Keeping My Mind Occupied With Stitching

I have to do something to keep myself occupied right now so that my thoughts don’t wander into dark territory. Both of my wrists and both elbows are causing me pain right now due to all of the excessive time spent on the laptop during the months leading up to the completion of that huge project at work, so I can’t exactly come home and fiddle on the laptop right now without injuring myself further. So, what else can a gal do to keep busy? Why, stitch, of course! Believe it or not, it doesn’t aggravate my wrists very much and when I get some twinges, I just strap on a pair of splints and I can keep going without making things worse. I don’t claim to understand the workings of my body…

Anyway, as a result, I have more stitching to share already. I have two pieces I’ve stitched, but cannot reveal yet because they are entries into Anna’s stitching challenge, which ends on the 16th.

The first photo I can actually post is a finish-finish of Periphaeria Designs’ Kokopelli into a biscornu. I was going through my pile of finished work with my mom when they were down here the other weekend and I realized that both sides of this biscornu were stitched; all I had to do was put it together:

Next is Just Nan’s Frost on the Pumpkin. It was released first as a limited edition Whimzi that I bought at the last CATS festival in Hershey a couple of years ago. She has since released it to the general public, but I can’t find a link to it on her site. I stitched this one up in the wee hours of one morning recently when I had a bout of insomnia. The white stitches on the snowflakes look a bit wonky because I found that, for some odd reason, I didn’t have any Kreinik 032 blending filament to go over the top of the stitches, so I had to use DMC’s equivalent metallic floss. It didn’t exactly work, but it will just have to be good enough:

Then we have my rendition of the Fall Biscornu, which is the current freebie contest running on The Victoria Sampler Yahoo! group. I’m not actually entering it into the contest because the point is for Thea to have models that she can use on her website to promote the design, along with a list of the materials used for each model. Well, I stitched portions of my biscornu with unlabeled overdyed silks from a grab bag and a limited edition overdyed silk that is no longer available. Oh well, looking at the current entries, there was no way I was going to win anyway! 🙂 Thea offered 4 different possible corner designs; I chose to use the pumpkins on one side and the leaves on the other. In hindsight, the border kind-of clashes with the rest of the design. Too bad!

So, here is one side stitched up with the pumpkins design:

And the other stitched up with the leaves design:

And here is the finished product:

And finally, there is my latest finish. I completed the stitching and beading last night, along with sewing the pocket together. I just strung the beads for the chain this morning. This is from a Mill Hill Treasured Stitching Band Kit for a scissor pocket, named Mauve Heart Sampler. The white and sea glass colored beads didn’t really show up in the scan unfortunately. You can see them a little better in the larger sized scan, if you are interested:

That’s all from me for now. Off to work on a WIP that hasn’t been touched in at least 2 years. I’d like to actually finish it and frame it in time for it to become the Christmas present that it was intended to be. 😉