Pretty flowers

I've added the pretty flowers to this panel.

I would show them to you but blogger won't let me.

Sigh . . .

This after spending way more time than I wanted to spend looking for the package of red Mill Hill beads that I know are somewhere in this house, but not where they are supposed to be.  Wherever they are, they're probably hiding out with the Christmas scissors that I also know are lurking in a very logical place. I just can't remember where that very logical place is.

I give up. I'm going to bed and enjoying my extra hour of sleep.

Zen Stitching

The last couple of months, between work and Mother, have been a wee bit stressful. I've been lurching in the house like a brain-dead zombie after work, collapsing in the wing chair, and staring at the TV until it was time to stagger upstairs, just to get up and do it again the next day.

There has been little or no stitching. This is most unlike me.

I realized that the only times I've actually stitched and enjoyed it have been Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

As I tend to try to analyze everything to the nth degree, I looked at what I was doing--Jackie du Plessis' Tsubaki on Fridays and Joanne Harvey's Queen stitch needle book on Sundays--and realized that the patterns I've been stitching  have been very repetitive and soothing. Jackie likes to reproduce the look of fabric in some of her projects, and the whole needle book is covered with Queenies, so the patterns are simply lovely and the stitches challenging enough to keep my attention.

This is where I am on each at the moment:

Tsubaki

Needle Book

It's all very Zen . . . and I'm going to stick with just these projects for the next bit.

The other thing I realized is that I am on track this year for the fewest projects finished ever. Yes, I keep a list of everything I finish each year. No, I don't know why I do it other than I like lists. Anyway, I was appalled when I looked at this year's list and there is hardly anything on it. Why it matters, I don't know, but it does.

So I decided to see which year had the most projects done. And it was the year that the Big Kid was seven, Baby Girl was two, and Dearly Beloved was traveling all the time for his job.

It was one of those times when nothing ever seems to get done. Just as you fold the last towel and put it in the linen closet, you look at the laundry hamper and discover it's half-full again. You get the last Lego off the living room floor, turn around, and find a whole Fisher Price village, complete with little people and their cars, has risen in the dining room. You get ready to unload the dishwasher, only to find that, while it was running, the gremlins have dirtied another sink full of dishes.

I was talking to one of my neighbors about feeling like a hamster in its wheel, and she emphatically told me I absolutely had to carve out time for myself. She told me that when her kids were little, she got up at four in the morning so she could sew until six when her kids got up. And she told me that everyday when she finished, she took a picture of what she'd done. Then when the day got to her, she could look at her pictures and realize that she was actually accomplishing something.

She was a brilliant woman.

Now I was not going to get up at four for anything less than the opportunity to go on a road trip--but I did have both kids in bed by eight, and I could then give myself permission to stitch until ten. After all, it was obvious that the house was never going to be spotlessly clean until the Munchkins were--well, to be perfectly honest--out of the house completely.

Anyway, that was the year I finished 47 projects. (Do not fall over in amazement. About two dozen of those projects were Christmas ornaments and most of the rest of them were UFO's that didn't need much more stitching to finish.)

And every night I took a Polaroid picture of the results of the evening's stitching, which I kept in a photo album so I could realize that I could actually get something done that stayed done.

I do not anticipate getting 47 projects completed in the next 12 months. I do anticipate allowing myself to relax with needle in hand.

I can't take a Polaroid picture--do they even still make Polaroid cameras any longer?-but I can post a picture on the blog. It will probably be boring for my readers, but it will be a good way for me to keep a record until life settles down again.

Swans A'Swimming

Betsy Morgan's Swan Bower is DONE!

The outside

One side of the interior needle case/pinkeep

Notice the neat pockets on either side of the case.

The other side of the interior needle case/pinkeep

Thread Keep, Scissor case, Scissors Fob

I believe this is one of the projects in Betsy Morgan's book, published by Inspirations, so if you have a hankering to do it, it is now available outside of a class. It's a lovely piece, like all of Betsy's projects.

The current issue of Inspirations also has a new project from Betsy, a Christmas Etui. I decided I loved it and I decided to order the kit from Inspirations because, as I get older, the less patience I have for sourcing materials for projects. Give me a complete kit with all the bits and bobs, and I am a happy stitcher.  And that is why I love shops who will package up all the materials for a project and send them to you in lovely, tissue-wrapped packages. It's like having Christmas year-round, looking forward to those boxes to arrive in the mail or the UPS truck.

Meanwhile, when not stalking the mail carrier, I went on a little road trip with Baby Girl a couple of weeks ago.

I have been raving about the Tenacity exhibit at Jamestown Settlement since I went to see it earlier this year. I have been bugging her endlessly about it  encouraging Baby Girl to go to see it and she finally succumbed to the nagging influence and off we went.

Now I had planned to go see the exhibits inside the museum, have lunch, and go home. However, it was a beautiful fall day, and Baby Girl wanted to see it all, which includes reproductions of a native village, the three ships that brought the colonists to Virginia, and the Jamestown fort. So we wandered around.

I took the camera and forgot I had it until we got to the ships. So here are the pictures that came out.

I did not go aboard. I have a wee bit of claustrophobia and a bad knee, so venturing below decks just was not going to happen. However Baby Girl explored to her heart's content and told me all about it. Meanwhile,  I had a lovely time people-watching and enjoying the fresh air.

It was a very nice break from the usual rut, and we've decided we want to find more things like this to do on the week-ends.

Poor neglected blog

And it's probably going to have very sporadic posts for the next couple of months.

There's a lot going on with work, and Mother has had a couple of mild "events", and I was knocked out by a sinus/ear infection for about a week, and on it goes. I wanted to let the people who have contacted me that I haven't planned to stop blogging--but it won't be very frequent for awhile.

If I could get my pictures to download, I'd show you what little I've been able to stitch in the last few weeks, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I finished the stitching on Swan Bower and started the assembly line to put it together, I got another panel for Tsubaki stitched, and I worked a little on the Queen Stitch needle case that used to be my travel project but has become my late Sunday afternoon project.

And I cannot believe that was all in just one sentence.

"See" you when things calm down!

There and back again

Last week, Baby Girl and I outraced Dorian (actually, we out-plodded Dorian, one of the slowest and most devastating hurricanes because it was so slow) to go to my Happy Place.

I took classes at Salty Yarns with Jackie du Plessis.

Here is the beautiful box that will hold the exquisite smalls for a project named Gardenesque:

We didn't get much stitching done, but we worked through the steps to make the pincushions that will fit on the top (most people got theirs done, mine looked like lopsided pimples so I decided to wait until I got home where I wouldn't embarrass myself too much) and to make the fittings for the drawer.

You can't see the drawer in this picture, but it will contain a marvel of engineering that will hold scissors, a thread winder, and a waxer, and also has a built-in button container. I was working on carving out the openings in mat board and foamcore that form the basis for the drawer fittings but stopped when I broke the blade of the knife I was using.

Yes, I broke the blade. It flew through the air. Luckily it didn't hit anyone and I found it almost immediately, so there were no injuries in the making of this etui--but it ended my interest in carving for the day.

But that was not all.

We also had the opportunity to make a fan/needlebook and its holder, designed especially for Salty Yarns.

The scrims will be the blades for the fan, and we were also given a mermaid thread winder by our hostess with the mostest, Sara Rutka-Karst.

I should add that the shell holder really looks just like a clam shell. It is amazing.

And there was the usual fabulous goody bag:

In keeping with our mermaid theme--when I get all the goodies stashed away in my sewing corner (aka kitchen table)--this will be the project bag for the fan and its holder.

But it's going to take some time to get all the goodies stashed away--it was a wonderful, bountiful collection of sewing aids and appurtenances:

As usual, Sara, Sally, Mary, and their families took extremely good care of us. I'm always so happy to have the chance to take classes there and hope I can continue to totter to Salty Yarns for years to come.

Baby Girl did not take classes this time. She drove us there and back and relaxed in between. I took classes and caught up on my sleep. It was the perfect vacation.

Now, have I jumped right into these projects since I've been home?

Nope.

As expected, my email inbox and desk blew up while I was gone and I'm still catching up. I may catch up by November 2020. I am breathing deeply and making every effort to avoid stressing out.

So instead of setting up the linen and jumping right in (for one thing, I've got to get a new knife--Dearly Beloved has decided I can't be trusted with any of his), I decided to continue working on Swan Bower. I'm getting very close to a finish for the stitching.

And I have Cherry Berry still in the finishing stages, and the Winter Casket Toys to the finishing stage, and I'm working away at Tsubaki . . . .

And I've added another lovely Barbara Jackson design to the list:

The beautiful handmade basket and the materials for a class through Shining Needle Society arrived a couple of days ago.

I am so lucky to have the opportunities I've had for stitching projects and classes--but I really need to plug in the electric needle and get to stitching.

So I am.

Never make plans

I was going to go off track this week-end and finally, FINALLY get the Winter Casket Toys assembled. I always like to have a special project to stitch when I have a long week-end or holiday, and this project has been in the works for far longer than I would like.

Well, this is what got put together yesterday:

This is one side of a thread winder holder. I did get the pocket that will go in the middle ready to go while I was working on this toy yesterday--and then there was another component that I spent most of the afternoon stitching and unstitching.

And stitching and unstitching.

And--well, you get the idea.

I finally admitted that my problem was that I really couldn't see as well as I wanted and my little clip-on magnifiers were not strong enough. This means the Dazor has to come out. Any by the time I decided on that, it was getting late in the evening and I couldn't focus my eyes anyway.

So I was going to do that today.

Except I was unwell in the middle of the night, complete with chills and headache, and I still feel a little quivery today. 24 hour virus? Maybe . . . anyway, this is not the day to do anything that involves focus and concentration.

I was making really good progress on Swan Bower before I decided to do something else this week-end:

And maybe I should stick with that.

Or maybe I should sip some chicken broth and go back to bed. What a waste of a week-end!

You learn something new every day

I made good progress on Betsy Morgan's Swan Bower set this week:

There are a couple of changes to the original design.

The eggs in the nest that Betsy stitched and charted are sort of a dark green/gray. I asked Dearly Beloved, who is my authority on all things wildlife, if swans have dark eggs. Amazingly, this is one question that he could not answer.

So, Google to the rescue!

It turns out that swans lay eggs in a variety of colors, from whitish to beige-ish to blue to greenish to grayish. There was a photograph of a nest that had mostly whitish eggs, with one that was close to the shade of the thread that Betsy used. However, the caption for the picture said that the egg turned that color after the nest became wet.

I decided my swan parents built their nest close enough to a body of water to be safe but high enough to avoid flooding. Besides, I thought, given the light and airy effect of the stitching, white would look a little better. So my eggs are white.

I also did plain cross stitch instead of long-arm cross on the multicolor bands above and below the woven ribbons. This was not a conscious decision. This was a mistake. Somehow I missed the line in the instructions that told me to work those bands in long-arm cross.  I decided to leave them as they are, since who would ever know?

Other than the people who read my blog, of course.