Category Archives: Counted Stitchwork

Inspiration, Celebration

Well lookie here. My wee biscornus got a little spot on the Focus on Finishing blog. Thanks Karen! Glad I could provide some inspiration – I’ve been feeling a little short of that myself lately.

In order to try getting myself inspired to stitch again, I’ve been going through my stash and weeding out some of what I don’t need. I’m not fully organised yet, but I’ve been doing some ebaying and Freecycling, and in the next couple of days, I’ll post a few more things I have for sale but can’t be bothered ebaying up on the blog, so keep your eyes out.

While looking back into my archives for the details on the car story, I realised that in May this year, I missed the second anniversary of my blog’s birth. So, uh, Happy 2-years-2-months-and-a-bit Blogiversary to me! Since I missed that celebration, I’m going to celebrate the 1000th comment on this blog instead. I’m going to start putting together a little something for the person who leaves the 1000th comment on Million Stitches… but I’m not going to tell you how close we are to that milestone yet! I assure you, it’s at least a handful of posts away, and given my recent post frequency, it could take some time to get there. Or not. We shall see :giggle:

Moving Right Along

Thank you all for your warm words of support and advice re. my last post. Virtual hugs are almost as therapeutic as the real thing 🙂 I have had a generally good week since. On the weekend, we got away for a couple of days, and the distraction of a grandfather and two uncles provided the kiddos some amusement while I managed to nap. Both days! And stitch! It was nice to break that particular 3-week drought.

The week since has been fairly uneventful, at least until today. It’s the second week of school holidays here at the moment, so no pre-school for Finn, but we’ve had some extra swimming lessons, trips to the library, trips to the park, and lots of mess-making (erm, and DVD watching) at home to keep us happy. Today I thought ‘hey, let’s venture further afield. Let’s have a day-trip to the Museum’.

I should’ve stuck with the DVDs. Not terribly far from home, we were rear-ended by Mr-Impatient-Guy. Dammit. Now the car needs repairing, and I suffered that lovely post adrenaline-surge hangover all day (we didn’t go to the Museum, btw. Finn was cool about it, particularly since he got to ride his bike down to the nearest playground instead). Let’s hope this vehicular incident doesn’t turn out like the last one two.

Okay. Moving on, and filling your screens with something far more interesting than my weepfest. These three wee little biscornu ornament/fobs (is biscornu the plural as well as the singular? Or is it something funky like biscornii?!) were finally sent out to their new homes, weeks after finishing them, so now I can show-and-tell:

Biscornu-Ornaments

These were to be ‘GTG gifts’ for Tannia, Anne and Junette, only I decided less than 48 hours before we met up that I wanted to make something, and so naturally, they weren’t finished in time. (Actually, the stitching was, but the finishing was not.) The fibres are all dyed by me. The designs are freebies from My Aunt’s Attic. Have you seen this project? A box of old hand drawn charts has been recovered in an attic, designer unknown, and this lovely lady is making them available for free. Many of the designs are quite lovely. My favourite (yet to be stitched) is the Butterflies chart in this post.

Oh, and yes, one of the biscornu/ii is slightly crooked. My advice? Don’t try making biscornu/ii with sides which are an odd number of stitches. You have to compensate at each corner, and while two of them worked out, for some reason I messed up that middle one slightly, and couldn’t make it come good (sorry Junette).

Question… do these three count as one finish, or three, for my 12-finishes-this-year goal, d’you think?

Later That Month…

The Blogger’s block continues. But I have been stitching. A few secret things – more on those later. And, surprise, surprise, I dragged something out from beneath the mountain of unfinished-finished-things:
Bookmark-1

I stitched this Teresa Wentzler freebie bookmark back in 2004. Finally, I actually made it into a bookmark! And used it, what’s more:
Bookmark-2

I used this stuff to fuse the fabric together:
Bookmark-3

I don’t know how kosher that is with regards to longevity of the stitching, but watch me not care. Also not caring about the lumpy seam up the back of the bookmark. The front looks good, and it does what it should, and that’s all that matters 🙂

Also in the interim since my last post, I spent a lovely afternoon meeting some fellow Melburnian stitchers – Junette, Anne and I descended on Tannia’s house where she plied us with food and wine, and we whiled a few hours away chatting and getting in some quality kitty time. Niamh came along, and made short work of befriending all and sundry, except perhaps Banjo, who remained unconvinced. It was lovely, and I hope we do it again sooner rather than later.

Then, we spent this weekend just past away for a couple of days with Dermot’s (large) family. Annually, on the weekend following Queen’s Birthday, we hire a school-camp facility (dorm rooms, communal showers and kitchen – you know the kind of thing) and spend two days eating, drinking and being generally merry, all in celebration of his grandmother’s birthday. She was 87 this year, and we all had a wonderful weekend. Here’s to many more like it 😆

Tranquil Sky

I’m finding myself struggling with the idea of blogging lately. So pictures, not words, today. A finish from Amaryllis Artworks – Tranquil Sky.

Tranquil-Sky-2
I like it, it’s pretty, but… 164 frelling eyelets? What was I thinking?!

Tranquil-Sky-1
Funny that I would stitch something ‘tranquil’, when I’ve been feeling anything but.

Niamh’s birthday on Sunday. Will report back with photos, hopefully.

Again with the Hardanger!

Niamh-thief
Be wary – the little people, they strike when you are least prepared. And nick off with your latest finish!

Haha. Moments after this shot, Niamh was ‘posing’ the ornament up against the wall, just like Mummy :giggle: I have photos of that too, but they’re just too blurry, and besides, this one captures that glint in her eye just perfectly!

Hardanger-Ornament-1
So here then is my latest finish – Scissors Keeper (only it isn’t) from the book ‘Hardanger Embroidery’ by Jill Carter. It’s stitched with one of my hand dyed #8 perle cottons and a couple of DMC pinks which I don’t think were perfect choices, really. I just grabbed whatever I could find because I was itching to start this. Both sides are identical, and it’s finished this as a pillow-style Christmas ornament instead of a fob.

Can you spot the suspended beads in the Dove’s eyes? How about now:

Hardanger-Ornament-3

Good trick, no? I like this a lot, and I’m planning to do another in a different colourway, and with larger beads (again, I just grabbed what came easily to hand). There are a couple of other pieces in this book that I’d like to stitch, too. Next up – the Pincushion, I think.

Hardanger-Ornament-2

My Precioussss

Wheeeee! I’m happy dancing again – and this finish comes complete with sparkles and dragonflies. Allow me to present Dragonfly Jewels by The Cat’s Whiskers Design Studio:

Dragonfly-Jewels-1

So, so, so, so pretty. Technically not a complete finish, of course – the complete design requires four flaps to be stitched which are then attached so as to hide the message until they are untied. While I am fascinated by the 3-D finishing method, I just can’t see myself shelling out the $60 for the box to mount this in just yet, so it will have to wait. Also, I really love the design as is, so perhaps I’ll end up just framing it instead.

There is nothing I don’t love in this – the colours, the silks, the over-one words – and those dragonflies. The eyes! The legs! Look at them! They’re just so damn cute and sparkly, I love them to bits! This may well just be my favourite finish to date 🙂

Dragonfly-Jewels-3

These last few posts may have you believing that I have my stitching groove back on. I’m thinking it’s probably just a temporary thing, myself. There’s so much on the burner at the moment. Home improvement-y things we have to do; sewing I’d like to fit in; school selection/enrolment blahblah for Finn; a thirtieth birthday weekend to plan for OtherHalf and a FIRST birthday celebration for the littlest one. So I’m pretty sure the stitching is going to take a back seat again for a little while. But I have finally made myself a goal for 2007 (me – goal making – the horror!). I’d like to have at least 12 finishes – one per month. Small, medium or large, doesn’t matter. So far, I’m on track… we’ll see how the rest of the year goes.

And now… ahem. I am up really really late, and so there’s no one but myself to blame tonight for too little sleep. So g’night.

Noah Returneth

Yes, my UFO has come home. You may remember Noah’s Journey headed off looking like this? Well, it’s come home looking like this:

Noah's Journey After

Much more finishable looking, don’t you think?

Thank you Tracey, Suz, Laura, Juli and Claire, for the many stitches you have put into this. I’ll be making every effort to finish this before the year is out (ie before Finn turns 5), so watch this space!

Hardanger-y Goodness

With good intentions, I sat down after my last finish to work on an existing WIP – the Wee Beasties dragonfly. I think I managed about three hours or so before I gave in to the temptation to start something new instead :giggle: To be honest, that dragonfly is not fun stitching. It’s full of finicky little fractional stitches and lots of blending filament. I need more concentration to work on it than I usually have in the evening after the kiddos are asleep, so it’s slow going at the moment.

So, I started, and then finished, Teenie Hardanger I by The Sweetheart Tree, instead. Pretty, no? The chart for this was a gift from my Secret Stitcher last year, Allie. She sent me II and III as well (among other wonderful things).

Teenie-Hardanger-I-lg

I’m much happier with my cutting this time. Well. Except for that one bit. That bit where I snipped one thread too many. Whoops! I ended up having to reweave a piece of linen so that I could do the woven bar properly. But all’s well that ends well, hey?

Hardanger-y goodness part two is this:
HardangerExchange-Haze

Haze stitched me this lovely candle wrap and mat for the Hardanger exchange on the Rotation BB. It’s taken a little while to arrive, it’s been on a bit of a world cruise, actually 🙂 Thanks Haze, I love it!

A Wee Finish

Many moons ago, I made the Big List, coming clean about my WIPs. I also planned to start a Rotation in order to get my number of WIPs under 10. Ha! Every time the word ‘rotation’ is mentioned, I seem to run screaming. In fact, I’m convinced it’s what causes stitching slumps (for me)!

Nevertheless, I have managed to finish three from the list since then – Kaitlin, Bumblebee, and just yesterday I put the final stitches in the November Sampler Accent by Periwinkle Promises. See… Fridays the 13th aren’t all bad :giggle:

November Sampler Accent

Annette gifted me with this design in a Seasonal Exchange a while back. I’m so glad I’ve got around to finishing it, it’s lovely. I plan to finish this as described in the instructions – as a little tasselled cushion.

In a little bit of a departure for me, I actually stitched the personalisation details. I changed it a little bit, as I didn’t like the way the year was originally split. I think my way works nicely.

Now… would anybody out there like to have this chart and the leftover silk threads it came with? (The threads are probably not enough to finish the design a second time). Just say the word and I’ll drop it in the mail for you 🙂

Hmmm… what to stitch on next…?

Catching Up: Part I

Well. Our Easter break was… slightly more than we bargained for, since our car ended up in parts in my father-in-law’s front paddock for several days!

When we arrived on Thursday afternoon, we had planned to do a fairly simple strut replacement job before heading off camping. As soon as FIL got a look at the underneath of the car, it rapidly turned into a drive-shaft-rebuild-needed-asap job. One of the drive shafts turned out to be a bugger to detach, so we weren’t able to get them into the rebuild place before everything shutting down for the long weekend. Nevermind… we loaded our considerable cargo into a trailer and FIL’s car, and took off from Friday through Monday for a lovely few days of riverfront camping.

On Tuesday morning, we had the drive shafts rebuilt, then FIL and OtherHalf spent the afternoon getting the car back in working order. And here we are, back again. Chocolate-bloated and laden with half a ton (it seems) of dirty laundry, but back.

Here then, are some promised catch up pictures. First, the two pay-it-forward packages I didn’t show you earlier:

For Angi
PIF-Angi
For Debbi
PIF-Debbi

Next, the final UFO that I stitched on for the round robin. This is Tracey’s Royal Holiday. It was nice to finish on another Mirabilia design:

Before:
UFO-RR-Tracey-1
And after:
UFO-RR-Tracey-2

And that, boys and girls, marks the end of so-called ‘obligation‘ stitching for me. For the time being, anyway. I joined this round robin because I knew I would go through a bit of a stitching slump while Niamh was little, and I figured this would be a good way to spur me into doing a little bit, better than nothing at all. But I have to confess, I’m not sad to see then end of it. I was growing a bit resentful of the time spent stitching on other people’s work (though I will no doubt feel differently once my own UFO gets home, and I see first-hand how much has been worked on it). Each time as the deadline approached, I felt pressured to stitch, even though I didn’t necessarily feel like doing so. I have done very little other stitching for the whole year so far – I completed the Hardanger exchange, I’ve spent a couple of hours on Lilly, and just in this last week I’ve come very close to a finish on one of my smaller pieces (hopefully I’ll dance this weekend). But that’s all. So I’ve decided to opt out of any more exchanges or round robins for at least the rest of 2007. How much or how little stitching I will actually do, I can’t predict, but I just don’t want to feel the pressure of deadlines for a little while.