I have a finished finish to show off, but since it’s nighttime and I want to get some serious, rocking photos of this piece, it will have to wait until tomorrow for the unveiling. 😀 I assure you, though, it is GORGEOUS! I even amaze myself. 😉
Yes, it’s true. I managed to start and finish a piece in just one day. Amazing for me, at least lately. I was off sick from work yesterday and received an email from my dad in Florida halfway through the day, reminding me that there were only 19 days until Christmas and that they wanted to send a gift. He asked if we wanted to do ornaments again this year and I had to respond that I hadn’t actually managed to stitch any ornaments this year, so it wouldn’t be handmade, but sure, we could do ornaments.
I spent some time looking at Hallmark.com to see what ornaments they had and picked a couple of likely candidates, then remembered the Britty Christmas Puppy ornament in this year’s Just Cross Stitch ornament issue. I ran upstairs, made a copy of the chart, kitted up the design on an ornie cut of 28 count lugana in Potato, with DMC black and red, with purple for the stocking (he said their colors for the tree were white, gold and purple – woohoo!) and Wisper for the hat and stocking trim.
Several hours (and a headache, unfortunately) later and voila!
I’ll finish it as a miniature pillow ornament this weekend and send it off early next week.
Yes, I am still stitching, believe it or not. Things are just proceeding very slowly, as I’ve been having trouble sitting down and focusing on it lately.
I have a nice sized finish to show off, but it’s kinda secret at the moment, so it will have to wait.
However, I did have my 15th finish in my now 70 projects challenge yesterday. It’s a charity quilt square, which I tend not to show and I don’t think they are terribly fantastic most of the time, but since I have nothing else to share and y’all are probably dying for some photos to lighten this place up a bit… I’ll show you yesterday’s finish and the previous SOLAK square finish, as well. Both were designed by me:
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Both of these will go into a quilt for a little boy who loves play his Xbox, Megaman, Spiderman, Digimon and several other things for which there are no existing designs. 😆 So, I had to bite the bullet and make some up myself. There are 2 other designs that I have created which have yet to be stitched. One is an Xbox console and controller, which is my current commuter project and the other is one I entitled “Megaman in Action.” I basically just trolled Google for photos and then tried to simulate them in cross stitch.
I don’t really have the time to stitch all of them myself, but I tossed out the availability of the designs to the SOLAK group and had no takers, so I’m slowly working through them. I haven’t even stitched my square for Mary’s quilt yet, plus I need to keep cracking on Cathy’s RR which is my top priority. I need to be able to survive on less sleep so that I can have more time to stitch!
This year, I think I may give myself a gift for Christmas, and that is to take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Terry and I have plenty of vacation time and I’m feeling a bit like a candle that’s burning at both ends and the middle. If I time it right, I could take 5 days of vacation and have one very long 12-day weekend. 😉
I just happened to think about what kinds of crafty things I would like to work on and how it would be lovely to have a commitment-free stretch where I can stitch, knit or work on whatever tickles my fancy. I don’t have to finish anything, I can start new things willy-nilly; the goal is just to have fun. Wouldn’t that be nice?
The big key will be to keep my mind off of work. Which may be tough to do with all I have going on right now, the loose ends I’m trying to tie up, the new project I’m going to be starting, the old commitments that I’m going to have to still find time for and the people who are all depending on me for something or other. The additional anti-anxiety meds I have might come in handy for that, but hopefully I won’t need them.
It would just be nice to be free to do whatever I feel like from moment to moment, with no strings attached and nothing to worry about. I haven’t played my flute in a long time, nor have I sung in a while. I haven’t touched knitting needles in many, many months, despite having some new goodies to play with thanks to a certain yarn-enabling friend. Plus, with all of the stitching commitments I’ve been working on lately, it would really be nice to do whatever I want, for once.
So, I guess I’ll be shooing our houseguests out of the door come Boxing Day! 😀
I realized that I’ve been struggling with a slightly elevated level of anxiety the past few days. Phoebe seems like she has managed to pull a muscle in her neck or something; she can’t manage to shake her head fully. And now she’s limping a bit on her bad back leg.
She had a problem with a luxating patella on her left hind leg that was operated on several years ago. They had to separate the ligament from the bone, deepen the groove in which the kneecap is supposed to ride and then reattach the ligament to the bone with metal pins. It was quite a pricey and painful procedure, so when she started limping again the other day, I became quite concerned.
Since then, we’ve been limiting her jumping, carrying her up and down the stairs and generally pampering her royal highness in order to encourage her to rest her leg. She seems to have had some improvement, but I may still take her for a visit to her veterinarian is she hasn’t improved to my liking by the end of the week.
Ahhhh, the plight of our furbabies and the toll it can take on us. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Terry and I spent a lovely afternoon with Cathy, Rob, Joshua and Evie on Sunday. Given the circumstances of Joshua’s adventure with the washing machine drain hose and the resulting aftermath, I think that Cathy was most relieved when I called and said that we were running an hour late. 😉
It took us a little longer to get there than we had anticipated. There were a lot of Amish buggies on the road, but they weren’t causing a traffic problem. In fact, we were fine until we reached Strasburg and caught up with all of the Christmas shopping traffic heading for the outlets in Lancaster. People driving cars are far more dangerous, panicky, dumb animals than people driving horse and buggy combos. Life in this area is definitely not for the impatient. The countryside is beautiful and the Amish deserve our respect just like any other fellow human beings walking this earth, so just relax and enjoy the drive!
Anyway, Cathy’s house has a great layout to it and Rob was quite a good, talkative host when Cathy left for her rehearsal before the concert. The chorale in which she sings is wonderful! They have a great blend of voices and the concert was quite pleasant, helping to bring the Christmas spirit to life. I think we all enjoyed it. Mr. Joshua even favored me by sitting in my lap for a while. He and Evie were quite well behaved throughout and afterwards, as well. The church in which the chorale performed is the same in which they rehearse every week and it truly is in walking distance. Cathy wasn’t kidding – it was about a block or two away from her house!
I got in my “kid fix” when we returned to the house and had both Joshua and Evie climbing all over me. I think Terry had fun playing with Joshua, too. He was Joshua’s protector from my tickle monster persona. 🙂 I love kids and they seem to love me. I’m just glad to be able to hand them back over to their moms and dads afterwards. I like to be the fun aunt figure that gets on the floor and plays with them, but then I don’t have to deal with the discipline or any other hard parts of parenting. I’m awful! 😉
Sorry I don’t have much more to say, but I’m not feeling terribly verbose at the moment (shock! shock! horror!) so I’ll leave it at that.
WOW! I accomplished exactly 0 of my goals for this month. Shucks.
This week’s SBQ is:
How do you secure your thread when you begin a new one? Specifically, do you or have you ever used a waste knot?
It depends on what I’m doing. In regular cross stitching, I use the loop start, stitch over my tails or weave them under existing threads. I do not like knots in cross stitching (including french knots :lol:). However, I do use waste knots in my hardanger work. I place the knot so that it is in the path of where I will be stitching so that when I reach the knot, I can simply clip it off and everything has been already secured and the tension of the stitching or weaving is maintained. It’s very effective in this context.
Darn, I so wanted to sleep in this morning, especially when I realized that I had mild abdominal cramps when I woke up. Spoot!
Now I’ve spent half of my day coding in one programming language and I need to shift gears to code in one or two others now. I’m in the mid-day slump, so I’m completely lacking in focus and could really use a nap. I know that I’ll be feeling better once my lunch partially digests and the sleepiness goes away, but right now I want to curl up in a ball under my desk and snore.
Not much to write about. This weekend was rather uneventful. I had all of these high hopes and wonderful intentions last week, but by the time the holiday came around, I think I just needed some downtime. Though I did start cleaning out both our and the spare bedroom. We generated what I’m sure is too much trash to fit in the can, so I’m not sure what we’ll do when we bag it up and try to take the trash to the end of the driveway tonight. 😉
I did spend some time stitching on Cathy’s round robin piece. I’m probably 80% or more finished at this point. There’s no backstitching and I have 4 colors left to work with. Two of which are halfway or more finished. I knew I shouldn’t have left the leaves until the end. Working with all of those greens gets a little dull after a while. I should be able to get it finished this week, which is nice because I’ll be seeing Cathy this Sunday. Not that she’s necessarily going to get her round robin at that point, though… because I have a surprise for her. I hope that she ends up not reading this entry for some reason. And if you are reading it, Cathy, if you want it to continue to be a surprise, then don’t read the rest of this post.
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Okay, is she gone? The coast is clear? Cathy’s round robin ran into a little bit of trouble when one member of our RR group got married and was very overwhelmed during the time that she had Cathy’s RR fabric. As a result, the woman was unable to finish her design, but she did include photocopies of the chart (let’s not talk about the legality of that at this time). As a result, I want to try to not only finish my part, but this other woman’s, as well, so that Cathy has a completed round robin when I send it back. Otherwise, she would be the only one in the group not to have a completed project and what kind of Christmas present would that be? So, here’s hoping that I can manage it! The piece the woman chose looks beautiful, but has a TON of partial stitching in it, so no wonder she abandoned it. I think that I might have been tempted to, as well. Wish me luck, please! 🙂
