April 26, 2009

First, I have to tell you a story. This happened on Tuesday and I forgot all about it until yesterday.

At the Heirloom Stitchers meeting, Knitter-Carol was having trouble counting threads on her stitching project, so I gave her my extra set of stitch markers. I never use them because I have three other pairs, so I didn't see a need to hang on to them. Besides, she was getting frustrated and I wasn't just going to sit beside her and do nothing when I could help.

So she looks at the stitch marker, turning it in her fingers. I say, "they're from My Big Toe," and she puts it down and looks at me. I look right back. Then it hits me! "Not MY big toe! The designer!" I completely forgot that Knitter-Carol is new to stitching and hasn't had the exposure to lots of different designers like I have. She says "I didn't know!" We had a nice chuckle over that one!

So...are you ready to see it? After all this time, I've finally completed my book, A Stitcher's Companion by Enchanting Lair! I stayed up and whipped together my last stitch at 3:45am.

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover and Title Page

Needles & Threads

Scissors

Band Sampler

Back Cover & Spine

I took a stumble this morning while I was out walking with Kasey so I didn't do as much today as I'd planned. My foot hit the side of a tire rut in the driveway and my heel slid off my flip-flop, causing my ankle to roll. Before I had time to do anything I was on the ground, hitting mostly my left knee and hip. I didn't sprain my ankle and only scraped my knee a little bit, but I still took it easy today. The spot where I fell in the driveway is just packed dirt so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

I managed to get all my stitching sorted and chose the projects that are going with me this weekend. I have approximately ten charts that I would like to shop for. They need fabric or threads or a combination of the two. Some I would like to change all the colors, so seeing a wall of fibers will help me out in that department. Then I can do floss tosses for the charts I've already chosen fibers for.

Thanks to Uncle Sam's stimulus plan, I have spending money! I'm not going to go overboard, though. I've updated my floss check lists for Weeks, Gentle Arts, and Crescent Colours, so I don't have to worry about buying duplicate colors. Except for last-minute things like toiletries and Kasey's food bowls, everything is ready to go. I didn't do any stitching today after waking up so there's no progress on America to show you. I'm hoping to put in some stitches sometime Monday.

April 22-25, 2009

I played hooky from dialysis today. I wasn't feeling well so I stayed home. I thought this evening was the Borders Books meeting but I was the only one there from 7-8pm. Kasey quietly slept on the floor beside my chair as I stitched. When no one arrived by 8:00, I left to return home.

After posting a message to Facebook, Genia replied that the meetings are the last Wednesday of the month. I was told the 4th Wednesday, but I got in a half-hour of stitching that I probably wouldn't have done at home. This is the progress I made while at Borders. My house is growing flowers!

Thursday was the usual gathering of needle-workers at Barnes & Noble. Audrey gifted me with this wonderful Sampler Gameboard by The Drawn Thread. She also included a 1/4 yard of linen to stitch it on. Thank you, Audrey!

Pam stayed late because she had a 5:30 yoga class nearby. Since there was no sense in her driving all the way home to turn right around for class, we hung out, chatted, and did more stitching. My flowers now have stems, a bird for companionship, and the vine is growing up the opposite side of the fabric.

I did absolutely no stitching on Friday. Mah Jong sucked me in. As a matter of fact, it's sucked me in almost every evening this week. Why is that game so addictive? And I can't go to sleep until I beat the last one. Even if I have to re-start it over and over, I have to finish it.

Saturday was an entirely different matter as far as stitching. I haven't had a day this productive in a long time. It felt wonderful! Not only did I wake up and take America out on the front porch, but I also went into a finishing frenzy! When I woke up I noticed how warm it was so Kasey and I went out to the porch to enjoy the fresh air. I stitched on America for a couple hours.

I was able to complete the lower part of the vine on the left and began the flag. I've been putting off stitching the other side of the house because it's all one color but I think I'm going to have to start stitching at least one length of floss on it each time I work on America.

Then I realized that I only have three days to prepare for my retreat! I did some packing and remembered that I had some gifts I wanted to make. I can't give details and spoil the surprise, but I had my first encounter with lacing and am very happy with the results. After a couple hours' work, I have two finished gifts. You'll have to wait until Friday when I hand-deliver them to see what's inside.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish before the retreat was to finish my stitching book, A Stitcher's Companion. There is going to be a show and tell at the retreat and I was hoping to be able to show off my finished book.

I'm still not thrilled with the finishing instruc-tions, as I think a few simple changes would have made the entire process a whole lot easier, but I tackled it. This is my progress as of midnight, with the first panel closed around the backing board and part-way attached to the inside cover of the book.

Panels two and three still need to be closed, but the backing board is in place. I may yet have that book finished for the show and tell!

A Stitcher's Companion

So to get you up to speed on the last week, I completed all the stitching for A Stitcher's Companion by Enchanting Lair. I'm VERY unhappy with the finishing instructions, though! THEY SUCK!

My Problems with Enchanting Lair's A Stitcher's Companion:

I used foam-core backing inside the pages. The problem was that when I put the foam-core in the cover, the book won't close. So I've now taken out all the foam-core and am putting it aside til I cool off. Believe me, I didn't spend two months stitching this just to throw it out!



Also, in my opinion, the pages on the panels are backwards. It's hard to explain in just words, but after you whip-stitch the pages together (like you do with a biscornu), you have three sides of whip stitch and one side of plain back stitching. Logic would tell you to use the line of back stitching on the fourth side and one of the lines of back stitching in the spine of the cover to whip-stitch together in order to attach the page to the cover, right?

Nope! If you do, all your pages are backwards. You have to use one of the whip-stitched sides instead. When the book is assembled, all of the visible sides of the cover and the pages are whip-stitched together, except the outer edge of the pages, which are a plain line of back stitching.

All Enchanting Lair had to do to fix this was switch the panels' sides. Then, once everything is whip-stitched together, you simply use that fourth side, with the back stitching, to attach the pages to the cover. It's that simple. And there are NO clear pictures of the entire project completed in the chart OR on their website.

They give you no measurements to lay out the individual panels on your fabric, just a fuzzy scan of an 18x27 piece of fabric. I used two pieces because it looked like their borders were less than an inch around the sides of the fabric. They tell you to use QSnaps, but you need more than an inch of clearance in order to stitch on them! I also do not like the fact that they don't bother to give you the stitch count of some of the parts. You have to count the thread pocket and the band sampler yourself.

Should I go on? Well, here goes... It says to machine stitch the pockets together and machine stitch them onto the page of the book. However, if you switch your fabric to a hand-dyed like I did, no thread matches it. Because of that, I back stitched extra lines so that I could whip-stitch the pockets together and to the fabric, all in one step. I also centered motifs on three different pages by moving them over one thread. They were: the motif on the front cover, the lettering on the spine, and the fourth row of the band sampler.

On the spine, you HAVE to stitch your letters first, especially if you're using three initials! I stitched the diamond motifs first and one of my letters ended up touching it. I frogged the diamonds and left them off in the end. I centered my letters side-to-side and top-to-bottom, leaving three spaces between each letter. There was no room for the diamond motifs after doing that.

I changed the entire font of the personalization page because the lettering they used is very styalized and doesn't go with the Gothic font they used everywhere else in the book. AND I had to move "eedles" of "Needles" up two threads because they didn't have that word lined up like they did all the other words in the book.

The final two changes I made from the charts were:

1. Instead of filling in "A Stitcher's Trove" with cross stitching, I left it with just the back stitching so that it would match "Needles" on the facing page, and



2. I used Wild Lavender (light purple) rather than variegated to stitch the pair of scissors. I used Yallingup (variegated) to back stitch around the scissors.

I don't like the look of variegated outlined in variegated, so I definitely had to change that.

Is that enough?? I WILL HAVE A BOOK WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE! I just need to take a break from it for a week or so.

October 24, 2008

Here is Baby Kasey with all the cross stitching completed. The picture was taken at about 3:30 this afternoon. I often have non-stitchers ask me why we do all the outlining and detail stitching. You'll be able to see the difference it makes...

Here she is, completed! I put the last backstitch in at 11:45 pm. I opted not to do the very pale yellow french knots in her eyes. She seems to be looking right at you as it is. Those detail stitches really make her look life-like, don't you think? I've had several people comment that it's like they can reach out and touch her nose, she's so realistic. And cute! You can't forget the cuteness factor here! I can't tell you how happy I am that she's finally done! She is among my favorites that I've stitched. BK is my 42nd stitching finish of the year, and when added to my eight sewing finishes I'm up to 50 total finishes!

June 13-16

I still can't stitch, so I've continued reading and watching movies. I'm in the middle of 16 Lighthouse Road by Debbie Macomber. PS I Love You arrived from Netflix today, so I'm going to take that to Mom's with me and watch it up there.

There was some trouble getting good bloodflow at dialysis Friday but Mai Lou was able to get it working correctly. I was a little worried; then again, I've been paranoid about the graft failing ever since I had to go back in for the second surgery last week. I've never heard of anyone who had to have back-to-back de-clotting surgeries like I just had! That's not a distinction I want to have, especially after having already set the record for the hospital stay following a parathyroidectomy. Someone needs to stay longer than 24 days...and fast!

Anyway, I left for Mom's following dialysis, but the trip seemed to take alot longer than usual. I stopped at the Wawa on Rt. 50 to get Lemonade Tea and a sub for the drive. The Bay Bridge traffic wasn't bad at all; I got right through the tolls. I made a pit stop at the rest stop on Rt 301 N and called Mom from the parking lot to tell her I'd be about an hour. The drive took another hour and a half. I think it was because there was a truck on Rt 213 that wouldn't go over 50mph and was doing 45mph most of the time. If I could have passed him, I would have, but there was always someone coming the other way. Therefore, I didn't arrive at Mom and Dad's til almost 10pm. I was totally frustrated by that point.

Mom and I played a few hands of Skip Bo and Ian and Sara got home around 1am. Mom went to bed and Sara and I played a couple more rounds of Skip Bo. Ian was in a bad temper because he was supposed to pick up Breanna for the weekend since it was Father's Day, but Aime went to West Virginia and took Bre with her. It was not to be brought up while I was there, because everyone was upset about it. I really hope he gets his visitation in writing so she can't pull this crap anymore. Bre's birthday was May 23 and we haven't seen her since Ian had her the weekend of April 19! Okay, done airing family dirty laundry. Sorry.

I watched PS I Love You on my laptop Saturday afternoon. I went through four Kleenex watching it, too! I've never laughed so much at a movie that made me cry! It's one of the best romantic comedies I've ever seen, and that's saying alot! This movie is definitely going on my short list of favorites! And I'd watch it two more times before the weekend was over!

I went up to work in the Craft Room Saturday night and got alot done! It was 5:00am before I cleaned up and went to bed. First, I finished Dad's no-sew cube. I wanted a cube to match the one I made for Mom at Mother's Day, so Heart in Hand's Pocket Samper: Dad was the stitched piece I used. I used a plain brown fabric for the sides and a blue print for the back to tie in to all the colors of the stitching. I'm still waiting for Mom to send me pictures, because the batteries in my camera died.
I also made two covers to put around the edges of my Q-Snaps. Mom had fusable tape, so I used that instead of running long lines of stitching down the fabric. I created two tubes in the fabric by folding the edges over and fusing them in the center. This left a tunnel through which I could run the elastic. I pinned the elastic to each end of the fabric and then sewed it into a circle. Voila! Two Q-Snap covers to protect my fabric edges from getting dirty!

I watched The Bucket List while I was working in the Craft Room and I must admit it was a disappointment. All the one-liners that were winged in the previews aren't really funny when you see them in context. It was about two dying men doing all the things they always wanted to do, but it just wasn't the comedy the movie trailers depicted it to be. I also watched PS I Love you for the second time.

I had no idea of the passage of time, so I was shocked to see that it was 5am when I finished. Needless to say, I went to bed. Mom was already upset with me for sleeping until 3pm Saturday, so I didn't want to do a repeat performance on Sunday!

Yes, it's Father's Day weekend and everyone (except Bre) is coming to visit Sunday afternoon. Sarah, Anna, and Caleb will be coming for the day. Ben is coming up for as long as he can. Ian and Sara will be here for dinner because they're going to Sara's dad's for the afternoon.

I put Dad's cube on the kitchen table along with the two Sudoku books I bought for him so they'd be there when he woke up. He thanked me for them when I got up (at 11am). Ben was already there, which totally suprised me, and Ian and Sara were awake, too. Sarah told Mom and Dad she wouldn't be coming over until the kids had taken their naps, so they were expected to arrive around 3pm. It ended up being more like 2pm and Sarah told us that Anna didn't sleep, but "she rested" on the couch for two hours.

I took Anna up to my room and we finished the Christmas Candles into an ornament for her to take home. This is the piece she picked out the last time I was at Mom's. This time, I have everything I need to finish it for her, including purple fabric for the back. She helped me by holding the glue and putting the cap on each time I was finished with it. She also folded over one of the sides of the stitched piece. The whole time she kept saying "Home!" meaning she was taking it home with her.

While I had her upstairs, I gave her all the Princess and Shrek things I found at the Dollar Store for her. There was an Ariel kaleidescope, a Shrek holographic poster, a magic towel with Ariel on it, Tinkerbell stamps, Princess stamps, an Ariel book for her to take into the bath tub, two Disney books with cardboard pages, and a Princess activity kit for her to do at home with Mommy. Anna loves Shreck and her eyes lit up when I showed her how the image changed. She went right downstairs to show off all her new toys and got Ben to read all the books to her (after Sarah and I read them to her). I was able to find Winnie the Pooh magic towel, bathtime book, and activity kit for Caleb, too.

After playing downstairs instead of in the playroom upstairs like Mom and Dad asked Sarah to take them to, she finally went the the neighbor's house with them to let them play with Ben (another Ben, not my brother) and Joseph. Deb had them out in the front yard so Anna played in the pool. Sarah took Caleb out of the water shortly after I went over, so he and Joseph, who is about 10 months old, played on a blanket with some toys.

Anna was so cute. She heard us talking about Deb's dog, Frosty, needing water and she carried a bucket from the pool to the sidewalk for Frosty to drink. Now, granted, most of the water sloshed out along the way, but it's the thought that counts! She even re-filled it twice because she didn't think there was enough water in it.

Sarah and I got on the see saw until Anna wanted to get up. Well, we let her up twice but told her that was it. She tried to climb up a third time and Sarah tried to stop her. She ended up biting Sarah on the stomach, through her shirt, and broke the skin a tiny bit. So that was the end of the see saw and Anna's playing for a while. After she calmed down from the crying jag, she went back to playing in the pool with Ben. I went back home to get my steak ready for the grill and to see if I could help with any of the other preparations and left Sarah and the little ones at Deb's.

Sarah brought the kids back in time to have an appetizer I fixed. I'd bought some mini bread bowls filled with spinach and artichoke dip. I'd have liked them more if there were holes bigger than a melon baller in the bread, but unfortunately there wasn't alot of spinach and artichoke dip, so it just tasted like bread for the most part. Anna ate two bread bowls, but gave the dip to Mom. Caleb suprisingly liked the dip, and he enjoyed the bread as well.

We sat down to dinner late because Ian and Sara didn't get back home until after 6pm. I had the tenderloins wrapped in bacon that I picked up from Acme and everyone else had macaroni salad and hamburgers. I bought a small salad from the salad bar because I don't care for store-bought cold salads. Anna was an absolute pill at dinner. You could tell she didn't get a nap. I ended up with ketchup on my pants because she knocked her fork off the table. She started sharing my salad with me, but then decided she didn't want to eat anything at all.

Her new trick is to "bonk" you with her fist and then say "Ha Ha!" which she did several dozen times in a row to Dad while he was eating. Keeping her in her chair and focused on the food on her plate was impossible. She usually eats alot nicer for me, but with everyone laughing at her antics, there was no way she was going to sit and eat. Luckily Sarah took them home right after she cleaned up their places at the table.

The rest of the evening was spent with Sara and Dad out on the deck chatting. Ian went downstairs to play his Playstation and rest while Mom blasted her music in the bedroom and relaxed in the jacuzzi tub. Ben had to head back home to Glen Burnie at the same time as Sarah and the kids.

Around midnight, I went upstairs to try to stitch, but it didn't work laying in bed. Instead, I watched PS I Love you for the third time. At least by now, I don't need as many Kleenex! I adore this story!

Dad helped me pack up my truck and I left around 11:15am Monday to go home. I arrived at the house by 1pm, so I had over an hour until I needed to leave for dialysis.

In the mail, I found the Spring 2008 Limited Edition pack from Dinky Dyes in the mail. Jo sent me two LE cotton skeins: Princess Rose and Spring Garden; two LE silk skeins: Lavender Roses and Poppy's Garden; one Araluen silk skein, and a piece of hand-dyed opalescent evenweave. Everything was packaged in a shimmering pink guaze draw-string bag. Also included was a chart for a biscornu that uses the two LE silk colors. It's a very delicate floral design; very pretty!

March 9, 2008

After the clock struck midnight, I continued my work on finishing off my stitched pieces. Because I usually have a small patriotic tree, I wanted to make Liberty by HIH into an ornament. I chose a fabric for the backing that had a distressed look to mimic the faded blue in the over-dyed floss. It also has a silver shimmer that picks up from the silver star charm. So here it is:
I also made a flatfold that looks like a pinkeep out of No Matter What by Hob-Nobb Designs before I went to bed. I love the fabric I chose because it picks up both the dark and light brown from the checkerboard border. Not bad for a first attempt, huh?
I didn't realize what time it was, so I went to bed at 4am. When I woke up, I got back to work on my last project My Very Bestest Friend by 4 My Boys. At first, I was going to make a pillow, but I really didn't feel like hand-stitching it closed. After thinking about it for a while, I saw a cigar tin that I got from Uncle Wes. It was large enough for the design. I lined the inside top and bottom of the tin with the fabric I'd chosen for the design and the design itself, of course, adorns the outside of the top.
I took these pictures the other day and forgot to include them in my post, so here they are now. I caught Kasey while she was "grooming" her newest toy, Maggie Mad-Face. Don't ask me why it's called that, but it's the name she came with. Maggie was Kasey's reward for being a good girl at the Dog Wash last Sunday after she went swimming. She really hates getting a bath and I wanted to give her a treat so it's not always a bad experience. Yawns, Kay-Kay style:

March 8, 2008

I was going through some stash today and found my JoAnn's flier. It had twelve 40% off coupons that expired TODAY, so I headed out the door with my last five stitched finishes. I got fabric, cording, batting, and buttons to "finish-finish" all five pieces.

When I got home Uncle Wes carried Grandma's sewing machine into the dining room for me and I set up a workstation at the end of the table. Chet slept on the floor near the table the whole time I was in there. I'd thought my cat had finally stopped hovering, but I was wrong! He's never very far away! Kasey actually gives me more space (figure THAT out!) than Chet does.

Anyway, I was able to make a pillow out of Hinzeit's Mini Block Stitch and an ornament out of Hob-Nobb's Cabin in the Snow before the clock struck midnight. I'm so proud of myself for getting these done! It's been forever since I've made a pillow or anything else, so I'm glad they turned out as well as they did.