Creative Monday


I redeemed my most-excellent-Mum status yesterday :giggle: ?! You know, it struck me that this creative streak I’ve been on lately is actually my equivalent of that ‘nesting’ thing other women get. I always thought it was a myth, or I’d been completely overlooked when they handed out the nesting gene. During neither of my pregnancies have I been overly interested in home improvements (aka “doing the baby’s room”) or excessive housework :yuk: But I realise now that at about this point last time I was going through a bit of a ‘make-stuff’ phase as well. Amongst other things, I made a squishy frog toy for Finn, and hand-stitched a felt counting-book, which he still adores. I’d better start thinking of something along those lines to make for Small.

Finn has been wearing his ‘monkey shirt’ with pride today… it rapidly acquired yoghurt stains, but never mind that! He had complete artistic direction over that one – green with a monkey, please Mum! The orange one was more of an afterthought – I thought I’d have another try at the low-water immersion technique, but I never seem to get this exactly how I like it… I’m more of a control freak than this allows! The giraffe design was, um, nicked from the Internet somewhere (shhh), but the monkey is all mine ๐Ÿ™‚

And yes, there was also more floss dyeing ๐Ÿ˜‰ And here’s part 2 of “Ask and ye shall receive”. I’m working on an 18-step colour spectrum from which you will at some point soon be able to purchase (with pastel shades to follow). The following 6 skeins have been evicted from the line-up. Not because they’re bad colours, but because they were too close to others I already had. So… six of you lucky ducks get to grab a freebie. All you need to do is comment below – mention which colour you’d like (so that commenters below you know what’s been taken) then email me your address and I’ll have it in the mail asap. Easy!

Vital info: Skeins are 6 meters in length, as I’m keeping a portion for my records. To avoid confusion, let’s call them (left to right): magenta, purple, blue, green, orange, red (which is actually more of a dark orange). The purple does have some slight smudges of blue in places… let’s call that a Finn original!

PS. Forgot to add, it was pointed out to me by two someones that the Caron heart can be found here. Enjoy!

Fast Finish

Thanks for the lovely compliments, everyone. I am so pleased that you like my pretties as much as I do. In regard to sales… well, I’m not going to deny that the thought has crossed my mind. Essentially, I’m not planning to make a bona-fide business out of this, at least in the short term. First there is the concern I have that the hand-dyed market is probably at saturation point. Plus, with a three year old on hand, and another baby due shortly, it’s just not terribly practical. That said, however, I know that I’m going to be dyeing an awful lot more than I could possibly use, because I’m enjoying it so much. So who am I to turn down making a few dollars from the excess?! I’ll let you know more when the time comes. Certainly at the very least I am always good for trades ๐Ÿ˜‰

Anyway, as requested by Debi yesterday, here’s a quick little HD using some of what I’ve dyed. I love this, and the fact that it took probably only two solid stitching hours makes me love it more! This is a free chart, which on my file system is entitled ‘Caron Freebie Heart’, but I couldn’t locate it anywhere on Caron’s website, so I can’t point you there, I’m afraid.

I did manage some more dyeing last night – mostly duplicates of what I’ve already done, for a couple of trades, but also a couple of darker skeins, which are quite striking. Tomorrow is a public holiday here, and a much more pleasant temperature than today, so if I get some more done I’ll post them then. Finn is becoming impatient for his monkey and giraffe shirts though, and today featured one of my poorer displays of parenting, so I might be printing instead ๐Ÿ™‚

Colour, Colour, Everywhere


How can you not love a rainbow? You know, I’ve actually been planning to redesign my blog template for ages now, and in my head I had some images just like this one. I didn’t imagine it would be my own dyed flosses though. Whoo ๐Ÿ™‚

The images today are scans, not photographs. By the time I had these all dry and skeined up, I had lost the decent light outside, so scans it was. The colour of the floss is more accurate, but there’s no decent depth of field. Sorry!


And in case you think I’m completely stuck on the brights, here’s a few more for you – some lighter shades of three of the above colours, with more subtle variation (different dilutions of light and dark shades). Also some neutrals. I really love the neutrals, but they’re so much more difficult to mix with any reliability. I’ve so far only been mixing from primary dyes, but I did pick up a pre-mixed brown the other day which I have yet to try, and I also plan to mix up some black to attempt some darker shades. Also in the works are some multi-coloured flosses – so far all of these are value-variations: different dilutions of the same colour applied to a single floss.

Oh… in other stashy news, my missing parcel has turned up right where it always was – back at SB&B. There was a miscommunication or two (it was a pretty convoluted order due to complex Secret Stitcher stuff), and it was filed rather than sent. D’oh. Nevermind, at least it has turned up, and it’s on its way to me now, for sure!

Hope you’re all having as fun a weekend as I am ๐Ÿ™‚

My Apologiesโ€ฆ

…to anyone in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne trying to find either B5200 or Blanc DMC floss this weekend – I’m afraid I’ve scooped the entire supply to support my ‘habit’ :giggle:

You see what is become of me? I’m paying $AU for my floss. Scary. I really can’t wait until I can sort out where to get the bulk cones from. I’ll update you on my venture tomorrow, promise. If I can drag myself away from my makeshift lab for a while, that is. I also have the beginnings of a ‘How-To’ post in the works, since tips have been requested by a few of you, here and on the BBs.

Must. Sleep.

(As proven by need to re-edit this post due to half finished sentence!)

I Rock!

Q: What is this?
If you guessed…
A: My first hand-dyed vareigated floss ever, you’re right! Yay me! ๐Ÿ˜†

I was doing some dyeing yesterday – I’ve been meaning to do a couple more t-shirts for Finn for a while, and finally found the time, space and energy to do it. No photos yet of the two shirts I dyed – I plan to print some jungle animals onto those at the weekend, so I’ll show you afterwards (erm… if they’re good, anyway!). But then I pulled out a couple of stitchers’ eighths of Cashel and tried out a new technique for fabric, the results of which I am very happy with:

Then… inspiration! Actually, I’ve wanted to try doing some floss for ages, and this time I suddenly remembered that I had a bunch of white floss from a trade a while ago. So I pulled a couple of skeins, and you see what happened. I am thrilled with how they’ve turned out, and I think I’ve found my new obsession :giggle: See, I love dyeing fabric, but evenweaves and linens aren’t exactly inexpensive, so I don’t get to do as much experimenting as I’d like to. Floss, on the other hand… it doesn’t really matter if I stuff up a few in the process. Well, OK, maybe not at $AU prices, but I’m currently looking into buying in some bulk cones of white from o/s, it should be much more economical. Wheeeee!

I’ve just dipped some more floss, so I’ll let you know tomorrow how that turns out. In the meanwhile, if anybody is interested, the green piece of fabric shown above, while lovely, is not quite the shade I was after, and I don’t have an immediate use for it. I’ll happily trade for something on my wishlist. The vital stats: it’s a 19″x14″ piece of hand-dyed Cashel linen (28-count). Email me ๐Ÿ™‚

PS: The green fabric didn’t sit around long, it’s been snapped up already!

My Unyellow Lilly

As I mentioned, DMC didn’t want to come to the party on the deep plummy-burgundy colours I had in mind. This is what happened instead:

Bear in mind this is my first conversion ever. Someone more experienced/talented than I might have been able to massage and blend the available colours to get closer than I have. But it seems to me there aren’t a good range of deeper shades in DMC. For perspective, the lightest pink here is DMC 3727. The darkest shade here is actually a Weeks dye works floss – ‘Bordeaux’, and is more what I had in mind for the mid-tones. The fabric is ‘Sapphire Sky’ Cashel by Silkweaver.

Putting aside the frustration of not being able to get exactly what I wanted, I am actually pretty happy with how it’s turning out. More ‘Rose Satin’ than ‘Burgundy Velvet’, but pretty all the same. I’m not at all sure whether I’m going to go with the original ‘blankie’ colours now or convert to greens as I had planned. She’s had her first ten hours anyway, so she’s going away for a little while, and I’ll cross that bridge next time I get to her.

So… put on your Critic’s cap and tell me what you honestly think so far ๐Ÿ™‚

Missing: One Parcel

Found: One Grumpy Me.

Until now, I have only had one parcel get ‘lost’ in the post. And if truth be told, in that case I have no definitive proof that one was ever actually posted… but it was of somewhat low value, so I let it slide. I was a bit miffed, but what could I do?

This time, however, I’m cranky. A parcel (of not exactly low value) from Stitching Bits and Bobs has gone ‘missing’ in between there and here. The worst thing? It’s not even full of stash for me… it’s for my Secret Stitcher victim. So it not only has to get here, it then has to be packaged up with some other stuff I have for her, then sent back to the US to my remailer, and then mailed from the remailer to my victim. So time is somewhat of the essence, y’know?!

Having given it two weeks now (this is a Global Priority parcel, which is supposed to take 4-7 days), I realise now that I’m going to have to make alternative arrangements, at least for the March mailing. Which means more paying local prices, which does not make me happy. Grrrr.

In a case of Bad news, Good news, though, the stash gremlins did decide to release to me the threads I was missing for Mermaids of the Deep Blue, and the still-don’t-know-what-they’re-for red crystals. I didn’t start MotDB in the end though – I haven’t made a working copy yet, so in the end my Lilly conversion won out, and I stitched a pink blob last night. It’s a bit too pink, I’m thinking, but the simple fact is that DMC don’t cater to my taste in burgundy ๐Ÿ™ I’ll stitch some more before I decide whether it gets a complete overhaul… it could yet turn out to be quite pretty… and it’s not yellow, so that’s a definite improvement :giggle:

Preggo Brain

Ok, now as a (former) scientist, I know that n=1 is a totally unreliable sample size, but I am here to declare that “Preggo Brain” officially does not exist! My reckoning is this: Of the twelve units I completed for my Masters degree, I sat exams for 5 of them while pregnant. Not all just recently – this is over two different pregnancies – I was pregnant with Finn when I began, and I sat two exams at 33 and 34 weeks gestation respectively. More recently, with Small, I’ve sat exams at 6 weeks, 7 weeks and 22 weeks. The respective grades for those 5 units are as follows: 94, 99, 91, 85, 90. (That 90 was the final unit, I just got my grade on Friday ๐Ÿ™‚ )

So there, you see! Obviously it is possible for one’s brain to continue functioning while pregnant. Of course… ask me to remember what I’m supposed to be buying for dinner, and then it all just falls apart completely!

That 85 up there is the thorn in my side, lemme tell you. It’s the only sub-90 mark I have on my record. There was a thread recently on the Wagon BB discussing group projects. That 85 is the result of my only group project in the whole degree. It was a nasty experience that I have no intention of ever repeating, and the source of all my stress over the second half of last year. By some miracle, we managed to pull it together enough in the final couple of days to score 75 on the project. For some weeks, I feared that we’d fail it completely ๐Ÿ™

Anyway, that’s enough blowing of my trumpet. The point I was getting at is that… I passed the last unit! It’s definitely all over now. And my stitching thanks me for it :giggle:

For Laura

And for me

And for all who loved and miss her

Warning: Border Ahead

Yesterday I finished a ten hour slot on Patricia Allison’s Spring Dragon. I took a ‘before’ shot, since the last one you saw wasn’t completely up to date.


You can see I spent most of the ten hours on border leaves and backstitching. If you will excuse my language, this border is a bitch! (And if you don’t excuse the language, it still is :giggle: ). I also stitched on a negligible amount of gold treasure, and would have done more if I hadn’t suddenly found myself without 032BF… how can that be possible?! Stash gremlins are at work in my house again, I swear – I’ve also ‘misplaced’ a few of the threads I need for Mermaids of the Deep Blue, which I had intended to start next, and some red crystals I recently traded for (but can’t even remember what they’re for)!

The colour of the fabric, by the way, is woefully inaccurate in these photos. Imagine a lighter colour with a more greenish cast to it, and you’re about there. It’s Rue Green Quaker cloth, for those that need to know ๐Ÿ™‚

I went cross-country today to visit a not-so-LNS to pick up some more 032BF, plus supplies for my exchange partner, and fibers for the quilt square I’m stitching in memory of Laura. I do love this particular shop, but I really, really, loathe paying Australian prices for anything. Support local business, sure, but there is a limit – effectively, I couldn’t afford this hobby if I had to rely on getting everything locally ๐Ÿ™