Tag, You're It

Eva tagged me and asked me the 11 questions below.  I need to answer them, then write up 11 questions of my own, and tag 11 people so they can answer them.  Here goes!

1.  Where is your favorite place to stitch?  In my good old oak straight back chair in front of the TV ... unless, of course, I am on vacation and then it's in a wicker chair on a terrace/porch/lawn overlooking a lake/river/ocean!

2.  What is your favorite shop (brick and mortar or on-line) to purchase your supplies?  Stitchery Row in Endicott, NY [Brick & mortar] and 123 stitch [on-line]

3.  What is your favorite specialty stitch?  Queen's Stitch - they are so pretty and a challenge!

4.  Which specialty stitch do your least enjoy?  any ribbon embroidery stitches ... mainly because it wounds my ego that I can't come up with consistently well made stitches.

5.  French knot, colonial knot or Mill Hill knot?  French knot!

6.  How much stitching time to do get per day or week or month?   I try to stitch an average of 1-2 hours per day

7.  Do you keep a stitching journal and if so, what do you include?  I used to do so but then blogging replaced the need for a journal ... and with pictures, too.

8.  Besides counted cross stitch, what other forms of needlework do you do?  Crewel, embroidery, counted canvas, and hardanger.  I can crochet and quilt and barely knit too, but haven't done any of that that in a long time!

9.  When did you start stitching?  and why?  I started with needlepoint in my early twenties and just went crazy from then on.  I love all textile arts.  I even tried to learn to weave and still have a table-top four harness loom that I will resurrect in my retirement for a second attempt.  My first attempts tended to produce place mats that were 14" wide at one end and 6" wide at the opposite end

10.  Do you rotate your stitching projects or are you a 'one-at-a time' stitcher?  Had you asked me that a month ago, I would have said rotate.  But I am going through one of my "one-at-a-time" jags at the moment, stitching exclusively on Primitive Needle's Black'd Skie for the past two weeks.  Sometimes, a project just grabs me by the throat and won't let go.  In the past, it has almost always been a Teresa Wentzler project that has that effect.  Though, three or four years ago, I spent all of January and February stitching four Sue Hillis "charmed" Santas one after another ... it was the stitching equivalent of chain-smoking.

11.  How many UFOs, and WIPs do you have?  I am in the middle of my year of the UFO Challenge: the Class Projects.  A quick glance at my sidebar will reveal just how many class projects I have started and then abandoned as something flashier caught my eye.  The sad thing is I truly want to finish all but one of these projects and really enjoyed the classes.  Hence I shall work doggedly till I have finished them all.  This may take a year or two, since class projects tend to be BAPs.

Now for my own questions:

1.  Do you enjoy designing projects of your own?  Over the past few years, I have become something of an amateur designer.  Sometimes, it's because I am inspired by a technique or a stitch I have discovered [as was the case with my Fertile Circles Needlebook WIP] or a found object [as was the case with my Beach Find Pansies using oyster shell fragments as the center of the pansies] or just the need to make frugal use of scraps of linen and floss [as in my Riona's Bookmarks design] and sometimes, it's because what I want isn't commercially available [as with some of my Quaker ornaments for my Bride's Tree series].  And at other times, I re-design a chart to make it more my own.  This usually happens with samplers: changing borders, switching motifs, replacing the text.  While I will never be a player on the commercial scene, I do manage to amuse myself.

2.  How often do you find yourself swapping out fibers:solid for overdyed, silk for cotton, etc.?  Very very often.

3.  Do you enjoy using "different" specialty fibers, e.g.: bamboo floss, velvets, silk ribbons, metallics and the like?  For ornaments and such I like a little glitz, so bring on the metallics, the braids and petite velvets.  And for samplers and small seasonal pieces, I really love the soft sheen of bamboo floss, that is when I am not using my favorite silks.

4.  Have you ever stitched on fabrics "outside the box"?  As a seamstress as well as a needleworker, I find I will sometimes use a "sewing" fabric  for needlework, usually gauzes or dressmaking linens or cotton broadcloths [thank God for Ott Lites with magnifiers] or even on burlap and screening. 

5.  Is there any form of needlework that, try as you might, you can't quite master?  For me, ribbon embroidery is always a hit or miss affair.  I frog more than I stitch.

6.  Are there other textile arts on the horizon that you want to explore?  Absolutely: weaving, spinning and knitting.

7.  Is it really necessary to have more than a dozen pairs of embroidery scissors?  Again, absolutely, I feel about scissors the way most women seem to feel about shoes and handbags.

8.  What is your favorite non-framing finish?  That's a tough one.  I make many small seasonal pieces into tote bags.  But I also love small pin pillow or bean bag finishes.  And then there are biscornus.  And I invested in that wonderful scrap booking tool, the Crop-a-dile, so I could make the eyelets in floss tags more neatly.  And what could be more satisfying than a beautifully centered flat finish ornament?  

9.  Do you select your vacation destinations based on the locations of needlework shops and tea shops?  Though this is my husband's deeply cherished belief about me, the truth of the matter is that I always research LNS' and tea shops in the area after he has selected the destination.  Is it my fault that I can almost always find some?

10  If you could plan the very finest of stitching cruises, what would it be like?  Mine would be aboard the American or the Mississippi Queen steamboat and stops would include the American Quilting Museum in Paducah, Kentucky as well as stops at various sites that had impressive displays of needlework throughout American history.  We might start in Kentucky and wend our way to the Mississippi River and from there on to St. Paul.  I  would have several instructors on board so that there would be something for everyone, from wet behind the ears novice to the most snooty elitist.  I would concentrate on North American forms of needlework, both historical and contemporary.    And the food would have to be superb and there would be a three or four course tea served every afternoon and the night-life would revolve around rag-time piano bars and jazz combos.  I would dispense with gambling ... after all who would want to risk losing their stash money?  I might even invite Monica Ferris to stage a stitching mystery night a la the Betsy Devonshire novels one evening.

11. How many stitching blogs do your read daily?  There are about 30 blogs on my reading list but of course, not everyone posts every day, so I would guess I read about ten a day.

BONUS QUESTION. What is your favorite needlework related website?  Mine is the Caron site.  They have such interesting articles about textile articles, beautifully archived.  I do love their projects and free charts.  It is such a dense site with so many menu options that you can easily pass an hour or two on the site before you know it.

Well, that does it for my own questions, now to find someone who hasn't already been tagged and ask them all these questions.