes:
1)  I started out by loosing my focus immediately and jumped on to make some matching accessories for my brand new ironing board cover.  Here is a picture of my triangular "scrap sac" (thanks for the idea L-bug!), a long, heavy, emery-filled pin-cushion, and a couple of pin-boxes with magnetic bottoms.  I thought that the magnetic bottoms would work great to keep the pins in, or at least to be strong enough to find & suck up lost pins, but nope.  I found the boxes in Michaels' storage/organization department, where they are sold as accessories to magnetic wall strips.  They come two of the same kind in one pack.  My plan is still to cross-stitch something suitable and insert in the other couple of lids..... (Here is a link that shows you the brands, Studio Decor, and the how the package looks, if you would like to pick some for yourself.  The brand is owned by Michaels, so that is were you'll find them.  Not sure if they sell stuff on-line anywhere.)  This was the easiest finish, just iron on pellon on the back of the fabric, draw the contour of the shape on the pellon and cut out carefully with small, sharp scissors.

2)  Over to the real business at hand - the address book was something that I had to work on in steps over several days.  Lots of gluing going on, something that I am not too comfortable with by the way.  The book came with some plain paper to cover up the linen edges on the back of the front flap, but I upgraded to some scrap booking paper that I had lying around.  (See, this is why I tend to collect things while thinking to myself "you never know when you might need a pallet of assorted Mill Hill beads" or "a mound of assorted paper-clips" or whatever-it-is...  Not good!  Now that I have confirmed that this approach works great, I am more likely to continue squirreling things away.)  Recall how I mentioned DH's and my breakfast yesterday?  Does bacon ring a bell?  Well, as a bonus to-do, I got grease all over the back of the address book and had to cover that up with the scrap-booking paper too.  (I am working in the kitchen, since someone put pallets of Mill Hill beads and mounds of paper-clips in my stitching-room....)  Check out the letters on the address book.  Cool, huh!?

3)  The Halloween Pin Garden was the last finish of the day.  I did manage to squeeze in a small pin-cushion on the fabric.  I used the flowers from the main design and added a small crow or raven from Sandra Sullivan's (Homespun Elegance) free Halloween chart from last year.  This cutie can be found on her blog, here.  Since I ran out of all my emery while making the big ironing board pin-cushion earlier in the day, I shamelessly used a bag of cheap glass beads instead.  It does give the cushion a pretty neat feel.  I have added a pick of the backing fabbie too.  Speaking of shameless, I also "borrowed" some black silk thread from a completely different kit.  This is the second time I have borrowed floss from that particular kit, so I think that I may run into trouble the day that I actually start stitching on that one (a Scarlet Letter kit).

And, since we are on that theme, here is a snap of the "Box of Shame"....

It contains, I don't even know how many, unfinished ornaments, small pictures etc.  Here I have pulled a few out that I really want to finish within a reasonable time period (like 5 years or so...).  I would like to finish up the name sampler before going to the retreat next weekend.  (I'll write more about the retreat in my next post.)

Today, I am fit and ready to start finishing the Merry Cox class.  I do believe that it can be done  However, Sunday is the big bird-cage cleaning day around here.  DH and I spend about 4 hrs taking apart, cleaning, and putting back together 6 BIG bird cages.  Not especially fun at all.

Well, I'd better hop to it or it won't get started.  Talk with you in a bit and Happy Stitching,