The Fall Funk

I'm getting ready to vent. You may want to skip this post.

Yes, I have been absent again, for even longer this time.

This is a stitching blog. If I don't stitch, I have nothing to blog about.

I did not thread a needle for a solid week.

Not one stitch was stitched.

I'm in my Fall Funk. 

Flosstubes and Facebook posts and Instagram pictures are full of lovely projects stitched in Fall colors or celebrating Halloween. It seems like three out of three stitchers say that Fall is their favorite season. They love the oranges and browns and golds of this time of year.

Okay, I'm very happy that the weather is cooler and the humidity level is much, much lower. That's it.

Fall means that the days are getting shorter and shorter, and the weather is going to get colder and colder. Neither of those things make me happier. Of all the colors in the palette, orange and brown are my least favorites. There, I said it. I don't like Fall colors. I prefer the soft greens and pastels of the Spring, the vivid colors of Summer. I even find the stark grays and blues and black of Winter attractive (plus once the Winter Solstice passes, the days start getting longer, thus more daylight).

And I am not into Halloween. I love Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July. I do not love Halloween. I do enjoy ghost stories, but Halloween now seems to be more horror-oriented than haunted.

The only way for me to get out of any funk is to stitch. So I finally hitched up the Granny panties and pulled out Jackie's Stitcher's Pocket and made some forward progress.

I want to get this finished--there isn't much left to stitch--and I want to work on Kate Barlow's Heartsease and sew the petals on Zina's Elizabethan Rose and catch up with my Sara Rickard crewel class.

And then we'll see where I go from there.

Out of the Fall Funk.

May I Present

A Carter is done!

I am very happy with how she turned out. I love the colors and the motifs (even the bugs) and I especially adore the two little ladies with their hands on their hips and their umbrellas by their sides.

I will admit  that I had to force myself to finish that last dancing crab urn, but I had two Zoom stitch-ins yesterday, and that gave me dedicated stitching time.

So today I'm going to decide what other trouble I can get into. I have options.

Which leads me to something else. Tara of Sully Stitches on Flosstube has started doing a Stitch Roulette. Basically, she picked 25 projects from her stash, plopped them into manila envelopes, and stuck a number from 1 to 25 on the outside of each envelope. She mixed things up so she would have no idea what was in each bag. On Sundays, she pulls a. number from her Roulette tray, and that's the project she starts that week. She isn't limiting herself to working on just that one project--but every week there's a new start.

And now Brenda and Laura of Brenda and the Serial Starter are pulling out projects for their Stitch Roulettes for 2027. They showed piles of potential projects. They're mixing it up a little; I think Brenda is putting in some things she has already started.

I admit, I thought about it. I'm still thinking about it. I'm thinking I get into enough trouble starting things without a program. 

But I'm still thinking.

Definitely a Rose

I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw a crab in the urn on A. Carter! Thank you for your comments!

However, the next motif is most definitely a rose:

 And I am on the home stretch! One more butterfly, four little flowers along the bottom, and a second crab urn and this can go in the Finished column!

However, please notice that there is yet another bug that apparently escaped the top panel of the sampler and is heading toward the rose. Dearly Beloved has declared that it is an aphid, and he should know. At one point, he was growing roses and was on a daily mission to eradicate aphids from the natural world.  It was a battle to the death. Literally. When I say that the man was in a homicidal--or should that be a bugicidal--rage, I am not exaggerating. 

I will say that the roses were finally healthy and aphid-free.

Long Time, No See

 I realized last night that we're a third of the way through October and I haven't blogged at all. There are reasons.

Unfortunately, the big one is that Mother has been in the hospital. As usual, The Saint has been doing all the heavy lifting, but we're hoping she will be released back to The Home today--depending on today's lab results. She is two months away from her 99th birthday, so each day is a gift.

And I had both Covid and flu shots in the same arm on the same day. I understand this year's flu shot for those of us over 65 is a little more powerful because this year's strain of flu is more virulent. All I know is that for the first time in several years, I was foggy for a couple of days afterwards.

Then, apparently A. Carter turned me into a monogamous stitcher. I think I mentioned before that I was thinking about working the side borders down to the next big chunk of grass, then stitching grass, then doing the bottom border. I did that, but didn't feel like any of it merited a blog post since stitching big swaths of grass is about as boring as, well, watching grass grow.

Finally I got past all that and now have the first big urn on the bottom finished.

I've been trying to figure out what that figure on the base of the urn could possibly be. My first thought was a crab.

The design kept nagging at me until I remembered that one of my great-aunts had a tea set with a rose pattern in gold. If you kind of squint at it, you could "see" a rose with leaves coming out the top and one side and a stem at the bottom.

Or you can squint and see a crab.

Happy Colors!

 I've finished the next section of A. Carter, and I am officially halfway through.

And, oh, the colors! They are so happy--and really pop! against the darker background.

I'm thinking about finishing the side borders, then stitching the six rows of green across the bottom of the sampler. This is REALLY eating one's veggies before getting to dessert, since the bottom panel of the sampler has two giant urns with equally large flowers, plus a beautiful rose in the center. Those would be so much fun to end the sampler with, as opposed to stitch after stitch of green, green, green.

I'm not so crazy about block stitching.

Can you tell?

Faux Fall

Mother Nature is pulling her usual tricks on us here in the Sunny South. We've had chilly weather--lows in the upper 40's for a couple of nights--and Mother packed away the humidity. Temporarily. It's going to reach the high 80's by the end of next week.

Thus, we have not turned the heat on, and the house has been a little chilly, especially overnight.

Last night, I made sure to have a blanket on the bed and pulled the comforter up as well. I thought this would be sufficient.

Have you ever had the experience where you're just uncomfortable enough to be unable to sleep, but too comfortable to get up and do anything about it?

I needed another blanket. The blankets are in a closet that isn't 10 feet from the bed. But, I thought, Dearly Beloved will be coming to bed eventually, and I can get him to pull another blanket down off the upper shelf.

What you need to know is that Dearly Beloved is a night owl. He doesn't come to bed until sometime between 1 and 2, and that's A.M. So I tossed and turned and shivered until he finally wandered upstairs and I could request the blanket. Yes, I could have gotten up, but, like I said, I was just comfortable enough to avoid it.

And while I'm on the subject of Fall, The Great British Baking Show is back.

Let me say that I absolutely adore this program. It is one of the very few that I don't stitch during.

But I do not like Nigella. She spends too much time criticizing and not enough encouraging, and all in a quite condescending tone of voice. And she just never shuts up. I will continue to watch, and I will hold onto the hope that she will get over herself by the end of the season.

I can always mute her.

But this is a stitching blog, so here is the small amount of stitching I've been able to do in the past week. It's just pitiful, but at least I did a little in the last couple of days.

I love the little lady with her hands on her hips and her furled umbrella. I like the urn and the birds perched on top of the flowers growing out of it. And the house is small and the pattern is easy to stitch. Why I haven't stitched very much this week is a mystery to me, because this is quite an enjoyable sampler.

I do have to say that I'm not quite sure why the lady has red eyes, but maybe she's suffering from seasonal allergies.

It is Fall, after all.

BO-RRRRRRRING

Oh, Lord, grass is boring to stitch!

I decided that it might be a good idea to have something to stitch on during our EGA Region's stitch-in that I didn't have to count or think about too much since the conversations tend to get lively. So I got the scaffolding of the house set up and the bare bones of the borders set in and started stitching grass.

I'm still stitching grass.

There's only so much grass you can plant in two hours, apparently.

So I'm going to find something binge-worthy on TV and try to finish the lawn today.

And also, I'm going to ignore the six rows of grass at the bottom of the sampler until later.