More stitching!

And more blogging - wow!



I actually finished this last week, but here's the first square of the Wonders of Space stitchalong that I'm doing this year.

I'm working on a little freebie right now until the next section of the SAL comes out and once I finish it I'm going to make it into a little magnet, I think. I'll post pics!

First finish of 2020!

Okay, technically the pumpkin patch bookmark was my first finish of 2020, but I'm not counting that. This is one I'm counting as my first finish of 2020:



This was one of the small kits that I mentioned throwing in to a supply order and that was making my hand cramp. Eventually that stopped happening, interestingly. But I did remind me that I vastly prefer things that I can stitch on a frame where I can use both of my hands for the actual stitching.

And speaking of... here's the literal first stitch on the Wonders of Space stitchalong:



I suspect that I'm not going to get as much stitching in for the next couple of months, but we'll see!

Welcome to 2020!

I really meant to write more about what I was stitching last year *during* the year but I never got around to it, so here's a 2019 round-up and a little about what I'm going to be working on in 2020.

First up - I finished the IT Crowd I posted about last year and framed it! And it's hanging in my office at work (and has even drawn a few chuckles and "Oh I love the IT Crowd!" comments). Here's the final version before I took it to work:



I also tried my hand at hoop framing some older projects and one new project. As often happens to me, the first couple that I did came out great and then the third one wasn't as good. (I have the same track record with Thanksgiving turkeys and my grandmother's pecan pie recipe). Here are the pizza penguin and Castle Coch, both originally stitched many years ago:



And this is the one that I wasn't as happy with the framing on (and this is also hanging in my office at work... for no reason whatsoever of course...):



And I framed this other old project and hung it up in my bedroom:



And I stitched up this little Celtic swirl card kit that I threw in my basket when I was shopping for some other supplies (I actually left of some backstitching in this because I thought it made the design a little too busy):



And this one was supposed to be my final finish of 2019 but I technically finished it two days into 2020. I had a pre-finished bookmark that I got in a grab bag I bought ages ago and I had saved this bookmark pattern from "The Cross Stitcher" magazine in 2008. I started on this in the fall with the original intent of finishing in the fall, but the fall ended up too busy:



And last but not least, here's a photo of my thread ends and leftover thread from a kit:



So what's up for 2020?

I've got a few projects that I've been stitching on for a few years now that I'll probably keep plugging away at, but of course I had to start a few new projects! I did a few stitches on another kit that I threw in to a supply order (that is actually one of the main ways I acquire small kits) but I have trouble with my left hand cramping if I stitch on something 'in hand' for too long. So I also have a couple of things on q-snaps that I can use on my lap frame.

I've signed up for the Wonders of Space stitch-along, which is my first SAL! We don't have the first part yet, but I'll try to post some progress photos of it as we go along. I don't know how well I'll be able to keep up through the first few months of the year, but I'm going to try!

The thing on my frame right now is something that probably shows how nuts I am, but I'm re-stitching the second large-ish project I did when I first started stitching 30 years ago. I've learned a lot since then so I'm curious to see how it comes out! I don't have the first project I did because it was TERRIBLE (I had no idea what I was doing....) but the second was Lichtenstein Castle, from the book Medieval Castles from Jeanette Crews Designs and you can see the first version of it here. Technically I'm getting a bit of a head start on the 30th anniversary of when I really got in to cross stitch since that didn't happen until the summer of 1990, but I know it's going to take a while since I have a lot less stitching time than I did back then!

Happy New Year!

Hey there anyone who stumbles across this blog and goes "hmmm, does she actually ever update it?"! Maybe 2019 will be the year that the answer to that question is more "yes" than "no".

I did actually do a little stitching last year after stumbling on the cross stitch subreddit and getting inspired to find a way to get more stitching time in to my schedule. And part of the reason that I haven't been stitching quite as much in recent years is that I've started to have trouble with my eyes, so I have to do it all with a magnifying lamp at my desk for now.

Of course I have a bunch of projects in progress that I could have been working on but I started a new project instead (see below):



For those unfamiliar, this is a reference to the IT Crowd show from the UK. :)

I did finish another of the Mill Hill musical Christmas ornaments, this time the drum. Three left to go! (previously finished - the harp and the mandolin)



And I finished the Haunted House that I mentioned here into a little pillow ornament. Although I was apparently *really* rusty since I didn't do a very good job on the stuffing and stitching to make it into a pillow!



That's it for recent stuff. Now let's see if I can post a little more before the end of 2019!

10 Years!

I know I almost never post these days, and one of these days I'll do enough stitching to actually write about it again, but I had to mark the 10 year anniversary of starting this blog. Even if I don't get a chance to stitch (or blog) nearly as often as I would like these days, it's nice to look back through some of the old posts and see what I've done in the past. Although it does also remind me of the pile of things that I have finished the stitching on that still need to be made into ornaments or framed, etc. Well, Hurricane Harvey is likely to bring a very wet weekend to central Texas, so maybe that's one of the things I'll do to pass the time over the next couple of days!

Greetings!

Hey, look, I'm posting something! It's too late for a Happy New Year post, and I don't have any new stitching to share, but I wanted to post *something* for anyone who comes across this blog in their internet travels. Last year was kind of insane, and this year hasn't started off any less crazy, but I really do want to try to get back into some stitching in 2016. It's a good stress reliever for me and I know I definitely need to do that more! So stay tuned, there might actually be something new here in the next few months!

Happy New Year!

Well hello there random people who still periodically stumble across this blog! It's been a while since I've posted because I haven't done much stitching to post about. But as I sit down to write about the new year and my goals for 2015, I realized I should also mention the stitching-related ones here. Last year I did really good on my goal to frame/finish a number of projects (which you can see in the post from August), but I fell short on the number of projects I wanted to finishing stitching. I did manage a few, but not the 10 I was aiming for.

Since I still have a huge pile of unfinished projects and projects that need framing (to need to be finished into ornaments or flat folds, etc.) I've set a goal to do 5 of each. Given the limited stitching time I get most weeks, I think those are reasonable goals, especially since I count small projects (like Christmas ornaments). I'd really love to be able to finish at least one medium or large project, but I'm trying to stay realistic. :)

So, happy new year and let's hope I find more time for stitching and blogging about it!

Another ornament finished

I guess for this blog, a month still counts as 'sooner, rather than later' per the previous post. But over the Labor Day weekend, I did finish the beaded ornament I mentioned before.



This is another of Mill Hill's musical instrument Christmas ornaments. (I've done the harp and the mandolin so far.)

Next up for the small projects is a Mill Hill beaded snowflake ornament that has been in my to-do pile for even longer than the musical instruments kits!

Catching up on a few completed projects

Time for an update! (Actually, it was time for an update a few months ago, but today is when I finally got around to writing up the post.)

I went through a finishing binge back in May when I took a mini-vacation from work and here are photos of the pieces I worked on:



This is a mini log cabin quilt that had been waiting for me to put a binding on it for YEARS, which I finally managed to do a couple of months ago.



And I finally framed this cross stitch of Hever Castle that I stitched ages ago. (And to preempt any questions about the chart - I bought this as a kit at the castle gift shop when I visited in 1998 and I no longer have the chart from the kit. I'm not sure if they still sell it, but you might contact them if you really, really want to stitch this design.)



This is one I finished stitching, but haven't framed or made into an ornament yet. The picture is Castle Coch in Wales, stitched from The Cross Stitcher's Guide to Britain - Wales. This castle is one on my list of "places I must actually visit" - i.e. places that I've driven by or walked past but didn't actually go in to for one reason or another. (Other places on this list include the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Lord Leicester Hospital, and the Liberty Bell. One place that used to be on the list that I DID make it back to visit properly was Tintern Abbey.)



And now for something completely different... This is a bookmark I did of the Arecibo Message.



Only one Christmas ornament in this round-up. I finished stitching this back in 2011 and just now got around to making it into an ornament.

And all of the rest of the projects that I finished were fall and Halloween designs (I think all of these came from various Halloween issues of Just Cross Stitch magazine.) I realized long after I took the photos and cropped them down for posting that I should have also taken photos of the backs so you can see the coordinating fabrics I used, but I'm too lazy to do it now. But I'll try to more in the future, especially since I now have a bunch of cute Halloween fabrics to use on the many remaining Halloween designs I still have to finish.

















That's it for this round-up! I have another beaded Christmas ornament that I'm getting close to finishing, so maybe there will be another update sooner rather than later. :)

Last finish of 2013

This is "Autumn Harvest" from the 2011 Just Cross Stitch September/October issue and I put the final stitches in a few hours before midnight on December 31, 2013. I mentioned in the previous post I have a few stitching goals, albeit modest ones, for 2014. I am expecting it to be a very busy year so I don't think I'll have a ton of stitching time, but I do hope to meet my goal since I'm including small projects in the count. I think a bookmark that I started a year or so ago will be the first target for finishing since it is relatively small. Stay tuned for the occasional update!

Happy New Year!

I'll have a proper update later since I finished stitching on one last project a few hours before midnight last night, but I wanted to put my stitching/crafting goals for 2014 here to keep me honest. I've posted my whole list on my "everything" blog, but the ones for this blog are as follows: My goal is to frame (or finish into ornaments or whatever) six projects that I've already completed the stitching on and to finish the stitching on 10 projects (small ones count!). This won't make a huge dent in my backlog but at least it will be progress!

I'm on a roll!

I finished the little witch hat over the previous weekend, so here it is:



This is from the Just Cross Stitch September/October 2011 issue. It's supposed to have a little string of beads and a specialty button hanging of the end, but I didn't have either, so I'm probably just going to leave it as is.

Quilting in SSSSSPPAAAAAAAACE!

When astronauts stay on the International Space Station, they usually have a little down time for personal projects. Probably the most famous use of that personal time was Commander Chris Hadfield's cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity". But Astronaut Karen Nyberg's use of some of her personal time is something I can identify with a bit more - she's sewing in space!

In the video below she describes some of the challenges of sewing in space:



And as she mentioned in the video, she's working with the International Quilt Festival (headquartered, like the NASA Astronauts, in Houston) and is calling on quilters to contribute a quilt block for a project for next year's festival. You can find out more here (PDF)! I'm planning to contribute a block myself... I have lots of astronomical fabrics to choose from too.

Besides quilting and love of space, one other thing that I have in common with Karen Nyberg is that we're Texas Longhorns! I got my Bachelor's in Astronomy in 1994 from (and still work at) the University of Texas at Austin and she got her Master's and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UT in 1996 and 1998 respectively.

Karen and two other crew members will be coming home from the ISS today. Safe travels!

I have actually been doing some stitching!

This was a Mill Hill kit that I picked up when my LNS closed last year. In hindsight, I shouldn't have backed it with a dark felt since now you can't see the antennae, but I'm happy with it.

I've started on another old Halloween design that has been in my "to do" basket even though we're now past the holiday itself. But it's a small project so maybe I'll have it finished before the urge to work on Christmas stuff takes over. :)

Dabbling in old projects

I have been going through my storage bins of old quilt projects to try to finish them up and make some space in my too-small-for-all-these-hobbies apartment. I had a few small blocks from a sampler quilt I started ages ago while I was first learning and then stalled on so instead of finishing the original project, I decided to just do things with the pieces I already had. The first thing I did was sew the log cabin blocks that I did by paper piecing into a miniature quilt, which you can see in its almost finished state here. A few weeks ago I did the machine sewing for the binding, but it is still waiting for the hand stitching to finish it up.

Of the remaining pieces, I had five blocks of an Ohio star design that I was trying to figure out what to do with when I thought that ornaments might be a good idea - especially since I have way too much fiber-fill around too. So I tossed the block that had some wonky alignment and made two ornaments out of the other four, a photo of which you see above. The colors are dark red and green, so they are good for Christmas, but I have them hanging on a peg board in my living room right now anyway.



The other thing I did was to finally frame this old lighthouse cross stitch that I finished stitching ages ago (see previous mention here) but has been sitting in my "to be framed" pile ever since. One down... a gazillion more to go. For now it's on one of my bookshelves, but it may end up on the wall eventually.

That's it for this weekend. I might be able to get a little more done over the long weekend coming up for the 4th of July, but as always, we'll see!

My quilting story

I was looking back through my old posts for some reason and I realized that I have never posted any quilting things here other than a small kit that came on a UK stitching magazine.

There isn't really much of a "story" here, but I figured I should post a little about how I got in to quilting since I've written so much about how I got in to cross stitch and embroidery. I think I've always liked quilts, but I actually got interested in making them in 1994-95 while I was working at Hobby Lobby. I was working in fabrics and needlework, so of course I occasionally got quilters at the counter. They were easy to spot, they would come up with 10 bolts of fabric and only want a quarter or a half a yard from each (finding pre-cut fat quarters at craft stores wasn't as common back then). And we had to stock notions, books, etc. and during that process I saw a book from the "American School of Needlework" collection called Decorator Quilts in a Hurry that had a really cool celestial-themed fabric and design on the cover quilt. So I bought that book to make the quilt on the cover (which, to this dates, I still haven't done).

Right about this time, the first of my friends from college to have kids found out they were pregnant with twin girls (who graduated from high school yesterday - I cannot accept that!) so I figured that making them some baby quilts would be a good way to get into quilting. I picked up another book called Stitch it, Snip it & Flip it that had a neat quick trick for making, among other patterns, star shapes. So, the first two quilts I ended up making were the two for them. I don't have the scans handy, but I'll eventually post some pictures.

I also bought yet another ASN book Quilting for People Who Don't Have Time to Quilt (I ended up with a bunch of those books because of the sales and employee discounts!), which was - and still is - a good description for me! The blue rail fence you see up top, as well as the brown shades one on my Flickr set, come from that book.

Of course I got in to reading and posting on quilting newsgroups, lists, etc. around this time too, since I can't have any hobby or interest after c. 1991 that didn't involve looking it up on the internet (and eventually the WWW). I eventually joined the Austin Area Quilt Guild, although after a few years it got harder and harder for me to make it to the meetings so I eventually decided not to renew my membership. I did get a chance to work at one of their shows while I was a member, which was a blast. I have some photos from that show, but since it was back in the old film days, I'll have to scan them. You can see photos from the 2006 show here though.

I've done a variety of small projects that you can see a few photos of on my quilting Flickr set (link below). I'll eventually go through and write a bit more about some of the project individually. There really isn't a whole lot to them, but as usual, I like this blog to be my personal journal of my projects, so the write-ups might not be all that interesting to other people. :)

You can see all of the pictures of my projects that I've posted so far up on my Quilting Flickr set. And you can see photos from the 2006 AAQG show here.

OMG, I actually finished some stitching

Yes, I finally finished the project that I showed in the post from last August! Needless to say, I haven't been doing a lot of stitching lately. Some of it is that my spare time was occupied with some of my other (way too many) hobbies, and some was that I moved some lights around and discovered the new arrangements weren't great for stitching (so I moved one of the lamps back to a better position). I might be getting back in to the mood to do some more, although I have that age-old problem of new things I want to start even though I have a bunch of other works in progress! I think I'm going to do a cute monarch butterfly Mill Hill kit I picked up when my LNS closed last year and then tackle some stuff in my "to do" basket.

Happy New Year!

Gosh, I can't believe my last update here was in August, and it wasn't even a stitching update! The project in my last stitching update post is still on my lapstand waiting to be completed - I only did a few stitches on it over my holiday break from work. (Which is really pathetic given that there isn't a whole lot left to do on it!)

So, it probably should surprise no one that one of my hopes for 2013 is to get more stitching and finishing done. I think I say that every year. :)

RIP Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum

I just saw in the Nordic Needle's weekly newsletter that Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum of Told in a Garden (and Lavender & Lace and Butternut Road) has died. I've only stitched one of her designs to date - Celtic Christmas - but I have several others in my stash that I intend to get to one of these days. Thankfully her talent lives on in her daughter, Nora Corbett of Mirabilia Designs and in the many beautiful projects her fans have stitched, and will stitch, from her designs.

Marilyn L. Imblum obituary from the Finger Lake Times.

Fifth Blogiversary!

I feel a little ashamed to be celebrating the 5th anniversary of this blog given that I update it so infrequently!

I thought I would have some time over the summer to get more stitching done, but the time just didn't materialize. A combination of a really busy summer at work and the fact that it wasn't atrociously hot this year just made it fly by. This year the summer was pretty mild other than a short stretch in June and we've actually had some rain. And, most importantly, everything's not on FIRE here in central Texas this year.

I really haven't done a lot of stitching since the last update, but here's the little Halloween haunted house that I've been working on sporadically:



I have one or two small Halloween projects in the queue and then maybe, just maybe, I'll tackle some of those larger projects that I've only barely scratched the surface on.