Oscar’s stuffed hand turkey. Thanks Marigold for the link and thanks to Bella Dia for the cute idea! I traced Oscar’s hand on fabric and he sewed it up all by himself. His first sewing project! He had such fun stitching it up and has been begging me all day to do more sewing. Thanks for all the fun crafts suggestions. We’ve got a full project to-do list now. Thanksgiving is making a comeback.
just plunked my new (old) orla kiely bag down on the table by my o.k. target mug. makes me so happy! I bought the bag on ebay about a month ago and oh how I love it. I justified it by saying I’ll never need another bag again and I might be right. I don’t think my love for it will ever waver.
also on the table, dmc floss colors for the cross stitch patterns. I’ll tell you what’s a good time. spending half an hour in the floss aisle at joanns while your 2 year old tears things apart and your 5 year old hollers at her for tearing things apart while you hunt and peck for matching floss colors. why don’t they have them all in a row? all the blues together, then all the greens, etc. there must be a reason they arrange/number them so haphazardly.
I sure had to restrain myself to not write a dorky post title today. So many goofy butter sayings popped into my head. If I had to pick a least favorite part of blogging it’d be the titles. I want to switch over to doing asterisks or something but that’d be so annoying when you’re looking through the archives. Anyhoo…
I finished up my cross stitch quartet! This weekend I picked up these frames at Ikea and I love them in the frames. So cute and easy and ready to go. Butter joins the group and so all told we have eggs, apples, wool and butter.
Time to start making charts!
These three have been sitting on my work desk for about 2 months now. The pig and duck came together lickety split back was I was all gung-ho on make-a-long #2 The Farm Story. Mr. Sheep took me a little longer, because sheep are just trouble. All was going along fine until I got stuck on the outfits. Every day I’d look at them knowing exactly what I wanted to make but not wanting to construct tiny little clothes.
Then this past week inspiration struck and I realized the problem was the sewing machine. I didn’t want to deal with it. So I decided these stinkers wanted to be hand-sewing projects. So I put them in my shrink-o-mater and here’s Mr. Duck.
Coming in at a cute 8″ tall, hand sewn from wool and wool felt and sporting some easy to whip up hand sewn overalls. Mac Mac! We’ve decided ‘quack quack’ is bunk and ducks really say mac mac.
I’m totally feeling these now! Miss Pig and her petticoat are cut out and ready to go. I’d like to get the pig and duck into the shop as Hand Sewing for Fun PDFs. And I hope to have the farm gal cross stitch patterns joining them. Not exactly the make-a-long extravaganza I’d been planning but I guess I’m not really working at an extravaganza pace these days. The smaller, more manageable and relaxing, hand sewing projects are definitely my scene right now, you know, the kind of project you can work on while sitting under a blanket 🙂
do you think she knit her scarf from her pet lamb’s wool?
After my success with the Blackbird Designs pattern I thought it’d be fun to try to come up with my own little something. That’s why you didn’t hear from me for a week! Here she is, after many false starts, my little egg collecting girl. I looked to these gals for inspiration. I’ve got ideas for butter, apples and wool next but first I’m sitting with this gal and trying to decide if she’s right.
Here’s what I’ve learned about cross stitch so far. To get me started on my first cross stitch project I googled and found this wonderful post on Yarn tree’s blog…Learn how to Cross Stitch in 5 minutes. I love succinct info like this. So much more helpful than the stack of library books I checked out. A few more things I learned while trying to design this… the linen you get at the needlework shop is amazing. It took me a very long morning of driving around to a bunch of needlework shops until I discovered the perfect shop right under my nose, Tomorrow’s Heirlooms. That’s where I got the linen and Crescent Colours thread I used for the pins and needles design. For egg girl I tried some linen I had on hand and it didn’t work out so well. I had a problem with my design being elongated. Also my stitches were confused and I couldn’t keep them nice and neat. I think the weave wasn’t even enough. And I tried 3 strands of floss instead of 2 and it was a mess. Obviously wrong amount of thread for the size. I’m still trying to figure out the sizes. So then I bought DMC 28 ct linen at Joanns and it worked out well. It’s very even and stiff, easy to work with, but I was wishing there were more colors at the store. I love cross stitch on darker backgrounds but I’m working on a little bird design for my mom on black and it is hard going at night, working on that dark background.
So that’s what I know about xstitch so far. I have a lot to learn. If you have any bits of wisdom or great needlework shops or sites I’d love to hear!
A captivating gang of 24 huggable, lovable creatures to sew—from classics like Margot, a topsy-turvy doll, and the button-jointed teddy bear Bjorn Bjornson, to irresistible Evelyn, a wool felt inchworm decked out in mod glasses and a kerchief, and Koji, a fiercely cute spiked softie monster. There’s something for everyone here—from kids to grown-ups and from beginning sewers to advanced dollmakers. Published by STC Craft, August, 2010.
