Something pops out

Sometimes a bit of stitching on a blog will just POP out at me and I have to share it with you.

Go over to Tommye's blog and see how she stitched the grass in her latest project.  Wonderful!

Can't show you much today...

...Because I've been working on a gift, so I don't want to give too much of it away. I don't think its recipient reads my blog, but we can never know...

I can show you a little bit without giving the whole thing away, so here are a couple snippets.  I'm using Valdani silks and a Silkweaver overdyed linen.  At least I think it's Silkweaver...if not, it's Lakeside.  And it's a Sunflower Seed design.

Dave and I are getting ready for a trip to Georgia soon.  After the weather we're enduring this week, the thought of traveling south almost 600 miles is really appealing.  I'd love to see some flowers!

But before we go, I have to finish gathering our papers for our tax return.  Yuck.  They're so complicated this year, and where the heck are all those little bits of mail I dutifully filed away?  So now I'm off to hunt...

Nine Inches

Hey - Get your minds out of the gutter!!  And get that dreamy expression off your face...

Sigh.  I haven't seen the sun in over a week now and we've had steady light snow for days.  Dave measured for the weather service this morning and believe it or not, we have nine inches of snow on the ground and more to come.  I sure miss the mild weather of 2012!

So anyway, what's a girl to do to keep her sanity in this world of grey, white and black?  Stitch something springy, of course!  I long for tulips, so this little BBD design was the perfect project for the weekend.

Loved it!  It's a design from A Stitcher's Journey (obviously), stitched on 28ct Antique Ivory Cashel linen, with the recommended GAST threads.  Now I'm waiting for some trim to arrive in the mail.  It'll be my first order from the Victorian Motto Sampler Shop, so how exciting is that??

Enjoy your week everyone!

Built the house!

I spent last weekend building the house on my anniversary sampler.

I thought this would go quickly, but houses are SO full of stitches!  For real, right?  I didn't have terribly far to go, because here's where I left off the before the weekend:

And yet I was pushing to finish it after almost two days of solid stitch time!  Luckily, I was in a room full of stitching buddies over the weekend and they kept me on task, so I was able to finish it Saturday afternoon.  (And when I say keep me on task, I mean that I was too embarrassed to give up and work on another project.  There would have been witnesses to my defeat, and I can't have that.)

So why did that house feel like it took so long to stitch?  Well, I decided to calculate time and stitches, starting with a total of 2, 276 stitches in that house.  Now, if I'm JUST creating cross stitches, I average about 5 complete cross stitches per minute.  (Yes, I timed myself) So if I had unending lengths of thread and stitched solidly with no breaks, that number of stitches would take me 7 hours and 40 minutes.

But of course, we must include pauses for tucking threads, starting threads, cutting threads, threading needles, unwinding floss, untangling floss, counting and recounting.  So to be on the safe side, let's add another 2 hours for all the stitching related activity that isn't actual putting thread onto fabric.  And even that 's probably a low estimate, because we all know that a tangled skein of DMC can take up a serious chunk of time...

And there you have it.  Conservatively, almost 10 hours of stitching went into a medium sized house.  Now, if you are like me, you must add in the time spent of getting up for snacks, walking around the room and admiring your buddies' work, catching up on everyone's families and jobs, grazing at the snack table AGAIN, texting, looking up useless trivia online,  gossiping about shops and bloggers, bathroom breaks, having more snacks on your way back from the bathroom, stretching your legs for a nice long, cold walk...and then you need another snack.  So - time sure flies!

And now that I think about it, it's downright amazing that I finished that house!  There.  Now I feel much better.

Oh...the cuteness!

Finished!  She was a really cute baby, right?  I loved those pink OshKosh overalls.

Valentine Mash Up

Ryan told me to tell you that he's glad you had a great Valentine's Day, even if it meant cracking a few jokes at his expense.  Our Ryan is nothing if not a good sport.

Each year I stitch a small Valentine for my daughter, (who is probably too old for this sort of thing now, but I don't care because I like doing it!) This year, the emphasis was on small.  And when I say Valentine, I actually mean post-Valentine, because even after stitching for 30 years, you would think that I would realize that small doesn't always mean fast.  So it's still not finished, but I may have to give it to her before I'm able to take another photo, and well...you'll get the idea from this picture.

I put this together by mashing up a few designs, starting with L'Atelier Perdu, where I found the phrase and the lettering for this little piece.  Natalie has some really adorable designs over there, and this one had been on my mind for a while.  But I didn't want to stitch the little girl on the left from the original design.  I wanted something more heart-y, so I switched her out and added a bit of a freebie heart tree from a Hungarian blog, called Sub Rosa.  And finally, I took out the original flower on the right of the design and added a thistle from a Blackbird Designs chart, the Thistle House Sewing Box.

You can see that I still have some stitching to do, like finishing the top border and I need some kind of something towards the bottom to balance the lettering...(Clear as mud, huh?)

Anyways, Colleen will probably like it, but she'll probably like the cash I tuck into the back of it more.  Oh..thanks everyone for your good thoughts for her as she interviews for jobs.  She hasn't heard anything one way or the other yet.

My friends in Ohio and West Virginia might be interested in reading the outdoor magazine she just published for her Senior Independent Study.  It's the kind of writing she really wants to pursue, and now that the magazine is hot off the press, she's hoping it'll be a nice addition to her resume.

It's a tough job market out there, but I'm sure something good will happen for her.  Still...I wouldn't be normal if I wasn't worrying.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I don't have any progress on my projects to show you, but that's no reason not to wish you a Happy Valentine's Day.  And even without any actual stitching, I still have a few gifts for you.

Have a wonderful Valentine's Day!