Here's the cutest ever cross stitch wall hanging that I bought from Elisabeth's Fine Little Shop a while back. It says "You sweet soft little baa". I love that! I'm going to hang it in Phoebe's room when I redecorate it to be a big girl room. Fits right in with my Heidi theme!
I'm stitching away on my 4 girl set. Here are the colors I've got going so far.
And here you can see linen vs. aida. This is over 2 threads on linen and over 1 square on black aida.
I've got some news for the stitchers out there. We've switched all our embroidery patterns over to quick and easy, handy dandy PDFs and slashed prices... $5 each for all but the Christmas Wishes. Also there is a 4 for the price of 3 deal for all 4 Season Stitchettes and all 4 Fairy Stitchettes. If you want to buy 4 mix and matched for the price of 3, that's cool too, send me an email.
If you're interested in checking it out, here's a linker to the shop. And if you're thinking that lazy girl just doesn't want to go to the post office and buy stamps, you caught me. I'm definitely feeling the PDF vibe right now.
I was very excited about this book in the stack because it was illustrated by Trina Schart who I absolutely love! We have a golden book illustrated by her, Bow Wow! Meow! and it's one of our favorites.
now this is a sign I'd definitely stop for!
I love illustrations of grocery stores in kids' books. All the bins neatly filled with all the pretty colors. I should try to remember to snap photos of them when I come across them.
And this in my favorite page. Very on topic as I am the party planner for the kindergarten Halloween party this year! I've already bought myself my "crazy room mom wearing a wig" wig for the party and now I'm working on our crafts and games. Any awesome, big hit ideas out there that I should know about? I have to keep reining myself in and remember that these are kindergartners. I think I'm going to ditch a craft for another game. Here are my front runners are so far... pumpkin bowling, eating donuts off a string, mummy wrapping kids in toliet paper and then for crafts I had, spiders made from styrofoam balls and then a treat type of craft, maybe candy faces on lollipops with icing, that sort of thing. I did want to make paper mache ghosts but too messy, won't dry in time. And I really wanted to make popcorn balls in class but talk about messy. Bobbing for apples seems like such a fun, retro game but then I think about snotty coughing kids slobbering around in a bucket of water. gah. Not sure that's CDC approved.
$3 each at the library book sale but I couldn't resist. So many amazing illustrators... Joe Kaufman, J.P. Miller, Dagmar Wilson, June Goldsborough, Trina Schart and Art Seiden!
Here's the first one, "Adventures with Color".
After my success with the Blackbird Designs pattern I thought it'd be fun to try to come up with my own little something. That's why you didn't hear from me for a week! Here she is, after many false starts, my little egg collecting girl. I looked to these gals for inspiration. I've got ideas for butter, apples and wool next but first I'm sitting with this gal and trying to decide if she's right.
Here's what I've learned about cross stitch so far. To get me started on my first cross stitch project I googled and found this wonderful post on Yarn tree's blog...Learn how to Cross Stitch in 5 minutes. I love succinct info like this. So much more helpful than the stack of library books I checked out. A few more things I learned while trying to design this... the linen you get at the needlework shop is amazing. It took me a very long morning of driving around to a bunch of needlework shops until I discovered the perfect shop right under my nose, Tomorrow's Heirlooms. That's where I got the linen and Crescent Colours thread I used for the pins and needles design. For egg girl I tried some linen I had on hand and it didn't work out so well. I had a problem with my design being elongated. Also my stitches were confused and I couldn't keep them nice and neat. I think the weave wasn't even enough. And I tried 3 strands of floss instead of 2 and it was a mess. Obviously wrong amount of thread for the size. I'm still trying to figure out the sizes. So then I bought DMC 28 ct linen at Joanns and it worked out well. It's very even and stiff, easy to work with, but I was wishing there were more colors at the store. I love cross stitch on darker backgrounds but I'm working on a little bird design for my mom on black and it is hard going at night, working on that dark background.
So that's what I know about xstitch so far. I have a lot to learn. If you have any bits of wisdom or great needlework shops or sites I'd love to hear!
We're in the process of wrapping up the 2009 garden. I'm bringing a few pretty things inside. We're mulching and trying to make our decisions for next year. I'm disappointed the books say we can't cut back perennials until the first frost. Some things are so shabby and I'm so tired of watching them decay. I think our garden was sort of a bust this year. Weird weather and no time and some really bad impulse decisions lead to a garden that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. We definitely erred on the side of too much variety and are trying to pare it down for next year. So hard though to yank out plants that didn't make it or that just aren't working for us. All that money spent. It's painful. We try to find other spots for things but we have a small yard and only a few spots that get good sun so our choices are limited.
The vegetable garden fared about as well as the flower garden. Some hits (tomatos, green beans, basil, lettuces) and lots of misses (zucchini, cantelope, tomatillos, peppers). We don't get as much sun as we need I think and also the non-raised bed needed more than crossed fingers. Our zucchini actually did well but was eaten by rabbits as soon as it grew.
So going forward, all cool colors. Different shades of greens and purples. Things that are getting axed: coneflowers (too sloppy), phlox (too tall), pinks (too neon and too shabby), golden tansy (too big). Things that will be added in the spring: more dragon's blood stonecrop, more artemisia (to replace the ones I killed by cutting them back too far), japanese anemones for pretty late summer blooms. We bought some more evergreen shrubs to do that whole bones for the garden thing and although I was resisting it I have to say it looks much better. Funny because we started out here 2 years ago in our first house with our new yard thinking we wanted modern, simple, just a few flowers, lots of green and then somehow we went garden gone wild. It's the lure of the nurseries, all those beautiful flowers, they're impossible to resist. I think we've learned our lessons. I have high hopes for Spring.
I'm addicted to cross stitch. I can't wait to start another. I tried to design one myself but I can't find my tiny square graph paper. So instead I'm knitting. Knitting with the most soft, amazingly perfect yarn. It's really worth it with yarn, isn't it, to get the good stuff. I'm knitting very slowly so I can enjoy every minute of it.
I've been waiting waiting waiting for Amy Karol's new book to come out and it's finally here! Bend the Rules with Fabric!
I long ago determined that Amy knows everything. And at least once a day I wish I had Amy sitting in my craft room so I could ask her my many annoying questions... should I do it like this? how does that work? why in the heck won't this turn out? Now I have her right here, in my hands, showing me all the coolio arty craft stuff I've always wanted to do. Fun cool stamping ideas, dying fabric, how to use that iron-on transfer stuff, how she does that free motion drawing with thread thing... actually I want to do every single thing in here. I guess she wrote this book just for me! Thanks Amy! Oh, alright, for all of us. But I'll bet you have so many a-ha moments you'll feel she wrote it just for you too.
Here is my first success, a most exciting success, screen printing with PhotoEZ, page 60. Screen printed kitty dolls, a very belated batch of thank you gifts. I find manufacturer's instructions are often too detailed and tedious. Having Amy's cut-to-the-chase advice and tips kept me on track where I would normally get overwhelmed and give up.
Bend the Rules with Fabric is really my kind of book, accessible, jump right in, adaptable. I have a long list of projects inspired by the techniques and supplies described in the book. As a person who wants to try everything, but just a little differently from the suggested, it's a perfect book. Nice job Amy! Thanks for writing a book just for me. Now I will be needing that book on knitting kids hats with bulky yarn.. thanks :)
Thanks guys for the sweet comments on Phoebe's jacket! And yes! to all of you who mentioned the plaid. Isn't that great. That and the gold knit are both from Joanns. I think the jacket would have been in the junk pile for sure if it hadn't been for my deep love for that fabric pairing. Another lesson maybe, work with fabric you love.
So my brain is stuck in goo today and I thought maybe I could write a quick post to unclog. I am having the hardest time blogging lately. I know a huge part of it is our new Fall schedule and it's almost complete lack of free alone time for me. Right now both kids are in their drop off activities for 2 hours and instead of being able to cruise through my huge to-do list I'm wandering around the house in a haze feeling like I forgot something.
I joke with my friends that writing the book broke me but I think actually it might have dinged me a little. All that work and all the responsibility is taking longer to recover from than I thought it would. It's tricky business making work out of what you love to do. I really want to just make and stitch and not think about the shop or the photos or writing about it or I don't know what. I feel like everything got so formal and official and I've lost myself or my voice. Or sort of like I forgot what I was doing. I'm just going to push through though. That's what you do when you don't feel yourself, keep acting yourself until it's back on track, right?
I'm working on this cross stitch at night and I love it. It's so exact and perfect and I don't have to make a single decision, colors, designs, they're all decided. It's like a therapeutic puzzle and I sort of feel like when I have it completed I'll be right as rain.
