Variety

Embroidery, crochet, cross-stitch and quilting. Those are the crafts that I have been working on lately.

First, I finally added the missing stitches to this embroidery I inherited from an aunt years ago.

 

 I'm not sure why she did most of the stitching in green ...even the flowers..., but I found a floss that I had also inherited from her and finished the stitching.

 I have four of these muslin pieces. I don't know if they were supposed to be dish towels or what. Some of them are quite stained.

 I will save them for now and hopefully cut out the motifs and sew them into a wall hanging quilt some day. 

I am have ditched the secret crocheting. It was supposed to be a crocheted chick in a decorated Easter egg. Let's just say that I was highly disappointed with the chick when all the pieces were completed. The proportions were wrong and it was sort of ugly even after I sewed some of the pieces together and added the embroidery.

I didn't even bother to unravel it. It went straight into the garbage as did the pattern. 

I am trying very hard to finish these blocks. There is one block of these 10 that is giving me fits and I currently just can't face trying to make it right.

I need 196 and I now have 111 completed. I can't begin to tell you how frustrating these blocks can be sometimes. I really hope that, in the end, I can manage to get them to go together so that they lay flat. 

I am working on filling in the background of this cross-stitched box lid. 

This is one of those UFOs that have been hanging around too long. It was a birthday gift 4 years ago. Since it is a wooden lid it is thicker than working on cloth and uses a whole lot of floss. I had to dig around in my stash to find another skein of the white Coats & Clark floss that I inherited several years ago that I am using. Thankfully there was one more full skein. It should be enough to finish.

I moved Three Boats back to my 2nd floor stitching area. Do you remember it?

This is where I left off quite some time ago. Not very much has been completed.

I sat with it yesterday to figure out where I am on the chart. It was way too dark and cloudy outside for me to get enough light (even with the lights on) to start stitching it again. 

Recently, after having trouble with our landline telephone due to the copper wiring, we are using home phones that are internet based. (We each have cell phones, but we have had the landline number for over 30 years and it is bundled with our internet service). Getting rid of the copper component meant that the phone hanging in our kitchen no longer worked. We took it down, but were left with the phone plate.

Hubby suggested that a craft could cover it. Of course I had to try. I stopped at Dollar Tree and found this cute little wooden house.

Other than the $1 house, I decided to use only items that I already had in my craft stash. Yesterday, I added some scrap fabric to the interior. 

I found some plastic stencils and used one of them to add the word home to another scrap of fabric using an archival ink pen. I tea dyed a piece of lace. I decided to use rustic ribbons for bows. I found the cute little wooden bird (that I didn't know I had) in a small miscellaneous bin and painted it maroon. I have a bin of paints that I rarely use any more. The mossy straw at the bottom was in yet another rarely used bin. I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

That is what I have been up to lately craftwise.

Last week both of our children and their families visited. We had 5 days with 8 people in our home. It is very busy here with a 16 month old and 7 month old and bitter cold weather outside. We celebrated Christmas with our son and also his January birthday. I did not get any crafting done during that time, but I enjoyed their visit immensely.

I did finish reading See Me by Nicolas Sparks soon after everyone left last Sunday. It is a hefty book and took a while to read. It is somewhat of a departure from his usual type of novel and I really enjoyed it.  I have two more of my mother's novels that I want to read before donating them. 

I am also trying to read my very large backlog of magazines. I tend to read these with breakfast/lunch each day. Not sure why I got so behind (some are 4 years old), but I have been going through them very quickly now. 

I am joining Kathy for some Slow Sunday Stitching. Pop on over to her site to see what other bloggers are up to. 

Thanks for stopping by!