A Work in Progress

Heart in Hand 2004 Christmas Keepsake Ornament  Quaker Christmas  Sanibel canvas My plan this month was to work on Not For Us Alone, but early in the month, I picked up Quaker Christmas and kept going.  It's nice not having to change thread colors all the time and I feel I've accomplished something each time I finish a motif.  The Sanibel canvas may be finished this weekend as we are making a short trip and have a five hour drive to get to our destination.  That's the perfect time to do the basketweave for the background. Lots of things have been happening at my house, including my son's acceptance to graduate school and my daughter's preparations to study abroad for the entire year.  Somehow they seem to need my attention just when I'm ready to sit down to stitch.  I do have some quilting progress to show and will post that when I get back after the weekend.  Hope everyone is staying cool this summer!

In spite of being off work for two weeks, I have very little progress to show this month. I finished a Christmas ornament and put a few stitches into some other projects.  I can't seem to settle on one and I still find myself finally sitting down to stitch around 9 in the evening.  Try as I might to find stitching time during the day, other things keep interfering with that plan.  It's amazing to me how household tasks expand to fill the available time.  I could show you pictures of my clean kitchen and emptier closets but that's way less exciting than stitching.  The heat wave we have starting today and predicted to go through next week sounds like the perfect excuse to stop cleaning and get stitching. Joy Ornament (Angel Stitching) Bookmark (canvas) acquired during Guild swap sale Sanibel Island canvas by Needlepoint Crossings Christmas Ornament Quaker Christmas (By Gone Stitches) New Mercies (Tree of LifeSamplings) ...

Thanks to the Delaware Valley Historical Sampler Guild's retreat in Ocean City, Maryland at the end of April, I have lots of progress to show you this month.  The piece above is Carriage House Samplings  Alphabet.  I spent quite of bit of the retreat stitching those black boxes, and there was no frogging involved!  I have the separate patterns for each alphabet letter and most of them call for using Sampler Threads Bittersweet for the fill-in at the bottom of the block.  I was never crazy about the color (probably one of the reasons this piece has been in the WIP pile for so long) and while I was at the retreat, I auditioned a couple of different colors.  Sampler Threads Antique Rose won and I'm happy with the choice.  I also started this piece at the retreat.  I threw this in my bag at the last minute just in case I needed something with a large count when my eyes got tired.  I started it on Sunday morning before we left and eventually...

                                                           Chapter 2, Not For Us Alone                                                     February, Anniversaries of the Heart It seems that I frequently participate in Friday Night Sew-In, but rarely get the chance to come back here and show you what I've done.  So I'll combine that with April's check-in for the WIPocalyse.  I did some work on Not For Us Alone on Friday night although t...

I know I don't have to have a finish in order to post for the WIPocalypse, but it sure feels good to have three finishes in three months!  Here's Lizzie Kate's ABCs of Aging Artfully which was fun to stitch despite several miscountings that required frogging.  I haven't decided whether to finish it as a pillow or to frame it, but either way, it will go in the guest room.  Right now, though, the "guest room" is still a semi-shrine to my older son.  The son who went to college in Miami, graduated four years ago and has lived in Los Angeles and New York since then. The son who has not spent more than two consecutive weeks in the room since the summer of 2006.  He just got a new job that gave him a nice increase in his income and at the same time, found a new apartment to share with a friend from high school.  After 18 months of living in sublet rooms, he has signed his own lease and now can become an official New Yorker.  At some point in th...

 Grace Mason (Of Female Worth)  The verse over one Grace Mason is finally done!  Some of us on the Legacy board had Thanksgiving Day starts one year.  I'm thinking that must have been in 2006.  As I've mentioned in other posts about this piece, the verse was the text for the sermon at my mother's funeral, and this was the first piece I worked on after we returned from the trip to the Midwest for the service.  I've also mentioned in other posts that I remember working on the border as I sat with my mother's sister, who was 90 at the time, and listened while she tried to come to terms with giving up her apartment and moving to assisted living.  Lots of memories in this piece. Now I'm concentrating on Lizzie Kate's ABCs of Aging Artfully.  I've managed to "personalize" this piece by miscounting threads in the first row which means I'll have to fudge here and there.  This piece is either going to be made into a pillow or frame...

ABCs of Aging Artfully - Lizzie Kate Grace Mason WIPocalypse is being hosted by Measi .  Although sign-ups are now closed, you can still stitch along with everyone throughout the year.  Here's my first check-in showing my progress on my two most active projects.  Grace and I survived a small crisis.  I ran out of the DMC 316 that I was using and the new skein I bought is a lot lighter.  Who knew DMC would change dye lots?  DMC 316 is the lavendar needed to fill in the flowers on the basket and in the red flowers.  I rummaged through the stash left from my mother's things and thought the skein from there was a little too light also.  I explained my problem to an employee of my local needlework store and she offered to run home and bring me what she had from her stash.  The bottom line is that I have a pretty close match and the store has a very grateful, loyal customer. I've been busy as always since my last post.  All fiv...

We're not even through this weekend yet and I'm already planning for the next one.  Good things are coming up--the Pennsylvania National Quilt Show in Oaks, watching my son run cross-country during his university's homecoming weekend, and spending some time stitching while Miami plays Ohio State.  I haven't even mentioned the Friday Night Sew-In.  You can sign up here and join the fun. Measi sent a correction to my last post about WIPocalypse.  She's going to accept sign-ups through the first few months of 2012, so start thinking about which WIPs you'll finish next year. I promise the next post will contain actual pictures of my projects!

Measi is hosting WIPocalypse in 2012.   I'm in on this and you can be too if you go to her blog and sign up by September 30.  It sounds like a lot of a fun and a great way to finish up some of those UFOs.