Sunday Stitching

I haven't worked that much on any stitching this week. I have been enjoying my son and daughter's visit. Alas, my son headed back to California early this morning and my daughter will be on her way back to Connecticut this afternoon. I will be stitching again late this afternoon and maybe this evening. 

I did work on the Large Cross-stitch #1 a little bit over the last two weeks. 

This is where I was two weeks ago:

This is where I am now.....

I am busy filling in odds and ends of colors. Some of them are only one stitch per color. It is so time consuming that even when I manage a half hour per day, there seems to be very little progress. I am getting there though. 

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

Thanks for stopping by!

100th post! Frogging Along....

Wow, I can't believe this is my 100th post! I have to thank all of you who follow my blog and post comments. I have a whole new set of blogger friends. Whoo-hoo!
I should be celebrating more, but instead I am frogging.....Ribbit, Ribbit.
So here I am happily knitting the Asher vest for my mom, when I see a spot that looks very flimsy about 10 rows back. I had not caught all of the yarn in the stitch and it was really only being held on by a thread. I realized this might break and unravel after wearing and washing so I frogged back to this stitch. I was going to just move on forward from there, but that little bobble I mentioned last week has been preying on my mind. I knew I would never be happy with the vest as long as it was there. Much more frogging ensued. Am I glad I did it though. It turns out that I must have stopped midway through one row and when I returned to knitting that row I turned it around and went back the other way without ever finishing the row. So one side of the vest was actually two rows longer than the other. I am sure that would have caused much grief later on.

I am now back to knitting again. I have almost knitted back to the place where I started frogging. Whew! 
I have been working on my Candy Corn Coasters also. 

You would think they would be finished by now, but I am in the middle of frogging the last one of these also. Somehow I managed to mess up the stitching on the back. The front looked fine, but one row was wrong on the back. This too would prey on my mind if I left it, so I am frogging.
I really don't think I will get much crafting done this week. Hubby and I are going to enjoy an extended visit from our son and daughter. Our son is doing graduate work at Stanford University, CA and we haven't seen him in five months. Our daughter will visit from Connecticut for a long weekend with us also. Heaven!

My reading will probably suffer also. I am still reading Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker. This is an historical fiction novel. I am enjoying it, but I can't say I love it. The reading is a little dry and at times I feel like I am just reading a history textbook. I will finish it, but this certainly is not what I anticipated when I started this book. 

I am joining Ginny's Yarn Along again this week. What are you knitting/crocheting? What are you reading? I am also joining Tami for WIP Wednesday. Pop on over to their sites to see what other bloggers are up to.

Thanks for stopping by!

September WIPocalypse

Today I am a couple of days late in joining Measi for WIPocalypse. I have been lapse in joining for the past few months. I just don't pay attention to when there is a full moon.
This month's question is "Who is your favorite person to stitch for, or do you prefer to keep your stitching for yourself?"
My answer: As I was going through my photos I realized that although I stitch gifts for family and friends, I mostly stitch for myself.

Currently I am in the midst of my Large Cross-stitch #1 which will be for my son. I am on the first of 10 pages. This is where it is now:

 A photo card of this little angel was the Christmas card I send a few years ago. It is one of my first forays into my own designs.

 I have also designed for Valentine's Day....

 and Halloween.

 The chart for this towel can be found under the pattern tab at the top of this page.

 I made this towel from a pattern in a magazine.

This is the latest angel that I designed. I am still working on the designs for the other seasons.

I made this cross-stitch using elements from various magazine patterns at my MIL's request many years ago. She liked this saying from the Family Circus newspaper comic strip and asked me to stitch it.

My mother-in-law re-gifted it back to me last Christmas now that hubby and I are empty-nesters.
This is another one of my own designs that now hangs at my mom's house. The colors went well with her den.

I have made many, many more cross-stitch items for myself, family and friends. I hope you enjoyed this little picture tour. 
Thanks for stopping by!

Candy Corn Yarn Along

I was sitting at my sewing machine and looking at all of my craft magazines nicely lined up. I was also thinking about autumn. Soon I was thumbing through said magazines and I came upon some autumn crafts that I have been wanting to make for a while. These Candy Corn Coasters are the first craft I decided to work on. It is from the Sept/Oct 2000 Crafting Traditions magazine.

I had a large sheet of clear plastic canvas and scraps of orange, yellow and white yarn. Perfect. Such a quick and easy craft to work on. I already have one coaster finished and the other 3 should be finished in no time. I was debating changing the order of the colors to be closer to a real piece of candy corn (orange in the middle), but I have the least amount of orange yarn so I left it as is.

I have made some progress on the vest for my mom. I am limited in how many rows I can knit each day because I continue to have hand issues. I really hope I can finish this for Christmas. I also found a small mistake several rows back. I am not sure what happened as I have the right stitch count, but there seems to be a little bobble. I think I will leave it alone though as it really isn't that noticeable.
As you can see from the photo above I am reading Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini. This is an historical novel. A blurb I found says this "compelling historical novel unveils the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln through the perspective of the First Lady's most trusted confidante  and friend, her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley." I am about halfway through this novel and I am enjoying the history lesson. I have always enjoyed history and this novel brings it to life. 

I went to the library last week and picked up this blogger recommended novel and a few others. 

I think I have quite a variety of reading in store for me. As for the AP Statistics book, it is for me also. I am a substitute math teacher and I am scheduled to be in an AP Statistics class later this month. I wanted to be sure to brush up on a subject I haven't really used since college.....many years ago. Thankfully, I remember it. 

I am joining Ginny's Yarn Along again this week. What are you knitting/crocheting? What are you reading? I am also joining Tami for WIP Wednesday. Pop on over to their sites to see what other bloggers are up to.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bargello Stitching

For some reason, this week I was able to make a lot of progress on my stitching. First I have finally finished cutting the strips for my Bargello table runner. It took me a little while to decide on my 10th fabric. I realized I had too many fabrics in the medium tone ranges so I added the light fabric you see on the end. I am not sure that I managed to get the gradation of fabrics right, but I am pleased with how it looks.

There are three strip sets like this. The next steps are to sew two of them in to a tube, cut the third one in half and sew the halves together into a tube. Then comes the scary part of cutting the tubes into the prescribed widths and keeping the strips in order. Thank goodness for pins and paper scraps. I think I may finish the sewing today.

I also plan on working some more on my Large Cross-stitch #1. Here is last week's update.

 This is where I am at as of this morning.

It is coming along, but I am currently at a point where I only have 4-10 stitches in some of the colors. That kind of stitching is very time-consuming. I much prefer big swaths of color. 

Today, the first project I am going to work on is shortening a pair of pants that I recently purchased. At 5'2" I always have to shorten my pants. I don't buy petite length pants because they always seem too short. After I measure and pin the pants, I will zig-zag the edge and then hand-stitch the hem. I have two more to shorten in the future.

Hopefully I will get to cross-stitch today also, but I think I will be working at my machine a bunch today.

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

Thanks for stopping by!

Yarn Along for Mom

As the title suggests this yarn along is mostly about my mom. Why? Because at 87 years old she just finished knitting an afghan for my son. 

It is made with Vanna's Choice Yarn. Here is a close-up.

  It is a beautiful basket-weave pattern.

Next she is planning to knit an afghan for my daughter. We will pick out yarn for it the next time my daughter visits. 

I have made progress on the vest I am knitting for my mom for Christmas.

The body of the vest is reverse stockinette stitch which I discovered just means that the pearl side is the right side. I have a lot to learn with knitting. It is knitting up quite quickly. I just have to limit how much time I spend on it each day. I don't want to re-injure my hand like I did in January.

I am joining Ginny's Yarn Along again this week. What are you knitting/crocheting? What are you reading? I am also joining Tami for WIP Wednesdays. Pop on over to their sites to see what other bloggers are up to.

As for my reading, I finished Beachcombers by Nancy Thayer. I loved this book. It is a the story of three sisters and their father, their lives, their loves and their insecurities. I have definitely found another author whose books I really like. Nancy Thayer joins Debbie Macomber, Susan Wiggs, Nora Roberts and Sheryl Woods as authors that I will continually return to reading. I am headed out to the library to pick up a few more books as soon as I finish this post. I will try to get another book by Nancy Thayer. 

Thanks for stopping by.

I moved my craft room

As I have mentioned before, my craft room is a small room nook in my basement that I share with my freezer. Well with no "kids" to use the larger side of the basement, I decided to swap storage and bookshelves to that much larger side. Now I have a larger place to spread out the sides of my sewing machine table and easier access to all of my supplies.
There is still a large sectional and entertainment center in this room which is a bonus for me when sewing.

Of course I could always play a little music on the keyboard too.

These shelves used to hold all of the family games and puzzles.

 Now they have my craft books/magazines ....

The binders below hold printed patterns and craft patterns that I have torn out of magazines. The binder with the yellow label has a list in front on which I have recorded all of the crafts I have made from books and magazines that I own. Also in this binder are all the craft patterns I have completed in the past. Each one is in a clear plastic holder. 

These boxes are filled with yarn, thread, ribbons and artificial flowers.

Of course there are some other odd and ends that needed homes also.
Here is one of two storage closets that hold more supplies. This one has some more of my yarn as well as boxes filled with glues, floss, tatting thread, and more odds and ends.

This is the larger of my storage closets. It holds all of my fabric, batting, and cross-stitch fabric and.....

buttons, paint, wrapping supplies and more odds and ends.

I also have this rolling cart for my scrapbooking supplies.

  This is probably the least used item in my room as I am not very creative when it comes to my photos.
Since this was my kids hangout room for quite a while, I have their school silhouettes with plastic-canvas name tags I made many years ago.

There is also a cross-stitch that I made for my husband's office many years ago.

 I couldn't get a great picture because I did not want to take it down as it is over a large desk with a hutch. 
I hope you enjoyed the tour of my "new" craft room. I didn't show you my sewing table which is located behind the sectional as it is currently covered in fabric. I still need to add some pretty touches, but it is more wide open than my "old" area so I am happy.


Thanks for stopping by!