Ears!

Ears: What my elephant now has two of! I usually reserve Sunday afternoon for working on a BAP, but the elephant is so close to being finished that I decided to work on him today. I finished his left ear -- well, I guess it's really his right ear but either way, it's done -- and now I just have to fill in the trunk, give him another tusk and add a little more grass and he'll be finis! It's only been since 2000 that I've been working on him :-)

We were spared the snow here, but it's been colder than blue blazes! The temps are supposed to start inching up this week, so that'll make it nice. Nicer.

Have a great week!

Friday Finish!

And my first finish of 2010! It's just an ornament, but hey, a finish is a finish. This is Silver Stitches from Charlotte's Web by way of one of the JCS ornament issues. It's stitched on 32 count Jobelan, using DMC floss and silver Light Effects.

Thursday Thoughts

I get a kick out of reading vanity license plates and trying to figure out what they mean. Some of them are easy; you can tell at a glance that the letters on the plate represent someone’s initials or what they do for a living. But yesterday I was driving to work and saw one that kind of startled me: CML WL DY. Somebody – or something – will die? That’s just a little weird. Creepy even. Or maybe they meant "will dye". Still a little strange. Of course, it was probably just family initials or some sort of acronym. I’d have taken a picture of it but it was still kind of dark and I was tootling along on the interstate doing 65 miles per hour, so I figured digging out the cell phone for some early morning photography probably wasn’t such a great idea.

***

The other evening I wanted to do some stitching but I didn’t feel like dealing with anything large, so I pulled out my WIP of JBW Designs’ Country French Pear.

I don’t have a whole lot done on it and I had left off at the top to the left of the stem, so I finished up a couple of stitches there and moved down toward the body of the pear…only to discover that I had miscounted somewhere along the line and even missed a couple of stitches, which was going to throw the whole thing out of whack. It was eight o’clock at night and I just wasn’t equal to dealing with it, so I decided to put it away and think about it, and got out Celtic Birds and put in a few stitches on that one.

After some consideration, I’m going to just re-start the pear on another piece of fabric. It’s not worth it to me to 1) try to figure out where the heck I went wrong and 2) frog on 40 count. I love the fibers I'm using on both of these. The green on the pear is from Olde Willow and I think it's actually called Weeping Willow. The fiber for Celtic Birds is a skein of Needle Necessities that I had in my stash. I don't know what it's called but the colors in it remind me of water and the sea. I thought it had a kind of Celtic look to it.

***

I was reading the book Dewey, so if you haven’t read it and don’t care to know what I think about it, or if you haven’t read it and don’t want to know what I think about it because you don’t want my opinion to color yours, then this would be a good place for you to stop because I’m going to tell you what I think.

I was very disappointed in this book. Dewey’s story would have made a great magazine article and it might have even made a good book in the hands of a better writer. But this book had too little Dewey and too much story about Spencer, Iowa, and the trials and tribulations of the librarian. That sounds like I’m belittling her and I’m really not, I just don’t care to read her life story. It seemed at times that the book was more about her than about the cat. I gave it 2 stars on GoodReads. When it comes to cat stories, I thought Homer's Odyssey was way better.

*

Good reading and happy stitching!

Ahhh, Sunday

The rain started during church this morning and it pretty much poured all day, so it made for a good afternoon to stay inside with stitching and football!

I put in a couple of hours or so on Heligan. If you try really, really hard, you can maybe picture the green blob at the top as a palm frond, which is what it will eventually be.


After I laid Heligan aside, I worked on Silver Stitches for just a little bit. The row I'm working on is done with ray stitches. I have another row just like this at the bottom, then two rows of fly stitches or some sort of fly stitch variation, then three short rows of silver at the very top that will represent the top of the ornament. I really like this one.

"Sometimes it's just better this way."

Saturday Stitching

I got the new SANQ in the mail today and it has a couple of gorgeous reproduction projects -- Margaret Havelock, stitched in 1836, and Elizabeth Hobson, stitched in 1800. I really like both of them, especially Margaret, and they're both all cross stitch, so they should be quick stitches. There is a reproduction of a German sampler as well, but it didn't take my fancy as much as the other two did. SANQ and Piecework are the only two needlework magazines that I still subscribe to. At one point I subscribed to about 6, including one or two British ones, but the cost and the increasing challenge of storage became too much to deal with. I've been culling my magazines over the past year or so; I'm keeping all my SANQs, but others I'm only hanging on to the ones with projects or articles that I really like or am interested in.

I got some work done on my elephant tonight. I put in about an hour and a half, maybe a little more. His other ear is starting to take shape!

I may pull him out for my Sunday afternoon stitching, at least for a little while. I'd like to put a few more stitches in Heligan tomorrow. I'd like to get started on some of the greenery. I think I'm going to try working on it [Heligan] in Q-Snaps rather than in-hand. It's a large piece of fabric and the Qs may make it easier to handle.

Finally....I hated to disturb this today but I really did have to make the bed!

Random Thoughts and Some Book Talk

Okay, so I’m standing in line at the Post Office and the lady in front of me goes up to the window. There’s a bit of conversation between her and the clerk about some letter or something the lady has, then the clerk says, “So one stamp is all you need?” The lady says yes and the clerk tears her 44c stamp off the sheet and the lady HANDS HER A CREDIT CARD!!! For a 44 cent stamp! And the credit card is declined! And then…and then…the lady says “can I come right back, I have to go to my car and get the money.”

***

Mondays are pretty hectic at work and this past Monday was no exception. I ended up working through my lunch hour, so when my boss asked me if I wanted some of the (frozen) broccoli & cheese and (frozen) turkey meatballs he was fixing, I said "sure." I was a little startled, though, when I went in the kitchen. The meatballs, which have spinach in them, were....green. Now there are a number of foods that should be green. Broccoli should be green. And peas. And lime Jello. But meatballs? Ummmm......No. In all fairness, they did taste okay, but green meatballs are pretty repulsive. In my humble opinion...

***

I finished reading Devil In a Blue Dress and frankly didn't care much for it. It was violent and vulgar -- not surprising for a book of the hard-boiled detective story genre, I suppose, but I was looking for the atmosphere of 40s LA and didn't find much of it. I doubt that I'll read many more in this series.

I've done a 180 degree turn with what I'm reading now:
I've had Dewey on my reading pile for several months and decided I needed to read it. I've been told that it's very good. Even if it's not, who can resist that face?

Happy stitching and good reading!

No Stitching But Still a Fun Weekend!

I haven't stitched since last Sunday (bad Karen!) but I had a great weekend this week in spite of it! My guy and I went to the motorcycle show at the Washington, D.C., convention center yesterday. It's a huge 3-day event with displays by manufacturers and vendors and full of things of interest to motorcycle buffs such as my guy, as well as to people who hang around with motorcycle buffs, such as myself :-) This is one of the cool bikes that was on display; the entire thing was painted with this type of Aztec or Mayan design. It was actually quite pretty.It was raining in Virginia this morning, still raining there when I left, and raining when I got back to Pittsburgh. That's not a complaint; it's way better than snow! We did a little exploring (translation: got kind of lost) this morning, trying to find a good place for lunch. We ended up at a restaurant in Alexandria, not far from National Airport, and had a couple of delicious burgers.

I managed to get a book read this week! It's a novella, only a hundred pages long, called The Seafarers, by Nevil Shute. If you're not familiar with Shute's work, he's most well-known for On the Beach (far from my favorite of his, but that's just MHO) and A Town Like Alice. I had never even heard of The Seafarers until I read about it a couple of weeks ago on a Shute website. It was found amoung his papers and published around 2002, some 40+ years after his death. Barnes & Noble was able to scare up a copy for me and it was a very enjoyable read. Now it's back to Devil In a Blue Dress.

Wishing everyone a good Monday and a better week!

Weekend Stitching and Some SUN!

It wasn't a bad weekend around here. It was colder than blue blazes, so the only place I went was to church this morning; yesterday I stayed home and actually got some stuff done, including emptying out a couple of boxes. I moved into this house a year and a half ago and I still have boxes to unpack. How pathetic is that? I'm thinking that a lot of it is going to end up going to the thrift shop or recycling center, because if I haven't needed it in a year and a half, do I really need it at all? Stash excluded, of course!

On to the stitching! I worked on the elephant for an hour or so last night; his trunk is filling in nicely and he actually has two eyes now. This isn't a large piece and I'm not too terribly far from having him finished. Don't know what I'll do with him when he is finished. He's too handsome to just put away but I don't really have a good place to hang him if I were to get him framed. Maybe I'll make him into a pillow.

I worked on boxes again today so I got a late start on my Sunday stitching. I didn't feel like pulling out anything big, so I worked on Silver Stitches and got about 4 rows finished. I really like this ornament; the center row across is Rhodes stitches using the DMC silver Light Effects. Directly on either side of the Rhodes stitches are rows of eyelets, then rows of Scotch and reverse Scotch stitches, rice stitches with the Xes done in the silver and couched with DMC 3743 (it looks really nice), Montenegrin in white, tied upright crosses in 3743 and then Smyrna crosses in DMC 927. The rows I'm working on now are double herringbone, with the first pass done using one strand of white and the second using one strand of 3743. It looks pretty in real life, though it's kind of hard to see in the picture.

And finally, another picture of my snowy deck, but if you notice there are shadows because the sun was out yesterday for a while! It peeked out a few times today as well. The sun makes the cold and snow a bit more bearable.

Have a great week and happy stitching!

Winter Reading

I seem to be on a detective story kick this week. I’m reading Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, by Stuart Kaminsky, and next on the book pile is Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. I don’t know exactly where the gumshoe thing came from, although I was watching part of The Wizard of Oz the other evening and that probably put the Kaminsky book in my head. I’ve read some of his other stuff and enjoyed it so I decided to give this a try; it’s set in LA in 1940 and the plot centers around the murder of a little person who had played a Munchkin in the movie. Devil in a Blue Dress is set in 1948 in LA, so maybe I’m on more of a period/atmosphere kick than I am a detective story kick.

I’m not sure what’ll be next on the agenda. I have Dewey waiting on the shelf, along with a biography of Abigail Adams, a Margaret Frazer mystery set in medieval Europe and half a dozen others of various genres, so who knows? Or maybe I’ll go to the library and see what I can find, or go downstairs to my own little library and root around for something. Whatever I decide on, I’m sure it’ll be a good companion for a winter afternoon, cat on lap and warm beverage within reach.

How about you? Are you reading anything interesting during these cold days?

I Looked Out the Window and It's Still Winter

This is one corner of my deck about 3 hours ago; there's more now.

It’s been another cold, gray and snowy day and every time I look out the window I’m reminded how much I don’t like winter in western PA. The temperature hasn’t been above freezing in days and, if one believes the weather mavens, won’t get there either this week or most of next. But I can deal with the cold, I really can; it’s the gray that just bums me out. And when it’s gray and snowing, I just want to pull the covers over my head and read in bed with a flashlight until April.

With all that in mind, I decided that I need to try to think on the positive side, so I leaned back in my chair and tried to think of five positive things about winter.

1. The snow really is pretty, as long as I don’t have to get out in it and before motor vehicles turn it to nasty slush. Lee posted some pics on her blog of the snow around her house and it’s quite beautiful.

2. The days are getting longer. It’s hard for me to believe that when I’m driving to work and 7:15 in the morning looks about like 10:15 at night, but they are getting longer, one minute at a time.

3. One of the bad things about winter is that it’s often too cold and nasty to go outside and walk or otherwise get exercise. One of the good things about winter is that it’s often too cold and nasty to go outside and walk or otherwise get exercise. Instead I have to stay in and stitch or read. Darn.

4. It’s fun to watch the animals in the snow. As I was leaving work the other day, I saw a flock of turkeys in an open space down the road, doing whatever turkeys do. One of them was in a tree, eating the berries or seed pods or whatever they were. Then tonight, also driving home, I was stopped behind a large truck that was making a left turn and the reason he was stopped was because there were about 15 turkeys swooping across the road in front of him. They're amazingly graceful for such large, rather unattractive birds. A few years ago in my previous employment life, several co-workers and I gathered at the windows in a fourth-floor conference room and looked down at the parking lot, watching a group of turkeys using a car for a slide. I am not making this up. The turkeys flew up in a tree, hopped down on the roof of the car parked beneath it (not mine, for which I was truly grateful), and slid down the windshield. They took turns, I swear they did. It was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen.
(Is there a pattern to this? There really are other creatures around here besides turkeys! My guy and I saw a buck the other night but he wasn't amusing, just beautiful.)

5. There are four seasons and only one of them is winter (okay, I know I’m reaching here). The other three are considerably more tolerable and user-friendly. I’ve read that people who move to one-season climates get kind of tired of not having the other three seasons. I think I wouldn’t mind doing a little empirical research about that if the one-season climate was in, oh, San Diego or Honolulu. Maybe not so much in Barrow, Alaska, or Greenland.

Okay, that’s it, I’m taking off the Pollyanna hat now. I’ll go back to griping and complaining and marking off the days until spring, but I’ll try to do it quietly. How about you? Are you a winter person or a non-winter person?

A little Thursday evening progress on Silver Stitches:

Happy stitching!

Sunday Stitching

Today was a great day to stay in! The sun shone this morning and for part of the afternoon, but it was bitterly cold and windy. I did go to church this morning, but this afternoon was a nice lazy Sunday around the house. I finished up round two of the laundry and worked the Sunday crossword, then settled down for a bit with the Steeler game and my stitching. The Steelers won but didn't get any of the magic combinations they needed to get in the play-offs, so they are done until the fall.

I decided to work some more on Heligan today. It still doesn't look like much. The brown is part of a tree trunk; I'm working my way to the greenery at the top of the trunk, so I'm almost there. I do love the colors in this piece.

Happy 2010

Greetings to all on the first day of 2010! I hope everybody had a good day. I didn't stay up and ring in the new year; been there, done that and didn't have anyone here to do it with this year but the cats and they generally sleep through it so I didn't see any point. Today I watched the Tournament of Roses parade, then plopped myself in the stitching chair with a Twilight Zone marathon on SyFy (that looks even more idiotic when I type it than it does on the TV screen) and a new start.

I wanted to start a new project with the new year and I had debated with myself a bit about which one to do, but I finally decided on The Lost Gardens of Heligan, mostly because it was already kitted up and ready to go. This picture is really, really bad; maybe I can get a better one in the daylight tomorrow.

I started with the little statue in the middle of the design; those are the stitches in the lower left of the picture above. The gray vertical block where the needle is parked is part of the wall to the right of the statue; I'm working my way to the greenery in the upper right. With a design like this, I prefer to start at the upper right, but I never seem to be able to measure it properly so it's placed evenly on the fabric, so I just start in the middle and work my way to it.

I bought it as a kit; the fibers are DMC and I switched out the 18 count aida for 40 count antique white linen.

I've read in several blogs about stitching accomplishments and goals. My big stitching accomplishment in '09 was finishing And They Sinned -- hooray! I didn't set any goals last year but I decided I'd set some for 2010, keeping them fairly generic:

1. Finish 1 BAP or large project

2. Finish 2 medium-sized projects

3. Finish 3 ornaments

4. Remember that stitching is FUN, not a chore or an obligation!

I think those are do-able, though sometimes the last one is the hardest one of all. When I find myself at that point, it's time to send the stitch on vacation for a few days while I re-connect the dots.

Stay warm!