Stitching Stuff

I just haven't been stitching much lately, although I now have some projects I need to finish in a hurry, so I guess I ought to get going again.

First up I have Flyways by Michael Boren to show you (not finished) - this is the piece I piloted last year in about June.

Next I have a piece I started this weekend at our guild meeting - A Diamond Progression by Susan Cluck. I chose the colours to be a bit outside what I normally use, and found a gorgeous overdyed to use as my base that has beautiful wood tones that I thought would work really well for this piece. An added bonus was that it looked like a hokey pokey icecream cone after stitching the first point of the compass. Now that I've almost finished the second point it's looking more like a clown head. It should look like a compass centre by the time I've finished all the points though.

Lastly - this months progress on the HAED SAL Siberian Forest:

Coming up in my stitching I have a retirement gift for the school librarian (deadline - end of May), bookmarks for the teachers (again end of May), a wedding gift for my brother (April next year), a 40th birthday gift (August), another ANG class (June), and an ANG group correspondence class for which I got the materials at the class on Saturday.

I've also finished picking out all my threads for Tony Minieri's Stars for a New Millennium (only when saying that I keep transposing Minieri and Millennium - good thing that the people I'm talking to know what I'm really trying to say). A group of friends from one of the bulletin boards I belong to are going to be doing this as a stitch along starting September/October-ish and aiming for 1 square every two months. I've chosen royal blue and chocolate brown with silver accents and a cream neutral as my colours, but now I'm second guessing myself and wondering if I should have gone with my second choice which was black and white with red accents and a silver grey neutral.

I had intended to start stitching Gay Ann Rogers Heart of Elizabeth with the rest of the class earlier this year, but I'm still waiting for one thread to come in so I haven't started it yet, and now it's probably going to have to wait a bit longer while I get the things with deadlines done.

I haven't really felt like stitching much since I finished my pilot piece, so I haven't got much to update on, but here is the latest progress on Tree of Stitches:

I also joined a SAL on the HAED board (yes, again) called Siberian Forest and here is what I've done on that so far. I'm stitching over 2 on 40ct, and even with my brilliant light it's easier to stitch on during the day.

Finally - the back of the pirate quilt - the pale blue is waves and was originally going to be the border on the front but it washed out too much so I got the dark blue map fabric instead for that. Then I used as big a pieces as I could from the fabric that was left over for the back so it would be as little work as possible. I have started on the quilting it all together now and hopefully will finish that soon and then I might even have my first quilt. I'm just quilting along the lines of the blocks for this one, but I can already see that a nice decorative stitch along the seams would be more forgiving and hide the bits where I could steer properly.

I've still got quite a lot of fabric from this quilt left over so I'm thinking of doing a baby quilt (like the original kit was for) for the school fund raising auction. I may not get it done for this year though.

My next update on Phaun:

Hopefully soon you'll also get to see a finish of Tempest - he's getting ever closer, I think I've finished half the backstitching now.

I signed up for another SAL with the HAED BB back in May or June. I've been saving the chart just waiting, and last night I finally started it. It's a long thin piece (like the other one I'm doing - Light of the World), but when I first chose it I decided I didn't want to stitch the cat's haunch as it seemed to dominate the picture due to the thin slice taken. Then when I was thinking about fabric - I knew I didn't want to do it on 25ct again, not that I have any left now - I decided I'd leave out the background too so a nice hand dyed would be good.

After rooting around in my stash I found a solitaire from Sparklies that would work. A very exaggerated mottled blue that I think will work well as the wall paper background. But it was 28ct and only 9x13". So I looked at my chart again and worked out the part I wanted to stitch (top two thirds), and how big that would be stitching over 2 on 28ct. 17". Oh. OK. Maybe not. But it was good fabric, and the next choice was a green fat quarter so I'd end up with a narrow bit of fabric left over, and I didn't want to do that either. So back to looking at the chart. I realised I could cut off about 30 rows from the top since I wasn't stitching the background, so that helped a bit. But it was still too long.

 So I looked at the fabric again and started thinking that if I only had a 1" border at top and bottom I could get 11" in there of stitching, which would be 154 rows. So minus the first 30 rows of chart that would take me to about the middle and still be a decent amount of cat. YES, I can now do it.

Then I pulled all the thread, I started trying to just pull what I'd need, but that got difficult, so I pulled everything I had from the list (still got some gaps, but I'll worry about those later) and got stitching. In my eagerness to fit it on the small piece of fabric I left less than half an inch of margin. After finishing my first length of thread my brain caught up with me and I pulled it all out and restarted with an inch of margin.

So here is my first picture of not quite the first length of thread finished. I would have finished the thread again and kept going a bit more too, but we didn't realise that the clock in the living room had reset itself back to daylight savings time (it's one of those ones that gets its time by radio signal and we thought it wasn't working so we adjusted it manually in the morning), and so we thought it was an hour later than it was. Once we realised that we changed the clock to mountain time as we couldn't get it to stay on the correct time. Then this morning it decided to go back to ordinary time again, so now it was an hour fast. So back to the correct time zone it went. Stupid clock.



And the full fabric:



I'm hoping to work on this each week slowly to make progress. I really need to work on Light of the World too, but I really don't like doing over one on 25ct, it's just irritating.

While looking for the fabric for this I was also looking for a piece for Tree of Stitches by Abi Gurden on the Stitch Specialists yahoo group. My original plan was to use overdyed threads and use a brown for the trunk, green for the leaves and pink for the blossoms - fairly standard really. But then I found the *perfect* bright pink fabric for it, and I'm not sure my colour scheme is going to work any more. So I'm now ruminating on thread colours to use for that. Perhaps I should go with a thread like the old Needle Necessities Calypso - although that might be too busy - I'll have to see.

And lastly - there are going to be fewer stitching updates than normal for a while as my main piece now is a pilot project that I can't share with you yet.