So close . . .

I'm halfway through with filling in the center motifs on Ann Lawle's whitework band.

I could have this done in another evening of stitching.  But tomorrow I have to preside at our sampler guild meeting, and then the next evening I have a board meeting for our EGA chapter. By the time I get home, I will have only enough time to get ready for work the next morning and to fall into bed.

Dearly Beloved says I need to stand in front of the mirror and practice saying, "No."

I think it's a little too late now.

Finally sunny . . . and now brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I do not need to state the obvious, although apparently I am.

It's cold.

Period.

Even here in the sunny South, we're going to fall into single digits tonight.  I am a wimp. I do heat and humidity. I do not do arctic blasts.

However, despite the fact that the thought of the temperature is making my fingers cold, I was able to get the other side of the whitework band stitched.

Now all I have to do is fill in the center diamonds and my self-imposed, self-assigned deadline for this sampler for this month will be completed!

Gloom, gloom, gloom . . .

Another gloomy day .  . . sigh . . .

I propped up the scroll frame with Ann Lawle on it across the room so I could look at the whitework while I escaped from the gloom into a book. I'm rereading the Longmire books by Craig Johnson. He's one of the authors I wish could write as fast as I can read.

As I said before, two strands were distorting the linen, not something I want on any sampler unless it involves pulled work. In addition, I've taken many classes at seminars and workshops from teachers who emphasize that less is frequently more, that it's better to suggest than to clobber someone over the head.


Anyway, after glancing up at the frame off and on during the day, one strand does work.  So I stitched a bit on that band this afternoon.

Now that I've figured out how best to work the pattern, it's just a matter of continuing on. I've decided to try to stitch a band a month, and this would take care of January. There won't be much time to stitch this week, though--I have a sampler guild meeting Wednesday and an EGA chapter board meeting on Thursday. Between getting ready for both and working the first full week since November, I'm not sure I'll have enough energy to thread the needle, much less get it in the right place on the linen.

On a gloomy January day

There was a list of things I had thought about doing today. They were even written down.  It all changed when I finally dragged myself out of bed to see that it was another gray, gloomy, yucky day.

The weather forecaster had said we should have sunshine today. He was wrong. We should have, but we didn't.

I had planned to work on Hannah Thornbush. It is much easier to stitch on 45 count linen in daylight, preferably bright sunshine. When it appeared that bright sunshine--indeed, even weak and barely there sunshine--wasn't going to happen today, I left Hannah in her pillowcase and pulled out Ann Lawle instead. 35 count linen can be seen in lamplight, at least as much lamplight as I turn on.

My mother-in-law, who was an interior designer, always complained about the amount of light we use in our living room. She said we could land a 747. She said the light from our windows could be seen from outer space. She said a lot of things which we ignored. Dearly Beloved and I are both readers and I stitch, and we need illumination.

Anyway, I stitched the framework for this band and have started filling it in:

I am going to let this sit overnight and look at it again in the morning.  I tried the satin with two strands and it seemed bulky, so bulky that it was distorting the linen.

But one strand seems a little skimpy:

A close-up photo makes it look even skimpier. I think I need to set it across the room and look at it from a distance in the morning. After all, no one is ever going to look at it as closely as I am, especially with magnification.

Decisions, decisions . . .

Just a little late for Christmas

Or maybe way too early . . .

I got the cording sewn around the rest of the ornaments tonight. Despite stabbing myself repeatedly with the sharp needle, I managed to finish them without leaving bloodstains.

The cording came with the kits. I still need to figure out how to deal with the ends hanging down below--the directions were just a wee bit vague on how to handle them.

Dearly Beloved remarked that they were heavy, too heavy for our usual Fraser Firs. I mentioned that  they may stay in reserve until we get so decrepit that we need to turn to an artificial tree rather than wrestling a real tree into the house and into the stand.  Dearly Beloved said he was decrepit enough for that about ten years ago.

Next Christmas may be interesting.

Happy Day!

With New Year's in the middle of the week, it sort of felt like I had two Mondays this week.  (Of course, that also means two Fridays!)  And to make it drearier, it's been raining off and on almost all day. (Although that means we're not dealing with over a foot of snow and below freezing temps--can you tell one of my goals for the new year is to be more positive? I'm trying to get in touch with my inner Pollyanna.)

Anyway, none of that made any difference when I arrived home to find something I've been waiting for  stuffed in the mailbox, all the long way over the Atlantic from England.

A tiny sweetbag ornament

Hampton Court

Both are designed and kitted by Jenny Adin-Christie.  And I am thrilled that they have arrived.

Am I ready to dive in?

You know I am.

Am I threading the needle as we speak?

Actually, I'm not.

I'm using the carrot-and-stick approach to the Overly Ambitious List.  While I can finish-finish when the mood strikes, since that is as rare as a blue moon, I agreed with myself to work on the Overly Ambitious List until I get a good chunk of it embroidered and, dare I say it, finished. Each project on it was very carefully selected for the enjoyment of stitching, the new skills I might either learn or polish, and its balance with the others on the list. Every single one of them was a project for which I felt every bit of the same enthusiasm when each arrived as I have felt as I look at these new designs.

But have I worked on anything on the Overly Ambitious List since I opened the package?

Are you kidding?  I've been fondling the kit contents and reading through the instructions. 

Happy New Year!

And here it is, the first day of 2014.  A blank slate . . .I've been told that what you do on the first day of the new year is what you'll do all year long.

I wish I could say I flew to Paris or London, but instead I was home, doing a bit of housecleaning and cooking. I did catch up on my blog reading, and I did a bit of stitching.

I started something new:

For some reason, this is showing up sideways. Anyway, it's the framework for Jackie du Plessis' Pocket for Posies needle case.

And I spent a lot of the day gluing. I started the finishing for the canvaswork ornaments I stitched in November. The kits came with the backing fabric and forms to mount the ornaments and cording. So, first you mount the backing to its form, then you mount the stitched piece to its form, then you glue the two forms together and sew the cording around. I would go and glue things for awhile, then I would wait so the glue would set up, then I would go back and glue something else, and wait for that to set up, then I had to take everything off the kitchen table so we could have dinner.

It didn't help to discover once I got the needlework glued and the backing fabric glued to find that the stitched side came out just slightly larger than the fabric backed part, partly due to the difference in thickness of fabric as opposed to stitched canvas, and partly because the design area was slightly larger than the forms. The kits did supply a heavy cording, and I think that's going to cover a multitude of sins. Of course, I always believe that cording will cover a multitude of sins. Usually it does.

Since dinner, I've managed to sew the cording to one ornament, so I do have one finish-finished project for 2014.

I wonder if I can count this as one of my dozen ornaments in the Great Triple Dog Dare ornament challenge . . .