Finished the Cross Stitching....

So I finished the cross stitching on Spanish Geometric Sampler, now it's time to do the beading.  I've started it a little bit last night - the beads are purple and green.  (Well, not purple and green - purple beads, and green beads).

I've finished some other things, but they're for gifts and I'm not sure if the recipients read my blog or not, so to be safe, I won't post them here.  Once the giving occasion(s) go by, I will post pictures here (and I will look really prolific!).

Anyway, thanks for checking it out.

Boulevard of Dreams Progress

Well, after another couple of weeks of stitching, I made a LITTLE more progress on my HAED. This was actually taken last Sunday, but I never got around to posting it.

It seems like I go in spurts with my blog....I'm either writing LONG entries and posting pictures faithfully every week, or I'm viewing it as a chore to update. Since I cross stitch for fun (my two jobs are enough work - I don't need more!), when it feels like a chore, I just don't do it! LOL

I also have a few little finishes - however, they are gifts for people who may or may not read my blog...so I don't want to post them here. I think I can safely post them on some of my stitching groups (selectively) and not ruin any surprises. My best guess is that most of you know me from a Yahoo group (or two!) so you can check there to see my pictures.....

Thank you all for sticking with me - whether I'm posting like crazy or posting sporadically!

Spanish Geometric Sampler

Well, I finished the third page on the Spanish Geometric Sampler. The fourth page is the smallest of the four pages (the pattern's not evenly divided). This is a fun travel project! After the stitching is done, then it gets a bunch of green and purple beads - that's green beads and purple beads, not green and purple on the same bead! LOL

Okay - going to try this posting again. I thought I had it, but alas, the picture didn't work! I found that out when Gabi and Julie sent me messages and said "Nope, didn't work!"

So, I thought I would try it a second time. I can't pull pictures into my blog from blogger, but I can seem to "push" them from Picasa, so that's how I'm doing it. We'll see if it posts better this time!

Anyway, AS I ALREADY TYPED ONCE....LOL.....I've been remiss. This picture was taken on July 12th, two days after my "Page 1 is done" picture. It was the progress I made from the time I took that picture until the time I took my HAED out of my rotations for a couple of weeks. I was working on a couple of little things, but they're gifts for people who sometimes check out my blog, so....can't post them here.

Meanwhile, I've been BUSY the last couple of weekends. Two weeks ago was my sister's 50th birthday party with the family. We went to a lake near my parents' house, and had a nice day. My other sister and I had made her a poster with pictures of her, and we all bought her gift certificates to pamper herself - a massage, and a manicure / pedicure. So hopefully she'll take advantage of it!

Then last weekend (Friday) we went to a free concert in the park with that same sister to see a Rod Stewart tribute band. It was a nice evening - people bring chairs, blankets, food, and drinks and hang out and listen to the music. They even had a dance floor. Saturday I had a reunion with some former co-workers from a job that I worked at from 1989 - 1999. There were about 30 of us there, and it was an awesome day. We were at the beach (always rough! NOT!) and had beautiful weather. Then on Sunday I had tickets with friends to see Mary Poppins (the stage version). I LOVED IT!!! I think I enjoyed it more than my friends 7 1/2 year old daughter, and I'm proud to say so. Mary Poppins is my favorite Disney movie.

Then last night we went to our county fair. I like to go look at the arts and crafts stuff, and the fine arts stuff (photography and painting). I was a little disappointed in the stitchery....it seems like every year there is less and less. And I hadn't been last year (and I don't remember if I went the year before) but they've changed how they display the stitched stuff. It used to be that in various sections there would kind of be themes....and there might be quilts, china paintings, knitting, crocheting, sewing AND stitched stuff that fit that theme (Christmas, Halloween, Babies, Patriotic, Weddings). Now they have a spot for cross-stitching, a spot for knitting, a spot for crocheting, etc. I liked the old way better because people who might be looking at the knitting might see something cross-stitched and become interested. Now unless you're already interested, you're not going to see the stitched stuff. The stuff that was there was pretty, but there just wasn't enough of it!

Anyway - this is a LONG post - I sure hope the picture works this time.

And in a minute, I'm going to try to post a picture of my Spanish Geometric Sampler.....

Page 1 Done

Okay - so this is my first HAED ever - and I'm counting each page as a "mini-finish". So I've finished page 1, and I'm getting ready to start page 2.

Some statistics (probably only interesting to me, but.....LOL)
Started - 5/15/11
Finished - 7/5/11
Days Stitched - 25 Days
Time Stitched - 79 1/2 Hours
Stitches - 7,840
Percent Completed - 3.73%

Now onto page 2 - more of the same, blues and purples! :-)

Queen of the Needle Update

The lighting on this picture isn't perfect - I took some with a flash and some without. Surprisingly, the ones without flash washed the color out until the fabric looked white (it isn't - it's pink). This one was with the flash, and the colors are a little "truer".

I don't feel like I made a ton of progress this week on this one. I finished the leaves in the row of pink and white flowers, and then I stitched the white flowers and the pink flowers. It's hard to see in the picture (I should have taken a close up of just that row). The white daisy looking flowers have smyrna crosses for the centers and satin stitches for the petals, and the pink flowers are just straight stitches in three different colors - I think there are something like 36 or 40 stitches in each flower. It took a TON of concentration because it wasn't just counting! The next row is pansies.

If you aren't familiar, it's a Just Nan pattern. There's a medallion type thing that goes in the middle of that spot with the top of it being between the two pink flowers in the middle. It's kind of challenging (not in a bad way) in that it requires some concentration on my part because of the specialty stitches. The white lacy stitching on the top was supposed to be pearl cotton, but I gave up because I couldn't get the stupid needle threaded! Sad, but true!

Any, thanks for looking!

One more week on my HAED

Well, it's another week on Boulevard of Dreams. Still lots of blues and purples.....still not QUITE done with page 1. I think the next week it comes up in the rotation I'll finish Page 1. It's going to literally take me years, but that's okay - it's all about the trip, not just the destination. (Although in the case the destination is pretty awesome - since it's a picture of Vegas! LOL).

And after I finish this one, I have a Chicago one to do next (assuming I have any inkling of sanity left!).

Frederick the Literate

Here's my progress on Frederick the Literate. One of my stitching groups has been talking about this one and doing a Stitch-Along of it. I'm not officially participating in it (I've got too many other projects I'm juggling to commit wholeheartedly to this one) but it was like an old friend when I pulled it out.

I'm not even a big cat fan - but I am an avid reader, so it's half fitting for me! I just thought it was a really cute picture.

For those that don't know, it's a Dimensions kit. However, the only part of it that's really Dimensions for me is the pattern - I subbed out different fabric (they had stiff aida, and Dimensions - at least in my opinion - doesn't give you enough fabric, and I just didn't want to deal with that. Then I found a Dimensions / DMC conversion and converted it all to DMC floss.

Anyway, thanks for looking. This was actually my progress picture from LAST Sunday (the 19th) I just never got around to blogging it.

HAED Progress

Well, after another week of stitching, I've finished another three rows of blocks of stitching (roughly 2,400 stitches, plus the overflow into the next row). Now it will get put away for another week while I work on another piece. You can kind of see mountains coming into focus in the picture......

Thanks for checking it out!

Finished another page

Well, I finished another page of my "Spanish Geometical Sampler". This has been my travel project forever (it seems). It's a perfect travel project even though it's a little big. Because things repeat it doesn't take a lot of counting (you just have to follow along with what you've previously stitched.

It's a four page pattern, and I just finished page 2. But that's really more than halfway done with the stitching, because pages 3 and 4 aren't full pages. But then again, I'm probably less than halfway done because it gets beads as well.

Thanks for looking!

Progress Picture

Here is my latest progress on my Blue Ribbon Designs project - the name of it is something like "Letters, Leprechauns, and Luck" (or something along those lines!). I'm liking it - it's an easy stitch - the little extra partially stitched squares are just to use up the end of a piece of floss.....

Thanks for checking it out.

Perspective

Well, this picture was to try to give some perspective on just how LITTLE progress I've really made on my HAED. I shouldn't minimize it, a start is a start, right?

The pages of the pattern are (approximately) 8 squares across and 10 squares down, so 80 squares to a page. There are 35 pages (not all complete pages, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to say they are full pages. So, that makes 2,800 total squares. I have completed 24 squares (plus some fractional ones, but I only count "full" squares. That means I am approximately 0.86% of the way done! LOL

To add to the ambitiousness of the project, I am not working only on this. I have a total of four "home" projects and one "travel" project in a rotation. The travel project is a repetitive geometric design, so it's ideal for travel. I don't want my other three home projects to get neglected. So I'm going to work one week on this project, then a week on project A, then a week on this one, then a week on project B, etc. So I will stell get time in on my other projects.

Thanks for checking it out...

Started my First ever HAED

Well - I did it!!! I took the plunge! This is the beginning of my first ever HAED! It's a design called "Boulevard of Dreams" and it's a picture of the Las Vegas strip at dusk. So the sky is all sorts of blues and purples.

I gridded just the horizontal lines (except for the left hand edge) because I figured as long as I could find the four corners, I could "make" the square out of it. I was too anxious to start, so I only gridded the first ten lines (the pages are 98 stitches long, so ten rows gives me the first pages going across.

The pattern calls for 2 threads on 25 count - I can't imagine how you would begin to do that. I'm doing 1 over 1, and the coverage is fine. I have another picture, which will show just how small this portion is in comparison to the whole picture. However, I've been struggling to get the pictures to post in Blogger. I finally got this one to post by going into Picasa and choosing the "Blog This" option. However you can only do one picture at a time that way.

I also have been keeping track of my time. Since this is a stitch at home project, I've built an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the time, and I've been counting full squares as "done". Obviously, I cross over into other squares, so the time I've spent and the number of completed squares aren't REALLY a clean match. So far, there are 24 completed squares, and I've stitched for 32 hours. But I don't strictly stitch - the television is always on, and the computer is next to me so I am periodically "distracted".....LOL

Anyway, thanks for checking it out....I think I'll post the other picture on a second blog post. Or maybe I'll see if I can edi this and add a picture. We shall see!

Been busy!

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here - actually, been busy since the end of April.

First off at my second job it's been a little crazy . For those of you who don't know, I work one job 2 days a week and another one three days a week. The 2 day a week job I've been at for about 6 years now. It was full time, but they were hit hard by the economy, and when they downsized, they had to cut me to two days. I wish that wasn't the case, because I LOVE it there, but, alas, it is what it is. The other job, where I work 3 days per week, I've been at for a little over year. We've been downsizing there in the last couple of weeks due to the transfer of a big client. So it has just been crazy hectic THERE! I do accounting, so layoffs mean final checks, and all the other stuff that goes with it.

The last weekend of April / first weekend of May (April 30th/May 1st) we were in Vegas for a long weekend with our bowling league. Gambling didn't go great, but bowling went pretty well. I ended up being the second highest scoring female bowler, Mike was 5th highest for the men. And our team came in third! So I won almost $200 bowling, Mike won about $100. So that was nice!

Then of course, we had Mother's Day - we had a fairly low key celebration - my sister had my parents, my other sister, and us over for a WONDERFUL dinner of tri-tip, crab legs, cheesy potatoes (my contribution), asparagus, salad, and cheesecake! YUM!!!

In the meantime, I finished my dollhouse.......here's THAT picture:

This past weekend was my great niece Alexis's First Holy Communion. She prefers to be addressed by her full name - Alexis Grace! She's a sweetheart, and LOVES being the center of attention. So she was in her element in her princess dress. She is Anthony's older sister (those of you who have been following my blog for a while will remember Anthony - he's the cutie patootie that was treated for kidney cancer two years ago). She has already decided she wants to go to Stanford, and has written them a letter telling them so. Of course, that's still 10 years away!

Finally - if you've lasted this long - I started on my first ever HAED. It's called "Boulevard of Dreams". It's a picture of the Strip in Las Vegas. I gridded the first 10 squares - I figured that will get me thru four pages across. That means I'll be good for a quite a while. I got a LOT of stitching time in yesterday, and completed 2 squares (with quite a bit of overflow). I'm going to try to track my time on this one because I know it will take a LOT of time and I know people will ask.

No pictures of it yet - it's just a blue rectangle right now.

Thanks for checking it out!

Lots of Updates

Finally got to give the birth announcement picture to my niece and great-niece. Yep, that's Payton in my arms, and her mommy, my niece Jillian. Jillian was thrilled. Payton on the other hand didn't seem very impressed....although in her defense, it was time for dinner! LOL

This one is my Just Nan - Queen of the Needle. I've had it out for a couple of weeks, but I still seem to be in a stitching slump at home. The progress I've made on this one has been mostly in the last day or two - so I'm hoping that maybe I'm out of the slump now!

And last but not least, my travel project. It's by The Needle's Content and it's called "Spanish Geometric Sampler. It's a four page pattern, and this was when I finished the first page. There is a little "bleed over" as I went onto the next page if I still had some floss left on the needle. I took this a couple of weeks ago.

Finally - after looking at the HAED (Heaven and Earth Designs) website a number of times and not seeing anything I liked, I heard someone talking about a Chicago pattern. So, I had to check it out, and I LOVED it. So I bought a Chicago pattern and a Las Vegas pattern, both by the same designer. His name is Dennis .... something or other! How's that for helpful??? But if you search on Chicago on the HAED website you'll see it, and if you look at that designer and look at "Boulevard of Dreams" you'll find my Vegas one. As much as I would LOVE to start one or both of them, I am telling myself I HAVE to finish something else first! LOL

Thanks for checking out my blog!

Two Progress Photos

Well, I'm back to my "normal" rotation - so here's a picture of Frederick. I had him out for two weeks, but really only stitched on him one week. For some reason, I just didn't have my stitching mojo this past week. It seemed like by the time I got home from work, did whatever needed to be done around the house, I just couldn't muster up any interest in stitching. Might have been my car situation - which I will explain about at the end of this post. If anyone doesn't recognize it, it's a Dimensions pattern - Frederick the Literate. However - all I'm using of the kit is the pattern. I subbed out the floss for DMC, and the aida for black evenweave.


This next picture is progress on my travel project. It's not the typical travel project because it's not very small - but it makes an awesome travel project because the motifs are very repetitive and it only has five colors. It's not the greatest picture - I thought I took some with the flash and some without, but I don't think any of them had the flash on. The colors are purples and greens - three purples and two greens. This pattern is called "Spanish Geometric Sampler" and it's by "The Needle's Content". I saw someone else stitching it, and really liked it - wasn't easy to find, but 123Stitch was able to special order it for me.

And on to my car saga. We have (well, had) two cars - one is my Explorer, and the other was an 18 year old convertible that my Dad had given of us (because we had been sharing a car). Last Saturday, we were out for the day, and someone crashed into the convertible - the estimate to fix it is $13,000. Not likely to happen, since the high blue book value on the car is only about $2,000. So - now it's a matter of dealing with her insurance and my insurance....what a hassle!

And I did get to deliver the bingo picture and the baby sampler in the last week or two. My friend Diane LOVED the bingo thing - and she did notice her birthdate included in the picture. And yesterday I saw my niece and the baby, and gave them the birth announcement. Her hubby was sick, so I didn't get to see his reaction. My sister took a picture of my niece, the baby, and me, with the birth announcement. As soon as she sends me a copy, I will post it.

Thanks for checking out my blog!

Back from the Framer

I stitched this for a dear friend that we've played bingo with for more than 10 years. Her birthday was back in October, but right before her birthday her father passed away. So, her birthday passed without a bunch of fanfare (as she wanted it) so we bought her a gift card to a restaurant and kept things very subdued. But she's in a little better place now (with the birth of her first grandchild) so even though there's no occasion, I'm giving it to her now. I decided not to mat it because I didn't want it getting too big. We tried frames in every color that's in it, and the red just made the whole thing pop. It's a little set back so that the charms didn't hit the glass. I customized it a little bit by scrambling up the numbers so that her birthdate is included in it. It will be interesting to see if she notices!

And here is the baby birth announcement I did for my great niece. The framer agreed with me that a simple frame and no mat was best - the pink and blue checks make it look already matted (or at least I think they do). The only other frame I might have considered was pink, but they didn't have any pink frames - well, they had one - it was bright pink with glitter all over it! LOL

I'm happy with the way both of them turned out. It's funny, when I look at the picture of the birth announcement, the bottom of it looks a little crooked. I even went and looked at it again - it's not, it must have just been the way I took the picture!

And on a different note - the subject of blog comments came up on one of my stitching boards, and I realized I'm guilty of some bad blog etiquette. I am thrilled when people comment on my blog, but I'm not very good about commenting on other people's blogs. Part of that is because often I feel like all I would be saying is "That's gorgeous", and I feel like that's repetitive. But then I realize I like to hear that about my stuff, so other people probably do to. The other reason is I follow a lot of blogs on google reader. So I often don't even go to the blogs. But I have made a decision to be better about commenting on people's blogs - even if it's just to reinforce other people saying how pretty things are!

So....with that being said - thanks for checking out my blog - and if you have one, and if you post on one of my stitching groups are, odds are I will comment at some point! :-)

Finished the Birth Announcement

Well, I finished my great niece's birth announcement...my first finish of 2011. It's actually been the only thing I've stitched on since I started on it which is not my "normal" system. But I really wanted to get it done.

I made a few changes to the pattern - most noticeably in the center part. I didn't like the "fill in the blank" style of the center, I wanted it to look a little more "formal". So I wrote out the date and stuff. The other thing I changed is the original pattern called for the baby's first and last name - I did first and middle, since the last name is down below with her parents' names. And...since she's a girl, I changed the coloring of the lettering to a dark pink rather than blue.

There are a few other less obvious (at least in the picture) changes - the pattern didn't call for stitching the white background on the wallpaper around the clock, the clock face, the stars (nor did it backstitch around the stars) and one part around Mother Goose's apron. But I thought it looked funny to have floating dots on the wallpaper, and also that it looked funny when the rest of the picture area was solidly stitched.

On Monday, it will go to the framer, so I can't wait. I'm thinking of a white frame - I don't know if it will need a mat - I think the blue and pink squares will kind of act like a mat. We'll see once I get there and we play with mats and moldings.....

Thanks for checking it out!

Update on Fairy Tale Baby

First off, I apologize for the dark picture - I usually play around with taking some with and without the flash, but for some reason, I forgot to when I took the picture.

I didn't post an update last weekend because I THOUGHT I would be done with the stitching of the design (other than the border) by Monday, or Tuesday at the latest and I figured I would post at that benchmark.

Instead, I spent Tuesday evening frogging. The bottom left hand corner is about five or six shades of brown and tan for the ground. On Monday, I went in to fix one solo stitch that I had missed, and then, somehow, forgot which symbol the thread I was using matched up with, so I went ahead and started continuing with that piece of thread on the WRONG symbols. I got a little further along before I realized my mistake. And because there are so many color changes in that area, the threads get kind of interwoven with one another on the back, so frogging gets a LITTLE tough!

I finally frogged it, and finally finished off the stitching of everything except the pink and blue border...and the backstitching. After I took this picture, I started on some of the backstitching, and it does bring the picture to life.

Thanks for checking out my blog - I do appreciate it, and all your comments!

Sad News

The world has sadly lost a wonderful woman, a talented stitcher, and a good friend to many....

Rest in peace Rene LaFrog....you will be missed by many.

You are thought of with every stitch.

Update on Fairy Tale Baby

Here is my progress picture on Fairy Tale Baby - it's a fun project to stitch on, and it's been the only thing I've stitched on since I started it. The baby is 3 months old already (in my defense, her parents didn't pick it out until after she was born).

I've made a couple of modifications to it - the face on the clock and the white on the wallpaper weren't stitched in the original pattern. But I didn't like the "negative" space aspect to it. I'm not one who needs the whole thing to be solidly stitched, a lot of patterns obviously call for unstitched areas. But on this one since the whole frame area was stitched (except that area) I thought it looked funny. The other thing is the stars (which you can barely see in the sky because of the angle) are also unstitched, and I'm going to fill them in with white as well.

The other thing I'm going to change is the lettering in the middle (which will be the baby's vital statistics - birth date, time, weight, length, name, parents' names, etc) is supposed to stitched in blue. But since it's for a girl, I'm going to use a dark pink color. Stereotypical, I know, but since there are both blue and pink in the design, I think it will work.

Thanks for checking it out.

Birth Announcement

Since all my Christmas stitching was done pretty early, I've been focusing on the birth announcement for my niece's first baby.

The baby was already born (in fact, she'll be 3 months old tomorrow!) but my niece and her husband didn't pick the pattern out until after she was born. I had given them their choice of about 15 patterns at the baby shower. They didn't let me know until Payton was about two weeks old which pattern they had chosen. This is it! LOL

The middle will have the critical stats - name, date, weight, etc....

It's a fun one to stitch, I like the colors. But there are a LOT of fractional stitches, which can get a little crazy, but it's worth it for the effect. Also SOME blending but not a lot. The grass is two shades of green, and some of the sky is two shades of blue. Also, there are a couple of other areas that are blended...I'm hoping maybe it will be a 6 months birthday present!

(For those who might want to know - it's called "Fairy Tale Baby" by Bobbie G Designs).

Thanks for looking!