Portrait of Christ #2

Here's where I got to by the fourth - going fairly quick for slowpoke me :D

I remember seeing this kit on several blogs a few years ago and all of them called it difficult - I think that was why I got it.  For the challenge, lol!  There is a lot of confetti and blends but after a HAED - this is easy-peasy.

(Hopefully, those won't turn in to 'famous last words'!!!)

I haven't really picked a project yet for today - I put a few stitches on the October block of my Snappers but I don't think I'm sticking with it.  I feel the need to work on another WIP and then pick up the Snappers on the 10th.

Maybe Wufei will be next!  Nice big blocks of color :D :D :D

Happy stitching!

Tama

A Report on Little Projects

This post will include finishes, a start, an old WIP, stash, and the bunny story!

First off - I finished 'The Great Light' on 7-17-15:

It came out really pretty!  I did do the tiny french knots in the scripture reference in the wrong holes - they were supposed to be in the middle of the squares.  I fixed it, but the holes they were in are kinda big now.  Usually washing will fix that, though, and this one is gonna need a bath since it went to work with me :D  The only thing I really don't like about it is that the cross on the steeple is off center.  That's the way it's charted, but I may redo it.

That makes 4 out of 7 of Bucilla's 'Christmas Promises' kits done.  Here are the three I have left in my stash:

'Emmanuel', 'Guardian Angels', and 'Peace'.  I will probably do either 'Emmanuel' or 'Guardian Angels' next, since they are similar, and then work 'Peace' in between them.  I won't be starting one yet, though.  I pulled out a Crazy January start - I think from 2013! - to work on next.  It is 'Three Kings' from the 1988 Gloria and Pat freebie pattern leaflet.

I only have the head of the King in green done so far.

And now for a Bunny Story!  I said in an earlier post that the Bunnies were another CJ start, and I had gotten this far:

Originally, I had intended to do just two bunnies, a pinky-white one and a brown one, and give them to my sister, who is a rabbit lover.

Then, this Easter, I made these cakes - remember?

One went to my oldest nephew, whose family was staying with my Mum and Dad.  Everybody ate some of it, but when they got up the next day and looked for the rest - the cake was there, and the candy was there, but the bunny peeps were mysteriously gone.

I also had about thirty bunny peeps left over, and my sister, who doesn't like carrot cake, had asked that I save them for her.  She loves peeps!

Well, they also mysteriously vanished.  Turns out, my Mum has discovered that SHE loves peeps, too.  This is the first year she ever ate any.  The ones at my house had gotten a tiny bit stale, and she says she likes them even better that way.

Weird mother - and this is a lady who will take the food off her own plate to give to someone who wants it - but she was absolutely, 100% unapologetic about eating all the peeps!

So here's how I finished up the bunnies, and the trim I bought for making them into a cushion, a cube, or a flatfold - haven't decided which:

And they will be presented to my Mum on her birthday :D  She will LOVE this and laugh like a lunatic!

Lastly, a start.  I have three nephews - 12, 6, and 2 - and they all are obsessed with Lego!  So I bought this alphabet on etsy:

And I have started the first of three names to be stitched in Lego blocks :D  There is a truckload of backstitch in these and I will be doing it as I go along :D  I'm stitching it on white 18 count.

So, two 'purse' projects done and two more to take their place.  Yay!

And now, I go back to my regular rotation, because I don't have any double shifts for at least the next two weeks (I hope).

Acquainted With the Night (this post is long!!!)

When I was a kid, I loved to read.  Still do, but back then I wanted to read everything, and now I'm sort of set in my reading tastes and don't venture beyond too often.  Kind of sad.  Anyway, my Da is a big-time reader, too, and he used to spend hours reading Louis L'amour westerns.  He wouldn't let me read them until I was twelve, which just made me more desperate to get my hands on them, haha!  They are very 'clean' as far as westerns go - no actual sex, but plenty of violence.  Not as graphic as most, but it's there.

But - the romance of those books!  And I don't mean the love story, even though there is plenty of that! (They're like romance books for men, I swear!)  The believable hero, an ordinary man doing extraordinary things - the family bonds - the beautifully described, sweeping scenery - the musical, poetic rhythm to the way that man wrote... eh, I was ruined.  Totally wanted to marry a cowboy.

Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, 'Bendigo Shafter', from the first chapter, when the wagons going west stopped to build a town :

My father had been a Bible-reading man and named his sons from the Book.  Four of our brothers had gone the way of flesh, and of the boys only we two remained.  Cain, a wedded man with two children, and I, Bendigo Shafter, eighteen and a man with hands to work.

Our sister was with us.  Lorna was a pretty sixteen, named for a cousin in Wales.

'You will build for the Widow Maken', Cain said to me.  'Her Bud is a man for his twelve years, but young for the lifting of logs and the notching.'

So I went up the hill through the frost of the morning, pausing when I reached the bench where their cabin would stand.  A fair place it was, with a cold spring spilling its water down to the meadow where our oxen and horses grazed upon the brown grass of autumn.  Tall pines, sentinel straight, made a park of the bench, and upon the steep slope behind there was a good stand of timber.  The view from the bench was a fine one, and I stood to look upon it, filling myself with the quiet morning and the beauty of the long valley below the Beaver Rim.

'You have an eye for beauty, Mr. Shafter,' Ruth Macken said to me, and I kept my eyes from her, feeling the flush and the heat climbing my neck as it forever did with a pretty woman spoke to me.  It is a good thing in a man.

'It works a magic,' I said, 'to look upon distance.'



So about two weeks ago, I was cruising along on eBay, and saw a kit I had never seen before.  Nearly fell off my chair.  It was an elderly kit, and only one other person bid on it.  Even with shipping, I got it for less than $5.

I love it.  It is supposedly for my Da's Christmas prezzie but... but this may be the first thing I ever stitch twice.  I love it.  It's my old Louis L'amour daydreams come to life again.

I am less in love with the reality of the kit itself.

I realized it said 8 x 24, but I didn't really think about that until I had the fabric out.  That's not a small project, lol!!!  And no fault of the seller, because it had never been opened, but there was a small brown spot on the fabric.  So I washed it, and it lightened.  So I washed it again - no scrubbing, just a good soak in soapy water.  When I went to iron it, I could barely see the spot - but it turned out it wasn't so much a spot as a flaw - the threads broke.

I panicked, like a twit - even started sewing it together before I smacked myself and went to get a big 30 x 36 piece of white Aida out and cut myself a new piece.  I'll cut up the old one for smaller projects - it's fine beyond that one flaw.

When I measured it out, I found that it was only big enough to give me one inch all the way around, anyway - so I cut a much bigger piece with healthy margins.

Then I really looked at the chart and thought, 'Um - that's tiny.'  Really tiny - the whole long thing is on a two-page folded sheet.  I took it to work and enlarged it 200% to get it normal sized.  Then I realized that this kit is so old that the chart is hand-drawn (ugh, so hard to read the symbols!) and has no grid lines.  So I'm drawing those on as I go.  I'm spoiled to grid lines XD

Then this:

That's the floss.  There is a color/symbol list, with no instructions of how to sort the floss beyond 'sort the floss'.  No number of strands.  Just take your best shot, I guess.  It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't mostly shades of blue, grey, and blue-grey.  It's not always easy to tell which they mean to be Lt Blue and which is Lt Blue Grey.

They did have DMC floss numbers listed, with a note that they did not use DMC floss but these were close matches.  So I got my floss card out.

About three colors actually matched the numbers.  It was almost no help.  Also, there were two bundles of floss - each had the exact same colors in the exact same number of strands.  There is a total of three (3) stitches of red in this pattern, yet I got two strands of red floss.  I'm thinking that they maybe accidentally put two floss bundles in the kit.  This I do not mind, but it didn't help with the sorting.

It's way too late to make this long story short, but I persevered, had a bit of a ponder on how the new way kits are done has me totally spoiled rotten (sorted floss!  patterns with grid lines!  perfectly printed symbols!) and then I got down to business.

And I'm right back in love.

That's my five days of progress.   Not too bad, I guess.  That one row of blue at the bottom has reached where the horse's leg will be.  I figured it up at about 17% done, then realized I wasn't counting the horse's shadow (it's all solid stitching, there is no half-stitch in this kit)  and cut it down to 15% done.   So yay, anyway.  But this one is going to need to be worked on once a month, like Unspoken.  But that's as far as I'm limiting myself on projects - I refuse to let anything else get put on the must-work-on list.

So next - maybe my Snappers?  I haven't decided.

Oh, and here's a bit of progress on my 'purse' kits - I finished the blue bunny and started the next - he's green.

And I got two colors done on 'Great Light'.  Actually, three colors, but I forgot to take a picture of the last one.

Gold:

And about ten stitches of Dark Taupe:

And I've done the Darkest Green but I'll have a pic of that later.  Two colors and the backstitching to go on this one.

An Afghan Update

I posted quite a while back that I wanted to try and make an afghan for each of my immediate family members this year, as their Christmas present - the total was eight afghans.

Well, like my usual plans, I ran into issues.  Mostly it was the trouble with my arm, which is much better than it was but still is giving me some grief.

I tried to keep crocheting a little bit at a time, but I finally had to just give it up, cold turkey, for a while.  I started back up on September the first and I tackled the granny-square blocks for my baby nephew first.  I had them done, they just needed to be sewed together and a border put around them.

Did the sewing together:



And finished it with the border somewhere around the middle of September.  So, I finished one out of eight, lol!



What I am going to try to do is finish the afghans that I have started, which will make one per couple - two siblings and their spouses, and Mom & Dad.  Then one for each of my nephews, so five afghans.  One down, four to go!

This one is for my sister in law to begin with, now my brother & her's.  It took seven strips, and I had four done.  Now I have all seven done and I am crocheting them together.  They are not whipstitched like the granny blocks - they have a very interesting joining technique.  I have two together and am working on the next two.  The first two took me about an hour, so I'm hoping the rest go more quickly!  Then two rows of single crochets all the way around, and it's done.




And the one that was for my other sibling Tavi is over halfway done now.  It is even further than this pic, which I took maybe two days ago?  Four of seven pattern repeats are done now:




And I'm also working on my mother's choice of afghan; it is currently being taken everywhere with me because it's only about a foot wide and five or so feet long - it looks like a big scarf.  I will show a picture of it soon!

That leaves my other nephew's afghan, and I couldn't find the shade of grey yarn that I needed.  I found pale grey, dark grey, medium grey, but no medium-light grey.  So, there came a box from Herschner's:



And lovely yarn was in it!  Perfect shade of grey - there are five 8oz skiens in there.  The red yarn is for the afghan my Dad wanted because I am eternally hopeful that time will stop for about three months and let me actually finish all eight!  But I'm not holding my breath!



The floss in there is for my eternally-continuing kitting up of HAED patterns, of which I thought I would show you more from the layaway:

Iris by Law



This is one that someone already stitched - looks fabulous!



And I knocked another Hannah Lynn of the list - this one is Felicia:



There was no stitched version or mock-up of her, but Hannah Lynn's always look really good.

Back with more soon!  I have some actual, oh my goodness, stitching to show :D

Updates - Finish and Stash! (lotsa pics)

I finished the PM Brave... hmm, either Saturday night or Sunday night.  I forget which!  But I've been too busy to post until today.

Isn't he cute?


Here he is with the girl - they need the names added under them, then they'll be cut apart (poor things!) because I want the canoe between them and also I want them to turn toward each other instead of having their backs to each other.


I'm back to working on the eagle, but there isn't a lot of the next shade I chose, so I'll be starting the two in the canoe (ooooo, rhyming!) soon.

I've also started the next Stocking, and since I'm posting today, I'll give you a shot of where it's at right now. I just started it yesterday at work and it's going really fast!


No, I started it Monday at work because yesterday I went to JoAnn's for the big sale!  I had the day off, and it's far enough away that it is a day-long trip.  We also went grocery shopping to save a trip, but more about that in a few.

Here's one thing I got - I wanted kits but since I couldn't use my coupons on them (they were on sale at a whole 10% off - I think they were cheating so I couldn't buy them with coupons!), I directed my attention to the McCall's patterns that were 10 for $10.  There was a limit of 10 per customer, but Mum was with me and she got some for me.  They didn't have all 20 of the ones I wanted in stock, so here's the 16 I did get.


I love making costumes.  Most of these will challenge my skills but I don't care :D  I've got a detailed sewing plan that starts in January, when it's so cold and the roads are so icy that I have to turn down the offer of extra work because I don't have a four-wheel drive to get over the mountain.  I'll show pics when I start!

Since the kits were a bust, I focused on floss and got all of Night Hunter and Mosslord kitted up.  I won't bother with a pic - it was a big pile of mostly greys, black, dark browns and dark blues. I did spend enough for the 30% off card and I plan to go back on the 25th or 26th to kit up some more HAEDs!

We stopped at WalMart to get some grocery shopping done - and I nearly fell over!  It was 2002 the last time I saw any cross stitch stuff at our WalMart - yet, lo and behold! - a whole quarter aisle!  With DMC!!! Not every color, of course, but I got some greys that had empty bins at JoAnn's, and next time I'll know to stop off at WalMart first!

Also, I do like to take tiny kits along in my purse - I was out of them and right now the stockings are taking their place, but eventually those will be done.  I couldn't bring myself to buy them for $3 like at Hobby Lobby or JoAnn's, but I grabbed five at WalMart for 99cents each! Yay!




I got my UFO kit in the mail really fast, but I'll bore you guys with a pic of that next time :D  Also, there was a payday!  That meant more Random Generator picks of WS-n-B patterns!

This time's winners:

Hunting


Candle Light


Lastly - no update of the afghan.  I've left it alone all week, but I plan to work on it tomorrow evening after I get back from the dentist, and hopefully my hands will be fine!

IHSW - September :D

It's a conspiracy!  I didn't work on Lovers on Thursday; I worked more on the little Brave, because Monday was free and clear for a long, lovely stitch-fest.

Then I got called in to work. So instead of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then freedom! an extra day got eaten up.

*insert wail here*

At least my paycheck will be nicer XD

Here's how Lovers did look:



And how they look now:



I think I finished up most of the background.  His profile stands out clearly, of course, but right now he looks ready to kiss the Wicked Witch of the West!  There are a few stitches that are prolly background, and a big chunk under her chin that confused me until I remembered his hand was there.  But I did finally start a few stitches of his hair - so I feel all accomplished, lol!  Even though I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted.

Today at work, I took the Ghost Cat in the Chair (I thought ghost!cat, too, rosey! even thought about doing a pale grey outline, but I didn't feel like doing the half cross of the chair and cushion he would have needed behind him to look all invisible!) and finished up all the crosses.  I started the backstitch - beyond the rug, of course - but not until after I took the picture.  The next time I post about this, it will be with a finish!



I took Christmas Bells along, too, but lately they have just gotten no love at all.  They're so little, and yet I have done only a few stitches when they could be another wee finish.  Oh, well.  Soon.

IHSW for November

I decided to keep working on Fred for the weekend - I still have hopes of finishing him off this year.
*crosses fingers*
Anyway - Fred now has a complete bum!



And I've started the work on those six red books in the bottom corner. I'll be going back and forth between them and the dreaded shelves for a while, possibly with a bit of the bird thrown in to keep my interest. We'll see how it goes!

I also finished two crocheted hats. These are for my dad for Christmas. He's bald, and on blood thinners, so his poor head gets very cold. I usually make him one of these, at least, every year, and by the next Christmas he's needing a new one. Last year, however, I made him a balaclava, so now he really needs a new hat! His old one has shrunk so much from being washed that it's halfway up his forehead, lol!

Here's the first - a slightly loose stitch with a nice ridge pattern to make it fit snugly. This is for when the weather is a little warmer or he wants to wear it during the day. I put a crab-stitch edging on it which looks like picots in the pic, but won't when he's wearing it. The finished hat was a little loose at the edge, so I added the crab-stitch to make sure it would stay on snugly.



The second one is a much thicker, plain double-crochet stitch. It's for cold days or to sleep in at night - yes, he sleeps in them at night. He used to have a quilted one that originally went under a helmet or was for hunting - I don't know - but it wouldn't stay on his head at night and he'd wake up with a head cold. So these are much better!



And that's two more prezzies off the list, which is lovely! On to my nephew's much more complicated hat!

Some Crochet and a Tiny Finish

I snapped a quick pic of the Juliet dress - the length is coming along nicely. I didn't arrange the dress for the pic, it was just a spur of the moment thing while I was measuring, so do forgive that it's laying a bit lumpy!


And here's a pic of my makeshift blocking board with some white granny squares (and two granny triangles). They are very brilliantly white in real life, and I'm being very, very cruel to my sister-in-law with them... she's getting a white scarf for Christmas. She'll love it BUT I would hate to be her trying to keep makeup off of it! The squares will be stitched together and then edged with a glittery blue yarn, and there will be tassels! Normally I wouldn't block granny squares as they usually shape themselves quite nicely, but I want the scarf to look really good so I'm not taking chances.


While cleaning up some cluttered closets (how's that for alliteration?) I found this little tiny kit in an old purse...


So... I don't remember buying or starting this... but there was no WAY I was adding something this small to my WIP list. So I finished it up, and had the devil's own time getting that little monster into the frame. I could NOT get it centered. This was the best I could do. But it'll look cute on Mum's stocking at Christmas.


I'll have a progress pic of my Nautical Sampler soon! I was watching TV with my Dad and trying to get a bit of backstitching done on the flags and I left it at my parents' house. So I have to pick it up tomorrow. But I've finished the knots and the anchors.

Words to Live By

So very, very true.

(I couldn't resist, sorry!)

I finished the Loon!



One more off my WIP list, and a present finished. Just needs framing now :D

Candy and a UFO

A few days ago, the Goth Chick and I were making candy.



Well, okay, she was making the candy, I was taking pictures. She didn't like the pics of her actually stirring the stuff, but I thought the candy itself was beautiful.



It's very golden and glowing. It's glass candy, but she poured it thicker and scored it when it was slightly set, so that it broke into beautiful squares. When Mum used to make it, she would pour it out in a big sheet and then break it once it was set, so that it shattered - like, well, glass. The odd shapes were fun, but I like this, too.



Tea-flavored. Our mum and the Goth Chick's Husband ate most of it :D

I didn't plan very well for Christmas presents this year - so the other day I went through all my UFOs and dug this one out.



It's in thread, which is why it became a UFO, but after all those ornaments last year I've become much better at working with the hateful, twisty stuff. So I think this could be a quick finish. It's always been intended for my brother.