IHSW

  Like many of you, I didn't get to 'hermit' as much as I would have liked this past weekend.  I  had both of my boys home, which is rare now, and there was a bit of a party atmosphere going on here. Add in the fact that stitching and wine don't mix too well (for me anyway)  and you get a picture of what the challenges might have been!
  Anyway, I am back to stitching memorial samplers and this is what I got accomplished this weekend.

Red, White & Blue by
The Cricket Collection

 I have stitched this so many times I have just about worn this chart out!  I know it's hard to tell from my work but this is stitched with over-dyed threads. I hope to have this finished by the end of the week since I have another one I need to get done soon too.  Maybe I can extend this hermit weekend into a hermit week!

The Company was Good

   It's always good when you can spend time with your stitching friends.  It's even better when it's someone you haven't seen in a while and you can just fall right back in step like you saw each other just yesterday.  That's the way it is with my friend Tommye.  She was here visiting me last week and we had such a good time!

   There was lots of chatting, a bit of shopping, way too much eating, and a whole lot of stitching going on.  My husband has become the family cook so we ate great food all week and didn't have to do any of the cooking.  How good is that?! We visited my local shop and came away with some lovely colors of Lakeside linen as well as some silks for her latest Scarlet Letter project so stay tuned for that!  We went down into the Colonial area and hit some of the shops, a trip I'm sure her mom will be grateful for!!  And the stitching flowed......

    I finished the small piece I had been working on.  I wasn't too crazy about the red she chose for this, it just seemed too rusty to me,  but now that it's done I really like it.  Love the miniature house.  It is so cute!!!!

Plum Street's The Red Cottage
36 ct. Summer Khaki w/ listed threads

  Then, Tommye helped me work out some issues I was having with the Flamestitch sampler.  Colors that didn't work well together were finessed to make them beautiful and she even worked out an error in the instructions that I hadn't found yet and probably would have had a panic over when I got to that part! Sure helps to have someone with skills backing you up!!

  Once I finished the small sampler above, I went back to work on Dorothy Walpole.  I started her, as well as about 6 other piece, about a year and a half ago in preparation for a trip to Tommye's.  I like to be in my nest to start a new piece so I can be relaxed and avoid mistakes.  And for this trip, I wanted to be able to work on whatever I wanted to without concern for starting something new.  I got Dorothy to this point before moving to the next sampler.

Not too far along but enough to be able to continue when I picked it up next time without too much trouble. Over the past week I have moved her along to this point.

Scarlet Letter's Dorothy Walpole
40 ct. Pecan Butter w/ DMC threads

   I am loving this piece and am sad to have to put her away again but I need to work on a couple of memorial samplers (which I hope to finish by the end of the month) and then get back to work on 272 Words.  I have that one slated to finish for my husband for Christmas this year and it's not going to happen if I don't get busy.  Dorothy is on that same list to 'finish this year' too so you can expect to see her again in the not too distant future.

   And not to make it seem like it was all about me, Tommye is a super fast stitcher and worked on several pieces while she was here.  She finished a birthday gift for one of her friends, finished another small piece for one of her other friends, did some work on Virtue Outshines the Stars and barely held off on a Scarlet Letter start.  I will be greatly surprised if she hasn't started that one by now!!

   Well, that's about it for now.  Hope you are all enjoying your stitching as much as I am!!

What a Difference!!

  I have had the worst time making progress on Ann Bowers!  You have heard me complain on more than one occasion about how much slower it is working on the 45 ct. linen.  But I have worked on this same linen before and do not remember having this much trouble.  Then, it dawned on me that maybe it wasn't the linen at all but the needle!
   I was using a 28 but I guess the end was too blunt and I was having a terrible time finding the holes, especially when trying to make 4 legs fit in the same hole!!  It felt like I was just slogging along and was never going to get through this one band.  When I posted just a couple of days ago, this is where I was, and not having much fun might I add!

  Then I changed my needle to a John James Petite.  My stitching speed really picked up and it felt like a hot knife moving through butter.  And just a couple of evenings later, it now looks like this.  (Keeping in mind that one of those nights was The Hubs' birthday so stitching time was limited.)

  I am so thrilled with the progress on this piece!  I am caught up with the May assignment now and although I am technically still behind since the June assignment is now out, I have hope about being able to keep up and maybe even finish this on schedule!
  I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out.  Must be another one of those signs of aging!! Darn it!!

Rumors...

  Rumors of my death have been greatly overstated.  I've probably looked like a wax museum figure lately and pain doesn't make me very nice to be around but dead, not yet!!!  I did manage to get some stitching done eventually.  There's only so long you can go without it until you either figure it out or go crazy!  I finally figured it out.  It has been rather an ADD sort of stitching so there are no finishes but I have a huge rotation going! LOL!!
  I did finish something on my 'obligation' list but I neglected to get a picture before handing it off.  Our EGA chapter stitches bookmarks for a literacy project each year as part of our outreach and I stitched a lovely Celtic Knot bookmark for that.  Sorry, no picture.
  Then, since I couldn't sit in the proper position to manage the lap frame, I started a new piece I could hold in my hand. I know, the year of the UFO, but I needed something small and I didn't have anything small started!  I had added this to my stash recently so out it came!

Plum Street's A Red Cottage
36 ct. Summer Khaki w/ listed threads

I'm not too happy with how this is turning out.  I LOVE red and the red in this is more rust than red.  I don't like it but it is too far along to rip it out now.  It will probably find a new home with one of my friends later.
  I still haven't been able to finish the last 2 month's assignment for Ann Bowers!  The work is much slower on 45 ct. and having to get up every 10 minutes doesn't help either. I really love this piece and I will keep plugging away but I have totally given up on the idea of keeping up with the schedule.  This is where she is as of last night.

It also doesn't help that this band is 'here a stitch, there a stitch' either!! Four and sometimes five colors in each motif!!

  While I was unable to stitch, I was rummaging around in my stash and came across a piece I took as an on-line class.  All of my friends know that in addition to house samplers, I am nuts for acorns and this piece has it in spades!!  Given my penchant for changing the linen, it should surprise no one that I changed this from the called for 36 ct to 40 ct.  You wouldn't think it would make that much difference but when I started doing the verse over one, all sorts of issues arose.  It is stitched in Needlepoint silk.  NPS is too thick for over one on 40 ct. I didn't like the look of the verse in tent stitch so I looked for a substitute thread.  Found an Au ver a Soie 100/3 in a similar color but didn't like that either.  Put it away. (There's always a reason why we have UFOs. We just don't remember what that reason is when we pick that piece back up years later!!)
  Anyway, in my recent C. Theron class, she is using NPS on 32 ct and the coverage is surprisingly good!  So I started this piece over on 34 ct Legacy Linen and am really enjoying it!

Young Acorn by Sampler Cove

The top row is my new re-start on 34 ct and the bottom row is on 40 ct.  I hope to be able to get back to this soon but for now, it has to go away again.  I have another memorial sampler to do and I am scheduled to bring out 272 Words the beginning of July!! More on that later.