I just finished up three and a half hours stitching on Claire’s UFO. 3½ hours! It is a long time since I’ve done that, and I’m sure I’ll pay for it tomorrow, especially in neck pain – I really need to find a better chair to stitch in when I’m stitching for that length of time :ouch:
I finished up the right hand border, and ‘Lizzie’ will be in the mail tomorrow. I’ll get a picture for you before she goes.
While you wait, why not go waste some time? Be careful, it’s v.addictive!
The last few mornings, while Finn has been watching a bit of ABCKids, and Niamh has been sleeping (or ‘notsleeping’, as the case sometimes is), I have been doing the dishes… folding the laundry… learning to pole dance… stitching, yay! I finished up my MiraBee this morning:
Also, I wanted to show off my new scissors. I won these in Jenna’s Great Scissor Giveaway 🙂 Aren’t they lovely? They are now elegantly attired in a scissor fob made for me by Ruth (Graciella) in an exchange on the TWBB a couple of years back. Thank you Jenna, that was such a wonderful thing to do!
Posted in Counted Stitchwork, Finished
Tagged Bee, cross-stitch, embroidery scissors, freebie, mirabilia
Woah, I’m actually answering an SBQ on the day it appeared!
Which way do you stitch, i.e. do you stitch /// followed by on top, or the other way around followed by ///? Are you left- or right-handed and do you think that this affects the way that you stitch?
This has always been interesting to me whenever it’s been discussed on the various BBs I frequent. I stitch then //, and I am left-handed. I taught myself to cross-stitch, and that seemed the logical way to me at the time (and still does, actually). Later, when I found out many people stitch the other way, I assumed that it was based on handedness. The people I know personally who stitch (not that many, admittedly) all stitch // then if they’re right-handed, and the same as me if they’re left-handed. But I’ve seen this topic come up on the boards a few times, and the answers vary. It seems there are plenty of left-handers who stitch // then , and right-handers who stitch then //. So who knows why we stitch the way we do, I just know that when I tried, once upon a time, to change the direction I stitch, it was a complete disaster! For the Round Robin I’m in, I’ll stitch on any UFOs which have differently directioned stitches to me by turning the fabric and chart through 90 degrees, which works fine. For Claire’s Elizabeth, I was pleased to see she stitches the same way I do, so that made my first one easy 🙂
I don’t really know how much I like the new Mirabilia mermaid. I’ll happily wait until seeing some WIPs before I decide completely, but she seems kind of… shapeless, to me. The colours and swirly bits look nice, I guess.
Anyway, it’s not like I need another addition to my wishlist! More stashy mail arrived yesterday – I was completely unable to resist the lure of a 60% off closing down sale at Stitched from the Heart. Along with some Antique White Quaker and Cashel to add to my dyeing stash, I picked up Teenie Tweenies Vintage Grapes and Baby bluebells fob and The Drawn Thread Autumn Arbor. I’m thinking it might be time for another trip to the Wagon soon 😳
I’ve truncated my blog feeds. Just in case you were wondering. You probably weren’t. It’s related to the Bitacle saga, reading about which has taken up too much of my evening. I have yet to make further moves to block Bitacle from my content, but I’m too tired to think about it right now.
And on a related note, I’m definitely now switching from my current feed reader (Sage) to Google Reader. I tried Google Reader only a couple of weeks ago, and wasn’t that happy with the interface, and it seemed a little buggy (not picking up updates from all my subscribed feeds, for example). But I had another look tonight, and it seems they’ve had a nice little makeover, which makes me happy.
That is all 🙂
Posted in Blog Blather, Counted Stitchwork, General Ramblings
Tagged bitacle, Google Reader, mirabilia, stash
OK, you caught me. I cheated again. I blogged yesterday today. My entire evening yesterday was written off by a migraine such as I have not had in a long, long time. Nasty. Niamh picking yesterday to take an hour and a half to be put to bed (by me… she won’t go down for anyone else yet) did not help matters one bit, either. She just wanted to feed and feed and feed, and if she wasn’t feeding, she was screaming. The screaming, ohhh the screaming :ouch: Luckily I can breastfeed lying down, because I certainly wasn’t able to stay upright for any length of time. At one point, I just had to put her (screaming) into the cot, and walk away to throw up (sorry, that’s gross). It’s definitely been a long time since I’ve had one that bad.
Today hasn’t been a great deal better. I always have a bit of a hangover effect after a migraine, and on a hot day it makes me feel kind of out of it. We headed off to the park for a bit and I sat in the shade with Niamh while Finn mucked about. I’m feeling okay now that kiddos are in bed and the house is quiet, and I’m hoping to sit and stitch now for a little bit. I’ll be working on Elizabeth – Claire’s UFO. Here’s my progress so far:
Elizabeth when she arrived:
Elizabeth now:
I was hoping to finish up the border at the right hand side before sending her on her way, but to be honest it has caused me some grief – the froggies have come to play on more than one occasion :yuk: Much as I think she’s beautiful, I think if I had stitched this for myself, it would have become a UFO for me too!
Posted in Counted Stitchwork, In Progress
Tagged cross-stitch, health, round robin stitching
Before today turned nasty, I managed to catch about half an hour stitching time with Niamh asleep in the car as we waited to pick Finn up from kinder. This is where the MiraBee is at now – there’s not a lot of regular stitching to go, mostly beads:
SBQ-ing along again:
As we all know, stitching in the winter can really be rough on the hands. What do you do to treat your hands well in the cold winter months? Do you have any suggestions for creams or soaps? Or perhaps a special regimen that you would like to share?
Dry skin is very much an issue for me at the moment, not because of the Winter (because it’s not), but the many daily nappy changes/ washing of hands that come along with a new kiddo. My hands got pretty bad a couple of months back (when it was Winter) – it was really difficult working with silks, I kept snagging them (so I put away Dragonfly Jewels for a while, remember). I’m using QV lotion (from Ego) pretty religiously now – I use it all over Niamh, too, and on a few dry bits of Finn’s skin. Eczema runs on my side of the family, so I really do try to keep us all moisturised 🙂
I tried out that hemp hand cream from the Body Shop – OtherHalf likes it a lot, but it leaves me with too talc-y a feeling, so I don’t use it. I have a bunch of other creams and lotions too, but most are too scented or too greasy for my liking. Though the greasy ones are good to put on last thing at night before bed, I find. Like now!
Wow – a day before my birthday, and I’ve already had an international happy birthday phone call, a birthday cheque in the mail, and a big stash order arrival! Yippee. I’ve been waiting on this one for a long time. Some of the Mill Hill treasures were backordered for ages. Anyway, the goodness was extensive when it finally arrived:
Whew! I’m exhausted after all that, aren’t you?!
PS. I totally didn’t realise I was getting a rainbow of WDWs – I just ordered a bunch that I needed for various charts – it made my heart smile when I pulled them all out of the package today.
I should really start answering the SBQs again. I’ll catch up with some of the past questions later, but for now, here’s the latest one:
When you find yourself making a lot of mistakes in various stitching projects do you find it better to muddle your way through or do you take a brief break from stitching? If you do take a break, how long do you take?
If I find tricky little counting errors, I try and fix them or at least frog them on the spot. If I suddenly realise I have a bunch of frogging to do (the sort that usually stems from one particular error), I usually set it aside for a day or so later when I’ve got a cooler head. If I keep making errors every time I pick a piece up – like recently happened with Dragonfly Jewels, then I put it away and work on something else for awhile. Or even better, do something else for awhile.
Finally, finally, I’ve got around to visiting all my WIPs, and writing out ‘the list’. It isn’t as bad as it could be, what with my decision to go guilt-free. (Most of the new starts I’ve had since then have been small projects that I finished off.) The list is still longer than I’m comfortable with though, so soon I’m going to have to have a go at a rotation again to whittle it down a bit. Here’s the list, roughly in order of oldest to newest, and with approximate progress on each:
(2003)
(Dec, 2005) (Mar, 2006) (Apr, 2006) (May, 2006) (July, 2006)
(August, 2006)(I’ve learned that I’m absolutely hopeless at estimating % progress, so some of these are probably terribly inaccurate, but it gives you an idea.)
The list is interesting – I think it shows a good cross-section of my stitching taste. Five out of the fifteen are Mirabilia designs, and four out of fifteen are insect designs (three of those are dragonflies). Of course there are also a couple of dragons in there – there would probably be more if most of the dragon charts I have weren’t so huge.
I’d like to get back down to under 10 projects. I’ll be binning Winter Queen (remember), so that’s 14. Kaitlin is only missing some backstitching (I actually thought she was finished, it was a bit of a surprise to dig her up and find she wasn’t) so I’ll finish her off today or tomorrow, that gives me 13. Then, starting November, I’m planning to pick three projects and rotate them whenever I’m not working on the UFO Round Robin. I won’t start rotating in October as I still have a round of student marking to go (and the less said about that, the better :yuk: ), and also I imagine it’s going to take me until the mailing deadline to finish up 20 hours on Claire’s UFO.
The first three projects I’ll rotate? Hmmm… not sure. My first thoughts are probably ‘the small ones‘! Bumblebee, certainly. Probably the Periwinkle Promises kit, as it’s something a bit different. And maybe something bigger – maybe MOTDB, which is my favourite of the Miras I currently have on the go. Or perhaps I should choose something older? What do you think?