Thursday's Here, Thank the Lord!

Thursday is the end of my work week: normally I put in two 12 hour days [Mon. & Tues.] and two 8 hour days [Wed. & Thurs.].  But this week has been a bit different since I had a catechist meeting to run on Wednesday night and a catechist formation class on Lesson Planning to teach on Thursday night, turning my two 8 hour days into 10 or 11 hour days.  Happily, there are no additional duties this weekend adding to the tally.  So, three glorious days all to myself.  Maybe I'll get that sewing machine, finally.  I'll try to squeeze in a visit to my mother, some gardening, loads of laundry and some cursory house-keeping.  And on the stitching front,  I did finish my third block on the afghan.  I am going to wait to photograph it again till I can get my husband to stand holding it up.  That way I'll be able to show the whole afghan rather than a block at a time.  I also got a bit more done on my gift stitch this morning.  So, of course, there'll be no photo of that till it is finished, sent and received.  As for my three days off, I'll try to finish up my gift stitch and another block on the afghan.  March seems to be slipping away just as quickly as February did and I am not at all certain I shall be able to meet all my goals this month.  But I will give it my best shot.

Random Tuesday

This will be all about odds and ends:

I have enrolled in two exchanges for the Spring.  The first is a Spring scissor keep/fob and scissor exchange with the TSS group.  The rules state that the keep should have a Spring theme and I was all set with a chart.  But now that I have been assigned a partner, I am confused since my partner listed the following preferences: sunflowers and autumnal colors.  Why join a Spring exchange if you want an autumn piece.  I was all set to stitch a very pretty Spring project and may still do just that since I have all the materials.  It's not as if my exchange partner is in the Southern Hemisphere where the seasons are reversed,  which would have made sense to me.  She is in Germany, for Pete's sake!  I am curious and ask you readers for an opinion on this: should I go ahead and follow the rules since I kitted everything up in accordance with the published parameters of the exchange or should I ditch my original plans in favor of my partner's preferences and go with an autumn piece.  It is the first exchange I am working with this group and I must say I am not sure which is the best way to go.  This exchange needs to reach my partner by May 26th.  Since I have no idea how long it will take a small package to get to Germany, I figure I need to get this in the mail no later than April 30th.  I know when we mail Christmas gifts [much larger packages] to my husband's German relatives it can take three to four weeks to arrive.  The second exchange is a Christmas ornament with the HOE group and the theme is Christmas birds.  Sign-ups continue through April 15th and the project won't need to be mailed till June 15th.  So I will have plenty of time to earn a new start with a finished class project and a finished 2010-11 WIP.  I will be using my go-to cardinal chart.  However, I will not be giving any further details on this last exchange for fear of spoiling the surprise.

Stash enhancement.  Since I sold my Just Nan Noah Revisited chart, I have had a $45 gc to 123stitch burning a hole in my pocket.  I have used it to purchase the fabric, Northern Cross cream linen in 35ct, for the new band sampler from Sampler and Antique Needlework Quarterly.  The chart actually calls for 30ct but the project would end up being unmanageably large.   I prefer stitching on higher thread count linens anyway, so 35ct it is.  The first part of the chart was published in the latest issue of SANQ and there will be two more installments.  I also ordered some more of the DMC needed for my Jacobean Elegance afghan.  Since I will not be skipping blocks as charted, I need twice the amount of floss.  And I ordered two pairs of scissors from The Silver Needle: one for me and one for my exchange partner.

WIP progress:  I have been working on my gift piece as my travel project for the past few days and can't show any photos of that.  But I can show a photo of my afghan progress.  The third block is nearly finished with just a bit of backstitching and long stitching yet to be done.  But in the course of doing this, I noticed that I didn't quite finish the first block and have to go back to that for an hour or two of stitching.  Can't imagine how I missed the furled leaf in the first block.  Next up will be the bud in the second row.  If anyone is wondering just why I am jumping around on the afghan it is because I am going to scan and flip the charts so the First row will be: flower facing left, bud facing left, bud facing right, flower facing right; the Second row will be bud facing right, flower facing right, flower facing left, bud facing left; and so on and so on.  I'll be stitching all the left-facing motifs first and then go back and fill in the right facing motifs.

On the homefront, I never did go shopping for a sewing machine this past weekend ... my husband and I were more in the mood for a lazy two days.  But next weekend, definitely!  Call me a grumpy old woman, but I just dislike shopping of any kind: I dislike the crowds, the lines, the mandatory salesman's spiels and the mule work of hauling the purchases out to the hinterlands of the parking lot.  I have never understood how some people can view shopping as a recreational activity or even as a high sport ... as the current crop of Kohl's radio commercials would have you believe it to be.  It is a painful but necessary chore, whether shopping for housewares, clothes [especially clothes] or groceries.  The only shopping I enjoy is catalog shopping: place an order by making a call from the comfort of your own home and receive the goods on your doorstep several days later.  Now that is convenience.

Weekend Progress Report: March 11, 2012

I am almost halfway through the month and most of my stitching so far has been off monthly goals although on annual goals: the cross-stitching of Papillion Creations Peacock was finished on March 9 [Friday].  I replaced a bit of the stitching with some Mill Hill seed beads in lavendar blue, just to give the piece a bit of glitz.  Again, the photograph was taken in natural daylight so there is a better sense of the true colors.  Now it is just a matter of doing the finish finishing.  That will require some stash diving in the sewing fabric bins.  The rest of the weekend was back on monthly goals, working on the Jacobean Elegance Afghan.  I am including a progress photo of the afghan block.  Not as impressive as one would hope.  I have nearly finished the third block of the afghan, leaving three more to go if I am to reach my March goal of four blocks.  I plan on keeping the afghan at my stitching chair for the remainder of the week, making it the focus of all my at home stitching time.  As for my travel focus piece, I will have to get back to my gift stitching if I am to have any hope of gettting it off in the mail this month as planned.  I did get to the post office earlier this week.  I had some boxes to mail to my grandchildren and I took the opportunity to mail the Sweetheart Tree's Holly & Hearts Sampler and Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons to their respective winners.  But it seems like there is always another reason to head to the post office.  I have another box for the grandchildren to mail this week and, if all of the Easter goodies I ordered arrive in time, there'll be another box to mail the week after that.  Long-distance grand-parenting is the pits!  Three thousand miles is just too great a distance to place between a grandmother and her grandchildren!

I have never been a big fan of Q-snaps but I do own a few: one of which is large enough to encompass a block in the afghan.  So I thought I'd give the Q-snaps another trial.  Generally, I find that the fabric becomes too loose in Q-snaps.  Since so many people seem to love them unreservedly, I figure I must be doing something wrong to get such unsatisfactory results.  In any case, I thought the afghan cloth [as opposed to linen] might work better in the Q-snap frame.  The tension isn't quite as taut as I usually like but it is workable.  At least I can work an entire block without having to shift my stitching frame when using the Q-snaps instead of my spring tension hoop.  So, between the Doodler Lap Frame I used for The Peacock and the q-snap I am using for the afghan, I have been doing a lot of two handed stitching lately.  I know this runs counter to common wisdom but, for me, two-handed stitching is slower than one handed stab and pull stitching.  I guess when you have been using one style for the better part of four decades, you build a proficiency making it a quicker option than the purportedly more efficient style.

A Day Off, at Last

This week has seemed even more harried than usual since I ran three Family Catechesis events for first through sixth graders and their parents: two with over 65 families and the third with about 45 families.  And, naturally, the adolescent catechesis program ran as well.  In fact, my 8th graders stunned me by participating in The Stations of the Cross with great reverence and dignity.  As anyone who works with adolescents knows, they are very unpredictable folk, swinging from one end of the behavioral spectrum to the other with nary a moment at the center.  This is what keeps them interesting.  At least, we didn't have any boy leap to stand on the pew and do an air guitar riff to a lively Spanish hymn playing in the background as happened during the Advent confessions.  Anyway, at the end of this week, I feel wiped out but satisfied.  The topic  for the Grade 1-6 events was "Strengthening the Domestic Church" and it seemed to be well-received. Note: "domestic church" is Catholic-speak for "nuclear family: parent[s] and child[ren]".  But, of course, now on my day off, I'll have to run in to the office and make a few important phone calls that I forgot in all the madness and mail off a finished report that got buried at the bottom of the inbox.  At least, I shouldn't have to put in more than an hour or two ... I'll just have to make sure I don't let myself get ambushed by any other tasks on the to-do list.  Monday is soon enough for all the rest.

Other than that, all that is on my agenda for the day: a haircut, grocery shopping and a trip to County Household Hazardous Waste to dispose of some electronics and medications I no longer use.  Oh, and the never-ending laundry ... how do just two people generate so much?  The rest of the day will be devoted to stitching and DVD viewing.  I figure a day off ought to include at least some leisure time.  The weekend agenda will includea start on indoor spring cleaning,  clearing the back yard of all the fall and winter detritus of fallen leaves, broken branches, etc.; a visit to the garden center to buy some large square planter boxes for vegetable gardening in the old square foot method and a visit to the mall to buy a new sewing machine.

Serendipitous Peacock Colors

I am still enjoying my Papillion Creations Peacock and the colors I have substituted for those charted.  This photo was taken in natural light and gives a better impression of the colors in the fabric and floss than the previous photos which were taken under my Ott lite.  The aquas and lavenders and blues are so delicate and springlike, reminiscent of croci and hyacinths and pale blue-white snow drops and snow stars.  I am loving these flosses and continute to be amazed at how fibers from three different and totally unrelated hand-dying vendors and hand-dyed fabric from yet another come together so well in one project.  I'll probably finish this as an etui rather than as a biscornu as was my original intention.  I'll use the Just Nan peacock bead I bought for the center of the biscornu as part of a bead and loop clasp to close the etui.  I'll fill it with some pretty tools, add a "page" of wool felt for needles and have a wonderful little accessory to take to my next stitcher's retreat.

It makes me feel ever so virtuous to use odds and ends from my stash.  It's all part of my aging hippie campaign to simplify my life, to reduce & reuse & recycle, to use it up, wear it out or do without.  A small step, to be sure, but  still a step in the right direction.  Having lived six decades, three of them in one place, I have accumulated so much stuff that I feel a real need to shed some of the detritus of my life.  Spring cleaning will be a lot of fun this year: an orgy of elimination that will benefit the Salvation Army and various white elephant sales for charity as well as adding to the work load of the local sanitation workers.  I know I won't be able to convince my pack rat of a husband to join in the fun but I will do my level best to confine his stuff to his space: his two walk-in closets and his home office.

A Few Progress Photos

I have done a little bit of stitching on each of two different projects over the past several days so, while there are a few photos, neither shows dramatic progress.

In my last post about Papillion Creation's Peacock, I forgot to mention the flosses I am using: a Carrie's Creation overdyed cotton that is simply labelled Jayne's Attic Exclusive and is a medium to medium dark aqua, a Polstitches' Dragon Floss overdyed cotton in a pale lavender, lavender blue, pale blue colorway and, finally, an Ozark Sampler overdyed cotton called Sea Queen. I am always amazed at how closely the shades and tints from different vendors end up working together. When you consider all the variables, what are the odds that the sundry bits and pieces in my stash will end up working together so well? Granted I do tend to gravitate toward certain colorways but two of the threads mentioned here were given to me in floss exchanges and so were totally random additions to my cache of overdyed cotton.

Workbaskets' Quaker Acorn: there'll have to be some frogging done on this one, durn it. Can you see my error? I haven't quite figured out exactly where I went wrong yet though I can see where things get funky. The motifs below the acorn cap line up with the bottom line of the cap and with the negative space within the cap but the lower section of the left leaf isn't right and that throws off everything above and to the left. I'm going to have to re-count all the lines up from the very beginning of the cap. I hope the frogging is minimal because I have just enough of the Catherine Jordan overdyed floss for this project. If I destroy too much of it with frogging [a real possibility with over one frogging], I'll have to just toss this and start all over again with new fabric and floss.

Stitching Question of the Week: March 5

"The needlework show in Nashville has just concluded, are there any new designs that are on your wish list or that you've already purchased?"

I have to admit that I haven't really looked at the new offerrings too extensively because I have no intention whatsoever of adding to my chart stash. I have reached the point where I have charts enough to keep myself busy for at least five or six years ... and that is not counting the charts in the magazines that I receive: SANQ and The Needlearts [the EGA house magazine]. My stash budget, for the time being at least, will be devoted to framing finished projects and purchasing needles, fabric and fiber needed to stitch charts already in my possession and the occasional indulgence in neat or unusual tools like collectible scissors, pretty laying tools and such. Unlike many stitchers, I don't "collect" charts. I buy only those I genuinely wish to stitch. My tastes have been fairly consistent over time. It is rare that, in reviewing my stash, that I come across something I know I will never stitch. The only time I can recall that happening was rather recently, as a matter of fact, with a Just Nan reissue of her Noah sampler. And rather than let that chart languish unloved, I sold it when the opportunity arose. Before buying anymore charts, I am just going to have to catch up to my stitching self. I am way too close to retirement age to be spending my money foolishly.

Weekend Progress Report: March 4, 2012

The unseasonably warm weather has been wreaking havoc with plant life in the area with the result that my Spring allergies have become a problem much earlier. Usually I get a bit of a respite between hay fever season and the spring mold and pollen season. But not so this year: I have had continuous sinus congestion and headaches since September. One season just morphed into another without that blessed period of cold, allergen killing weather in between. During the past few days, the headaches have been outrageous, killing any impulse I might have had to stitch. It's a wee bit tough to read a chart and count threads when you can't get your eyes uncrossed!

And to top it all off, what little stitching I did was off-goal for the month! I couldn't help myself. I'll just have to admit that a rotation of two or three projects just doesn't suit my undisciplined and manic inner stitcher. I picked up another project from the WIP list: Papillion Creations Peacock which I will be stitching as a biscornu. I am using some hand-dyed Laguna in ivory to violet and am using a combination of Polstitch and Ozark Sampler overdyed cottons in shades of blue, aqua and violet. I have some aqua Laguna on which to stitch the opposite side. When I picked this up this morning all that had been stitched was the outer scallopped border. I am totally unrepentant about choosing another project from the WIP list ... I needed a bit of a change. If you must know, I am actually feeling quite virtuous about this project because I am using up odds and ends of stash that might otherwise never be used! As I proof read this post, I noted four exclamation points. I must be in an unusually emphatic mood. How very unlike me. [Note to husband and daughter: there is no need to comment on that last statement, derisively or otherwise.]

The Second Annual Oubliette Stitching Limerick Contest

Let's do a little something to dispel the winter doldrums. Although, truth be known, it hasn't been a very wintry winter thus far. I imagine Mother Nature has a few tricks up her sleeve. I am expecting snow on Easter! Anyway, last year I had a fun and silly contest inviting everyone to write a stitching limerick that began with the line: There once was a stitcher named [insert your name]. This generated a lot of really silly and clever rhymes. Shall we do it again?

Remember, limericks are defined by Google as a humorous verse form of 5 anapestic lines with a rhyme scheme aabba i.e., they have a definite pattern:
10 syllables/beats to the first line,
7 syllables/beats to the second line,
6 syllables/beats to third and fourth lines,
9 syllables/beats to the fifth line.
The rhyme pattern: lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme; lines 3 and 4 rhyme.

Here's my 2011 limerick:
There once was a stitcher named Riona,
Who used up all of her toner,
Printing freebies galore
Till she had so much more
Than anyone ought to be owner!

And here's my 2012 version:
There once was a stitcher named Riona,
Who, when you tried to phone her,
All your calls she'd ignore
As she stitched more and more.
Her friends thought this flaw a real groaner!

Leave your limmerick in the comments ... any entry not fitting the above definition will be disqualified ... it must be a true limmerick! At the end of the month, I'll have my husband pick a winner from the comments and award that stitcher/limmericist a $10 GC to 123stitch [an online shop]. Thanks to all who participate.

Setting March Goals

MARCH
Crazy Class Project Challenge: Resume stitching on the next class project: Phyllis Mauer's Japanese Kogin Tea Cozy. Actually resumed stitching on this piece already, on 2/26.
2010/11 WIPs: Resume work on Jacobean Elegance Afghan and Primitive Needle's Black'd Skie. I'll be working these two in tandem since the afghan is clearly too large to travel. Both qualify as BAPs and will probably remain on my monthly goals list for many months. So my actual goal will be to stitch 4 more blocks on the afghan and to complete Block 2 of Black'd Skie. I was able to return to these two projects on 2/20, having met my WIP goal early last month.

2012 Start: Earned by finishing the Holly & Hearts Sampler from the Class project list and Workbasket's Quaker Sampler from the 2010-11 WIP list: small mystery gift promised to Jo as December 2011 giveaway winner. I earned another 2012 start with a finish of Tracery Dragons from the WIP list and the Holly & Hearts Christmas ornament. Next up is the Teresa Wentzler's Woodland Angel Christmas Stocking which, I suspect, will keep me occupied for the remainder of the year. As a result, all other new starts earned will have to be small exchanges and ornaments.

TSS Scissor Keep Exchange: start and finish and mail by April deadline. For reasons I cannot explain even to myself, I am not counting this as a "new start". My internal logic [or, illogic, if you will] clearly designates exchanges as exempt from the new start rule.

Sewing and Assembly Finishes: Two pillows.