Tale of a Shooting Star…

Since I finished the purple butterfly on my way back from San Francisco the other week, I thought that I would take a minute to show off the entire rainbow of Just Nan heart butterflies:

I can’t wait to turn this into a bellpull, though the choice of fabrics will be a challenge. Do I go with a fabric for each butterfly that coordinates with it and piece them all together into one big rainbow? I’m afraid it will be too … strident, or something. Otherwise, finding a neutral fabric that goes with all of the butterflies without being totally blah and boring may be impossible.

I guess I won’t know until I make some time to go to Joann and start looking!

I also have some new finishes to share. Both are by Janie Hubble Designs and can be obtained by signing up for her free newsletter.

First is Be Mine Sweet Valentine, the bookmark version:

And second is Peacock Feathers. I did two of these so that I can make them into a bookmark, like The Flower Juggler’s Bookmark.

That’s it for me for now. I’ll be stitching a good bit this weekend, as I’ve been ill and am trying to take it easy. I doubt that I’ll have another finish to show off by Monday, but you never know! 😉

I have talked for years about designing a software package to help us stashaholics organize our out of control stash. In poking around the web the other day, I stumbled across someone else who has actually created and is selling some basic organization software. Let that be a lesson to me for sitting on a good idea for too long.

Anyway, I think that I am going to start programming my software package, now that I have competition to motivate me. I have not taken a look at this person’s software at all, as I don’t want to become biased or swayed in any way from my original vision.

My question to you, my loyal readers, and to anyone else that you might drag to this blog in order to help answer this question for me is:

I have my own list of ideas, which I will not list here because I don’t want to give away my (hopefully) good ideas to my competition, but I would really like to see what any potential customers would find useful.

Please, please, pretty please take a minute to comment on this post with your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

C’est fini!

It took me a couple of hours, but I finished my Heart Tuffet a couple of days ago. I had envisioned a finish for this one and I think I managed to carry it off quite well, if I don’t say so myself. When I first saw the design, I knew it wouldn’t be a biscornu with that heart in the center. Because the design was square, I immediately thought of doing a mattress pincushion finish. Even though I had never done one before, I had an idea of how I could construct it fairly easily. From there, my vision included pulling the centers together like you would with a biscornu, except this one would get pulled together by stitching around the square in the center of the design over which the heart is stitched. I had a feeling that it would produce a really neat effect this way, if everything came together as planned. It turns out, my vision was an accurate one and it worked out just as I had hoped it would. Nary a catch anywhere, honestly. I didn’t bother looking up how to construct a mattress pincushion because I had an idea in my head of how to do it. I just Google’d it and looked through a couple of tutorials and it turns out that I constructed mine in a very similar fashion to other people. I actually saw some instructions that gave me an idea of how to do mine better the next time. I enjoyed this type of finish so much that there will definitely be a next time.

Well, I’ve bored you enough, so here is the content that you are really more interested in – the pictures!

First up in the first contest photo, so it’s a montage of the 3 photos I selected to keep. The photos following it are the individual close-ups:

And then the second contest photo (of the opposite side) and its component close-up shots:

Tomorrow’s post will be about some lovely squishy gifty mail that was waiting for me when I returned from San Francisco. I need better lighting in order to show the colors properly, so hopefully I’ll be able to capture some in full daylight tomorrow, as my thank you post is well overdue!

It’s time for another contest from Thea Dueck of The Victoria Sampler for the members of the Victoria Sampler Yahoo! group. This time the design is called Heart Tuffet and the deadline to submit a picture of your finished piece is April 1st. She always gives us plenty of time and I inevitably leave mine until close to the end.

I chose the overdyed floss, two coordinating colors of DMC (though the design only calls for one coordinating color) and fabric before leaving for San Francisco. I even got to start on one side of the piece while we were there. I just realized that I didn’t add the four beads called for in the design. I’ll have to take a good look at it, but I don’t think I want to clutter up the piece, so I may skip them completely. We’ll see; it may take a little experimenting before I come to a decision on that point.

I have mostly decided on a finishing technique for this one and it’s one that I have never done before, so this should be interesting. I have my own ideas of how to do it, so I’m not going to troll the ‘net for instructions. I’d prefer to wing it. I’m anxious to see if some of the ideas I have for this will pan out. As long as I don’t completely destroy the stitching in the process of monkeying around with the finish, then I should be in good shape. I should have the finish done by the end of the weekend.

Oh what, you’d like to actually see the stitched pieces? 😉 As usual, I had to fiddle with the colors in Photoshop. The thread colors are pretty close, but the fabric is a little off. It’s actually Ray of Light lugana, which is a pale yellow.

Here’s the top:

And I reversed the color scheme for the bottom:

I already know that I’m not going to win, based on a few of the photos that have already been submitted to the contest, but I’m hoping to make at least a respectable showing. Besides, it’s a good excuse for me to stitch and get something done; it’s not really about winning for me.

Airports and airplanes, that is. I took a quick trip out to San Francisco last week for work. We arrived Sunday afternoon, with the hopes of catching up with a friend from college Sunday night, but we had left the house at 2 AM and were absolutely exhausted when we got in. We hit the hotel restaurant for a late lunch and then pretty much slept until Monday. Seriously. We had planned to go into the city on Monday, but Terry felt unwell and I had a headache, so we spent the day in the hotel. Tuesday was a full day at Big Red, I mean Oracle, with a riverboat dinner cruise that night which I ended up having to skip because I was feeling feverish and nauseous. Wednesday saw another 6+ hours at Oracle and then off to the airport to wait for our red eye flight. I was awake from 6 AM Wednesday until 1 or 2 PM Thursday, when we finally arrived home, not counting snooze time on the planes. It was a brutal trip and I’m still paying for it headache-wise, but it was well worth it from a professional standpoint.

So, anyway, the point is that I spent a good chunk of time in airports and airplanes while flying out and back. The cheapest flights went to SFO by way of Atlanta, which extended that time even more. Yes, I could have gotten a direct flight, but it was excessively expensive and I was paying for Terry to fly out with me, so a couple of hundred dollars made a difference. The worst part was arriving at SFO Wednesday evening, expecting to be able to get our bags checked in, scoot through security and then get a relaxing dinner and hang out near the gate. Not so much, it turns out. Air Tran must only run red eye flights out of SFO, so the desk doesn’t even open until 8:30 PM. That really sucked. We had to walk over to the international terminal to find a food court and hang out there for a couple of hours and then back to wait for another 2 hours in front of the Air Tran desk. Bah. Lessons learned, though!

As far as stitching goes, many of you remember the Just Nan Butterfly Heart design that I stitched multiple times in colors of the rainbow back in 2008, right? Unfortunately, the purples that I had picked out and stitched early on in that project were dusty and the remaining colors that I chose later did not work with the purples. I started a new purple instance back then, but put it down when I realized that the shading between the 3 (sequential) floss colors in the DMC line was not subtle enough. Well, prior to leaving for San Francisco, I decided that this would be a perfect design to travel with (as it had been in the past), so I ripped out all of the old stitching (more than 50% of the design) and kitted it up with another set of purples to try. I guess the third time is a charm because it worked out well this time. I started the design on the plane out from Atlanta to San Francisco and ended up finishing it in the SFO airport before leaving to come home.

Now I just need to choose some fabrics to piece my 6 rainbow colored instances of this design together into a bellpull. I guess I’ll have to gather up the pieces and take them to the nearest Joann store when I have some time.

I have another finish to show today. I stitched a hardanger card for my mother’s birthday. This one is the February edition of Nordic Needle’s hardanger card club from 2010. Their kits included the design, card and pearl cotton #8 equivalents. Needless to say, I didn’t want to do the weaving with pearl 8, so I’ve been slowly buying the pearl cotton #12 or floss equivalents to go with each kit. I have less than half of them kitted up to date. I’ll have to do some online purchases to fill in the blanks.

This is the first one I’ve actually stitched out of the 12 kits, though I do plan to stitch them all and send them out for various stitchers’ birthdays. Eventually.

Here is the card and a closeup of the hardanger section. I chose a pale yellow fabric with which to back the hardanger section, so the picots don’t show up very well. I hate picots. Truly. Hate. Picots. And, as you will see, the woven section of this design consisted primarily of picots. Ugh.

My other finish to show off is long overdue. It is my framed The Sweetheart Tree round robin. I picked it up weeks ago, but getting a good picture of it has proven to be difficult. I had to do some fiddling in Photoshop to get the colors a little closer to the real hues. It’s still not perfect, but I would have to put a lot of time into it in order for it to be precise and even then the colors still might not be exact, so I’ll settle for what I have.

This counts as my final Not-So-Crazy January Challenge finish, as I got it to my framer at Michaels just before the end of January. On a side note, I actually saw my framer at Michaels when I was in the other night and she joked that I didn’t have anything with me to be framed. No, I’m actually all tapped out until I finish some other pieces. That is really hard to believe, but fantastic to be able to say!

Anyway, back on topic. Here is the framed round robin:

I hope that you are all having a wonderful weekend. The temperatures here are quite nice today, although we are lacking in sunshine. The clouds don’t surprise me, as we are expecting rain storms to move in for tomorrow. Just in time for my cousin’s bridal shower. At least we’ll be inside!