A New Start

Thank you so much for your very kind comments about the progress on Lady of the Thread.  I really appreciate them.  

I am taking a little break from Lady of the Thread.  I was starting to not enjoy stitching on the piece.  Rather than powering through and risking errors, a break was in order.  So I pulled out Plum Street's Tomato Dame.

This is a super fun stitch!  It really appealed to me because I love growing tomatoes!  I always plant way too many each year.  I think it is due to growing up in New Jersey where the very best tomatoes are grown.  Word on the street is that they are so good because of the water in New Jersey.  Nevertheless, a homegrown tomato is one of the best things in the world.  It is just about time for me to fire up the Aerogarden and start this year's crop of tomatoes!

Anyway, as I mentioned this is a super fun stitch.  I am stitching it with the called for colors which are all Weeks Dye Works.  I did not realize until today that WDW are colorfast.  Bonus!  I really love the richness of the reds.  The large tomato is stitched with Chrysanthemum, which is exactly the same color as Campbell's Tomato Soup.  I have been craving it all day.

It has been cold, rainy, and windy here in California for a few weeks now.  We have snow on the hills around here.  This is somewhat rare around here but this year has been exceptional in terms of temperature and rainfall.  More rain has been forecasted for this weekend.  I thought that this would be a perfect weekend to spend in my Fortress of Crafty-tude.  I had taken care of my chores during the week, did my grocery shopping before the weekend and planned on getting up early so that I could sit in my Queendom with my coffee.  It had been a long week, so I was happy to go to bed early last night.  

All would have gone according to plan, except, the house next door to the cozy cottage was recently turned into an Airbnb.  For the most part, the people who stay there are very respectful of the neighbors and are quiet.  Last night, however, the renters were a group of young people who decided to have a loud, drunken party in the yard, outside of my bedroom window.  (It was 35 degrees!)  I was woken up at 10:30, 12:05, 12:40 and 1:45 am.  I woke up exhausted and cranky.  I am not sure what I can even do about it.  I was too tired to try to sew or play in my room today.   I ended up taking a two hour nap today.  Hopefully, tomorrow will be better!  It is supposed to rain again, so it is a good day to play inside!

Hope you have a great rest of your weekend!

I Love It When That Happens!

 

Admittedly, I am a stitching daredevil.  Living life on the edge, throwing caution to the wind...So it is always pretty exciting when I join two sides of a border or in this case, the wreath on this piece.  I do not graph my fabric or mark it in any way. I am old school and count my stitches and compare against the pattern often.  I am happy to report that everything lined up and I can breathe more easily.  I still have a lot of stitching to do on her, but the hardest part is over.  

Yesterday turned out to be a stitching day.  I had intended to paint my office/craft room, but it is really cold and windy here.  Like the wind cuts through you.  I could not get warm the entire day.  So I did not go to Home Depot to get my paint.  I hate to be cold.  

It was also meal prep day yesterday.  I try to make a couple of things for the fridge that I can just grab during the week.  One of my favorite lunches is a lentil, feta and bruschetta salad.  It is just so good.  I like really bright flavors.  The recipe is one that I found on a Trader Joe's Facebook page.  Unfortunately, for about the past year, Trader Joe's was having supply chain issues and did not have the bruschetta.  I finally gave up and found a copycat recipe that is fresh and so much better.   If you are interested both the salad and the bruschetta recipe can be found here: https://alexandracooks.com/2022/07/01/homemade-bruschetta-sauce-trader-joes-copycat-recipe/

It is so fresh tasting and a bit healthier than TJ's.  I buy the fresh Campari tomatoes at Costco to make mine and  I grow the basil on my countertop in my Aerogarden.  I also put a pinch of sugar in the mix to cut the acid in the tomatoes.  So delicious!  

So now that I have faced my fear with the Lady of the Needle, I am thinking about my other large WIP's.  The largest two are Teresa Wentzler's Fruit Bellpull and the Stoney Creek Hummingbird Trellis.  I might have to take a look at these two now that some time has passed.  Teresa Wentzler patterns are notorious for confetti stitching.  While the finished project is so beautiful, with the depth of color that comes with the variety of color, it can cease to be fun because there are no real blocks of one color.  The Hummingbird Trellis is just large, with blocks that are just white.  Two extremes.

Hoping you stay warm this week!

Stitchy Progress!

 

I am close to closing the loop of the wreath.  Once I do that, I have to go through and fill in a lot of the places that I have missed.  Mark my words, I shall never stitch on black fabric again.  I feel like I am seeing triple.  It is really hard on the eyes.  I do love the way the finished product looks, but seriously.  

I woke up to total happiness today.  My son sent me a video text of my little 10 month old grandson taking some steps.  He just decided while he was standing that he was going to let go and start walking toward his daddy.  He had this determined little look on his face.  I am so proud of him but I can't believe how fast he is growing.

My craft room is in bad need of being painted.  I am thinking that tomorrow may be the day!  I have been looking at paint samples for in there for some time.  My craft room/office is blue and white.  I thought about blue walls, or bluish gray.  I know gray walls are very in, but it just seemed kind of depressing, so I think that I will go with a buff neutral.  I think this will look a lot warmer.  So off to Home Depot I go tomorrow.

This will actually be my second trip to Home Depot this week.  I had to run in to pick up some drain cleaner the other day.  I always park by the Garden Center because it makes me happy to walk past all of the plants.  I am counting the days until March 3rd, the last date for frost here in the Almanac.  I can't wait to start my garden.  I miss the way that soil smells when you first work on it in the Spring.  

So, as I was walking through the Garden Center, I saw that they had all kinds of cool things that I havd not intended to buy that day.  I have two fig plants, strawberry plants, potato starters, sweet potato starters, scallion and onion sets. I thought to myself that between all of that and the seeds that I have bought from Baker Creek, I am all set.  I really wanted the dahlia bulbs, too, but I had to rein myself in.  For now. LOL

Enjoy the Superbowl tomorrow!  I hope you get lots of stitching time in!

  

A Stitchy Weekend

 This poor WIP.  I put it away for at least the last 10-15 years.  Lady of the Thread by Margaret Leavitt Imblum has gone through several moves with me.  Several times I have unrolled this in an attempt to restart it.  She is beautiful and I have always wanted to stitch her.  The only problem was that I thought that I had made a number of mistakes that I could not find.  So every few years I would pull her out and try to work on her, but I would get to so frustrated I would just shove her back into my project bag.  Part of me thought that I should just throw the whole thing away, but I just couldn't bring myself to do.

 A couple of weekends ago, I was in a mood and decided that if I had to, I would rip out the top half.  As I started pulling out the lace color stitching, I realized that the way that MLI lined up the overlap lines between the top and bottom of the pattern is different than what I am used to seeing.  I realized that there was no error after all.  It was the way that I was reading the pattern.  Whew!

So over the past couple of weekends I have been working on it.  I really needed a weekend off, so I took a stitchy weekend to just relax and enjoy working on her.  I really love MLI's patterns and I have stitched three of her angels.  There is something so feminine and beautiful about her work.  She also layers colors in a way that is so beautiful.  Several years ago, before she passed away I emailed her to tell her how much I loved her patterns.  To my surprise, she emailed me back thanking me for my email.  I still fangirl over it to this day.

Two things have contributed to my ability to stitch a lot lately.  For three weeks we had monster storms in California, and the central coast of the state really took a beating.  We were being advised to stay home.  You do not have to ask me really hard to stay home.  It is my favorite place.  So it has been nice to cozy in.  I am hearing from my weather friends that it is going to be a wet February so I think I might actually be able to finish the Lady of the Thread in 2023.

The other thing that is freeing up time to stitch is that I pretty much stay off my computer during the weekends now.  It has been liberating.  My best friend is 80 now and she gets so much done.  She is my inspiration. I wondered why she accomplishes so much and I realized it is because she is not  on her computer much.  So I take breaks from social media on the weekends.  It is really relaxing to stitch instead.

I think this is going to be my next stitching project.  It is so pretty.  I bought it from Shepherd's Needle.  I was so impressed with them.  Super fast shipping.  The package said, "Happy Mail" on the flap and it was gift wrapped in a pretty bird tissue paper.  I love when stores do something extra like that.  It makes it feel special top open a present.

I hope you get to have some special stitchy time this week.