Here’s how it looked when I received it in mid-July:

Here’s how it’s looking today as I send it off to Catherine:

My goal was to finish one orca. I believe I did that.

I’m on a six-day vacation week. After four days of rain, the sun is shining and I’m ready to go out and enjoy the weather. The day is on pause only because Erich had an eye appointment this morning and they dilated his eyes. It’s a bit bright out there for him today (ironic that he’d have been fine the last four!) We’re hoping to do some local Rhody food exploration today – the two locations we have in mind are Kenyon’s Grist Mill and Wright’s Dairy Farm which are nearly on opposite corners of the mainland here in Rhode Island. BUT… it’s such a small state that it doesn’t matter!

Write a quick comment

Since taking this photo the other day, I’ve finished bringing the vine border across the bottom and have started on the mini birdhouse that’s in the empty bottom section.  Once I’m done with the birdhouse, I’m going to go back and finish up all of the flowers.  I need to find another skein of DMC #935 to finish up the dark green under the light green squiggly.  I’ll probably focus on getting everything BUT the green done first, since I’ve been working nothing but green since last Friday.  I’m a bit tired of it.

This is someone else’s completed version, for reference.

So yeah, this one’s moving right along.  The best thing is that there’s virtually no backstitch, so once I have the crosses done, it’s essentially done.  :)  I have finish #5 of 2010 in my sights!

I dunno… maybe I’ll get another surge and actually push this one done.  There is a Rhody Stitcher group meetup on Sunday.  I imagine I’ll get some stitching energy from them.  :)

After that, I’ll be working on the UFO Round Robin for a week – I have Spryntz‘ piece now.  I keep joking with my husband that I’m going to be stitching the Celestial Orcas he never wants me to summon when we play Dungeons & Dragons.  (geek in-joke… don’t ask).  Her piece is called “Giants of the Sea” and is a Sunset-published piece.  It’s not one I’ve seen before.  It’s really been progressing since she sent it of.  I’m planning on working as much of the orca as possible that belongs to that disembodied tail.

Write a quick comment

Rahenna selected Teresa Wentzler’s “Angel Procession” to send around. Here’s how I received it:

And here’s how it’s leaving me:

I focused on the one thing that any Teresa Wentzler has plenty of…

backstitching.

20 hours of it – I worked the outside edge and inside edge of the brown border around the piece. Plus the the satin stitches in the border. I feel pretty good – even if it doesn’t come out well in a picture.

Write a quick comment

Here’s how it looked when I received it:

And here’s how it’s leaving:

Detail on my summer bunny:

Next round, I’ll be working TW’s Angel Procession – seriously cannot wait.

Write a quick comment

It still isn’t looking like much, but slowly it will.

Now I’m moving on to Linda’s piece for the UFO RR. Here’s what it looks like as I received it:

I’ll be starting the summer bunny tonight. I think I may finish it this round.

Write a quick comment

Before:

After:

In addition to blue on the bottom of the dress, I also did some white sections in the dress and sleeve folds – but they don’t show up well on the photo. I wanted to do more than this, honestly – even though I did get 17 hours in on it, I just don’t feel like I did enough work on it. *sigh*

The new job and the weekend in PA just took control.

Ah well – I did make some progress.

Write a quick comment

Round #1 is PugMama’s piece… and this is how I received it:

There’s a lot done.  I’m debating working on backstitching parts of it this round, since I’m now on a backstitch swing for the next little bit in my rotation.  I’ll see how I feel next weekend when I can actually get this on scroll bars, though.

The other is the slow and steady progress of backstitching – and when I was at this point, I remarked how easy it is to see what a difference backstitching makes:

For my friends who don’t stitch… backstitching is the outlining of elements to define their shape and make them “pop.” It can be a bit of a chore, but usually the effort is well-worth it for the final effect. So in this photo, the right side of the head has been backstitched. The left side (at that point), including the eye and nostril, had not been. And later this week, I’ll have the entire piece backstitched. It really is amazing how it makes it pop from this fabric!

Write a quick comment

I needed a little change on the template to feel springy.  It’s a bit pink for me, but for now, it works. 

I had a productive weekend of stitching.  Hush Hush is now complete (hooray!) and ready to mail off to Carolyn, once I have her address (image pops):

Not bad for a first try, although I’m wincing a bit at the placement of that heart. Ah well.  The specifications for this were a butterfly in funky colors, a heart stitched in the receiver’s favorite color, and her initials.  Carolyn gave me “autumn shades” and “turquoise” as her favorite colors – so I tried to stick to those as much as possible.

I spent the rest of the weekend working on Legends of the Dragons, since it was screaming the loudest. I wound up doing some frogging, which slowed down my progress – but overall I’m pleased with what I did. I’m going to finish up the thread I’m currently working tonight, and then put it aside for this rotation. (Pics will come tonight).

Stacy’s project for the UFO Round Robin arrived on Saturday. I’m holding off on that until next week – I want to try to push the rest of my rotation through by Saturday the 26th so I can focus on the Round Robin piece for a week or two. I’m hoping mine arrives at Catherine shortly, now that it’s been in transit a week (ah, the joys of sending internationally). Today’s the official due date for sending – I have a couple of participants who haven’t posted anything yet, and I’m trying not to be too antsy about it.

Off to lunch in the great deluge of Boston… more later!

Write a quick comment

(oh yeah… I spent them in front of the TV watching the Olympics and stitching…)

Ready for a long post? I haven’t done one of these in a LONG time. It feels good, actually.

I started this post on March 2nd, by the way, but saved it before heading to lunch and forgot about it.  Since I’m still not as familiar with how WordPress will post things, I’m curious whether it will show up before or after the photo I just posted.

Anyway…

Crazy, crazy month. It flew by entirely too fast. BUT – it was productive, in many ways. I’ll talk about stitching in a sec – but I’ll start with the general life stuff.

Erich and I have *gasp* finally gone bowling. It’s a bit of an in-joke, really. I mean, we’ve been together for nine years this May, and we’d never gone bowling. We’d talked about it – and we live within a mile of three separate bowling alleys (although one’s duck pin only, so that may not count), but we’d never gone.

Our best man and his wife thankfully changed that when they invited us to the Sunday morning bowling hangout they’re doing up in Brockton. So… 9:30 on Sunday morning, we’re now hanging out with them at the lanes, bowling a few games since there’s a special to rent lanes by the hour and bowl as many games as you can. Cheap morning – gets us up and moving (and getting some slight exercise, at least!)

We’ve also decided to start doing one other night of bowling per week down by us – the lane in Cranston just down Rt. 1 from us does dollar per game nights on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after 8 p.m., which works perfectly for us. So tonight we’ll go after we eat dinner at home and bowl 4 or 5 games.

I’m still playing pretty badly – the last time I’d been bowling was at the end of high school, and 17 years and about 140 pounds more weight (yeah… seriously *hangs head in shame) have completely thrown off my approach in every way. I’m rebuilding it from basics – right now focusing on the swing itself to get my accuracy, and then I’ll add steps into it. Right now if I do a step-approach, my swing gets thrown off because of the width of my hip, and I swing my arm diagonally across my body just as I do while walking. If I do a stand and swing, I have far better accuracy.

The plan next paycheck is to buy our own bowling shoes – just a few times at the lanes will pay them off (and they’ll be ours, not the worn out rental ones that god knows who has used). I’m seriously debating buying a pair of tri-color bowling shoes… because they’re bowling shoes - it seems like it’s a requirement! I’ve honestly always thought the rental shoes at the lanes were cute in a ugly rebellious sort of way.

So… hooray for hobbies as a couple!

Other stuff… Doctor Who is back on air in the UK on Easter weekend, staring here in the States on Apr. 17th. So my weekends will now be full of geekery again. I’m nervous but excited about the new Doctor. I will miss Tennant a lot in the role, but hopefully Matt Smith is fantastic, too. Steven Moffat is amazing, so if nothing else – I know I’ll enjoy the storylines.

Work’s been busy – quite a bit of overtime lately. Some parts of it are still annoying as hell, but meh, that’s work.  I have a job and for the most part, I enjoy it.  I work for a good company.  The things I do in my job are enjoyable, and most of the people I work with are, too.

Oh… and since I’m in New England, I saw no snow in February. No. Really. All of that crap that dumped on the Mid-Atlantic? Never saw it. We had a decent amount of rain, but that’s all. The first storm that gave Washington almost 30 inches or whatever? The weather forecasters up here actually apologized on air for their bad forecasts because they wound up being absolute duds. Everyone called off school and declared snow emergencies, and we barely got anything that day. Boston even offered to reimburse fines and towing fees for cars that had parked on the street – THAT was how badly off they were!

Stitching Stuff

I’ll get my final Stitching Olympics photos up late this week once I know what our weekend schedule is. The final tally, however – 10 projects worked. I managed to put stitches into all but two of my UFO projects (which I define as anything that has sat untouched for 6 months or more), plus a couple WIPs, plus started a piece for an exchange for the Life’s A Stitch board called “Hush Hush.” That’s due to be mailed out on the 15th, so I’ll be focusing on that piece until it’s done and ready to go.

Two projects are now within a couple hours of finishing – Home is Where the Cat Is (finally!) and Elemental Dragon:Spirit. Both essentially have maybe 90 minutes to two hours of backstitching each. They’re both on my radar for March.

So I’m very pleased… even if my goal list for February went extremely askew:

For February, my goals were

1) Rotate through all of my WIPs and UFOs at least once  No.  I was a few projects short.  But I DID get through 10 projects last month, so I’m very happy with the progress I made.
2) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is  So close – I just ran out of time at the end of the month.  I’m 4 hours away from finishing, max.
3) Finish Spirit  All but the backstitching.  So I’m about 90 minuts max on this one from finishing.
4) Put together the individual progress pages on my website  One of these months, maybe I’ll get to this.  But it hasn’t happened for 3 now.  So… yeah.  I’ll just focus on some stitching and call a mulligan on this.
5) Finalize my rotation that will start in March  Yep.
6) Remember to photograph the TUSAL this month.  OMG I finished one of my goals this month!

Seriously though, I’m pleased with what I did this month, even if it didn’t match the goals.

For March, I want to…

1) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is
2) Finish Spirit
3) Get my Hush Hush exchange out on time
4) Get my UFO RR mailing out on time
5) Rotate through my new rotation once by the end of March

Rotation for this month will be:

Hush Hush project (finish and mail by 3/15)
Cats on a Staircase (for Yoyo’s Christmas SAL)
Elemental Dragons: Spirit (will finish)
Egyptian Sampler
Apache Wedding Blessing
Home is Where the Cat is (will finish)
Legends of the Dragons (for the TW board SAL)
UFO Round Robin – Round #1

Ah yes… the UFO Round Robin. I’m seriously excited. Our first mailing date is on March 15th, and it’s looking like it’ll be a fantastic robin. Lots of diverse projects that are going around. We’re stitching as one group of eight, and the robin will take nearly a year before it’s over.

And I’m modding this shindig. Heh. I never thought experience with modding friendship book and slam swaps would come in handy!

I’m sending my Magical Night piece, which I adopted from (I believe) Annette back in 2005 or 2006. Due to the proximity to my wedding, it didn’t get the work hours I’d hoped it would. And since I have a glut of Teresa Wentzler pieces (being insane as I am), I decided sending one of them around was probably the best choice. This one’s probably the least far along – so sending it for a robin will give it a very nice push.

Here’s where it currently stands:

Like I said… it’s not far along. But next year, hopefully it will return with a nice amount of forward progress!

Until next time…

- Mel.

Write a quick comment

It’s odd to know that there’s a raging snowstorm coming up the East Coast that’s going to absolutely bury some places in 20-30 inches of snow, yet in Rhode Island there isn’t even a flake in the forecast. Amazing how these systems work. I’m so used to hearing the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington, DC announcement on Amtrak as if the megalopolis is this continual, reasonably small area of land that sometimes it’s easy to forget that no, it really isn’t.

In any case, my mom will be in this storm, though not in the worst of it. I’ll give her a call at some point to check in tomorrow.

My weekend should be fairly tame – I’m going to stitch all day tomorrow. Literally. Erich and Matt are off to play Dungeons & Dragons (well… a Star Wars campaign actually, but it’s tabletop roleplaying…) all day. They’ll probably leave sometime around 10 a.m., and I expect them home pretty late (10 or 11 p.m.). I’ll have the house to myself.

So stitching’s the plan – and lots of it. I’m going to be working on my Stitching Olympics rotation for The Wagon tomorrow. Unsure how many projects I’ll actually stitch. The official turnaround is at 2 hours. I am going to stick to that as best I can, but I do tend to be a slow stitcher. 2 hours may not give me a lot of progress. Still, it will be good to put stitches in a bunch of things. I have UFOs that literally have not been touched since before my wedding. I’m using the Olympic challenges to form my rotations for the rest of the year, too. I want to figure out which projects are strongly appealing right now and which projects I have a reasonable chance at finishing at some point this year. As far as I’m concerned, the more I can clean off my list, the more new projects I can start. But now I have a healthy group of projects to choose from, so no more from me until a couple others are completed, I think.

I also became the moderator for the new 2010 UFO Round Robin over on The Worldwide Round Robins board today. Susan’s a bit busy with work and other projects, and I was happy to jump in with the experience I have from years past in non-stitching exchanges. The RR’s scheduled to have its first mailing on March 15th, so if anyone’s interested in participating, pop over there, look for the 2010 UFO RR board (bottom of the page, currently) and drop me the info required. The more the merrier!

Time to go home soon, so I’m going to start tidying up around here before heading to the boat. (I drove to Hingham and took the ferry today)

Happy Friday!

Write a quick comment