Gifted Gorgeousness - February Edition

Hello one and all! I hope everyone is bundled up nicely because it is freakin' cold! Or maybe y'all on the warmer side of the Earth are in short-shorts and the envy of us all! I am woefully behind in blog reading.  Our new little kitty, Klondike, has fooled us all into thinking he is a perfect little angel but alas! So I am keeping certain rooms closed off, including the office, until I'm 100% sure he isn't being a little stinker. This post is brought to you by typing a teeny bit each day and scheduling during cat naps! I will catch up eventually.  :)

click to join the fun!

Anyway, on to the gorgeousness! Or at least the gifted-ness.

Ta-da! The Muppets have been started! My mom, The Awesomest Mom Ever, managed to find a piece of evenweave on an excursion to the Big City so I washed, ironed, cut, and marked the center WITH FABRIC PEN. Permanent markers were banished from the room entirely. I apologize in advance that I will not be able to show this piece in its entirety. As you can see (hopefully, lol), the letters are individual Muppets, tweaked from this and this alphabet. As such, they will spell out the child's full name and I don't like that info online.  Instead, I will show snippets.  Feel free to guess the characters~ :D

There is not a ton of progress on this piece because 1) I made this pattern -- some colors were off (pattern maker is an older version) and some things, once stitched, looked odd and needed redesigned. So even the pattern is still a WIP! This letter in particular is giving me a lot of grief. 2) I find I absolutely cannot stitch with my glasses on the 28-count. I must, must, must be wearing my contacts and that is not an everyday thing in winter.

Anyway! PROGRESS WEEEEEEEEE. My goal is the end of April. I CAN DO THIS. /frantic.

lemony goodness

And here, help yourself to some bread. I was quite upset at FedEx delivery on Friday and what better thing to do when upset than to beat the living daylights out of eggs and sugar? I wound up making two regular loaves and four mini loaves of lemon-zucchini bread. I followed the recipe as written except I used 2 teaspoons of lemon extract instead of 2 tablespoons lemon juice.  I find it makes for a stronger lemony flavor and we're lemon-lovers in this house!

Anywhoodle, I'm sure your productive fingers have made a substantial dent in all of your gifts! :D

The Arrival of a Fridge Magnet!!

Back in my 2015 Ambitions post, I mentioned that this is the year I would like to get a needle minder so I can stop losing needles to the couch arms / carpet gremlins / whatever it is that steals needles in this house. I got completely RAKd by Justine who not only got me a needle minder, she got me one that I had wanted even before I had put it up on my revamped wishlist to remind myself of it! I'm sure she knew it arrived because my squeals of delight were loud enough to reach across the puddle, right?!

:D

:DDDDDD

If you don't know who this little kitty is, her name is Chi from Chi's Sweet Home, a Japanese manga series detailing the life and adventures of an adorable kitten getting used to being a people cat! I love it, THANK YOU SO MUCH, Justine!

FotM - January and Messy-to-Classy

Well hidey ho! I'm gonna jump right in here with I HAVE A FINISH!!

January - Carnations

Weeee, my first finish of 2015! At this rate maybe I will have a solid 11 finishes by the end of the year! This is the first check in for the Flower of the Month SAL hosted by Alyssa at Brownie's Chair and I'm so happy to have it ready to show off. Well... I guess mostly finished. See that big empty space above the flowers? I'm hoping to eventually design a "Rosey's Kitchen" or "[month] Kitchen" or just "[month]" (on all of them!) but no fonts have inspired me thus far. I'll keep lookin'. I started off unsure on the colors I selected as they were not the ones called for.  Now that it's finished, I am happy with them but not that bottom carnation.  I think.  It may grow on me.  You may notice I decided to not stitch the border.  It's a tight squeeze on the huck towels as is.  And as I've been mostly quiet this month with no WIP pictures of this project, I thought maybe you would like to see a little GIF of my progress.

grow and bloom!

It is incredibly hard to get the same lighting and position haha.  I'll try harder 'cause I think this looks kinda neat.  :D

Technical Details

• "January: Carnation" freebie pattern by Ellen Maurer-Stroh, found here
• 2 over 1 on 14-count ecru huck towel (called for 3 over but I thought 2 looked okay)
• Finished size: 4.50 x 4.50" (11,50 x 11,50 cm)
• Started: January 1, Finished: January 30.  19.5 hours.

finishes - before

finishes - after

I have a little addition to the Messy-to-Classy link party hosted by Preeti. It is still fairly cold in my craft room so I've been stubbornly ignoring its messiness until warmer weather. Instead, I took advantage of a decent Internet connection and organized my finishes and wishes pages! I originally had them sorted with pictures but my connection cannot handle too many images and as time goes on, the finishes page will grow (I hope!) beyond what I can load. So, I changed everything over to links with a short description.  I may have gone a bit, erm, overboard with the wishlist though, lol. I dream big and will never accomplish half (quarter!) of the stuff listed! I even went scouring HaED patterns after seeing so many wonderful starts with DUCJC I had to give it a second chance. I did not realize there were over 10k patterns on that site, lol. I hope this somewhat unorthodox "cleaning" is okay.

Hi!

In other, less stitchy news, we have a new kitty! Please find yourself admiring this rather potato picture of our newest black and white, Klondike. Peanut took to him rather quickly as Peanut is a loving goofball and Klondike has an unending supply of energy. It's kitty terrorism when they start playing. Oreo, she is still being worked on. She's always been a bit of a stubborn butt-head (even with Peanut, who she grew up with) so I'm not worried. She tolerates Klondike and will play in the same area as him, so small steps. :)

Whew!  That is a lot of stuff; I hope you survived~! 

IHSW and TUSAL!

Hello, world!

It was IHSW! A magical three-day weekend if you were in the USA and lucky enough to have a place of work that honors MLK Day.  I wish I could say I had a fabulously productive time but I did a whole lotta nothing.  I went to our not-so-local craft store on Saturday to get a replacement for my botched fabric... and they didn't have any!  *cry*  I have one more place I'm hoping to check but if they don't have it, I'll just have to bite the bullet and order online. What a frustrating mess I've put myself in.  :D

But I do have my first TUSAL picture of the year! If you're unaware what TUSAL is, we save our little end bits of floss over the year to do whatever with. Quite simple, really! Since 2013 was unproductive and 2014 was a little better, these ORTs are from 2012 to now. Yikes. Maybe they'd look more impressive if I didn't feel the need to squish them down. There's bits of fuzzy yarn in there from my crocheting escapades, and the top layer of flosses are from Dolphin Trio and FotM - January Carnations.

Wish me luck on finding that elusive fabric! Whodathunk plain ol' white evenweave would be so difficult to come by!?

Gifted Gorgeousness - January Edition

Yay, my first Gifted Gorgeousness post!  Thanks to Jo for hosting these~ :D

It's amazing how even our best-laid plans go wonky, or at least mine do. I was so excited to start the Muppets sampler. First, I washed the fabric because, learning from experience, washing after you've stitched does not always mean any fabric creases will magically go away and it becomes impossible to iron! So, washed, dried, and nicely ironed. Then I decided to cut the fabric down to a 20" x 20" square which would leave me a little room to play around with other projects on the smaller piece. Easy enough. Next, I wanted to mark the center of the fabric and toyed around with actually making a grid on this so I wouldn't have quite so many counting mistakes. I folded the fabric, found the center, and marked it.

With a blue permanent marker instead of the fabric pen sitting beside it.

Of course there's a nice empty space right in the center so it can't be stitched over and the colors for that area wouldn't really hide the blue anyway. I decided to try bleach... it lightened it extensively but still there is a nice little blue dot and the bleach did something strange to the fabric.

So, while the fabric isn't destroyed, it's not useable for this particular project.  It was large enough that I could cut it up for several smaller works or, if there was a pattern that fully covered the center... Bah.  I did so hope to have a whole array of adorable Muppet letters to show off this month. :(

Lesson learned: Keep your fabric pens separate! (!!!)

Before

So I instead worked a bit on Dolphin Trio! This little kit was a gift from my husband's grandmother(s) who like to encourage hobbies and know I like dolphins.  There's really not too much left on this piece. Here's where I was previously, back in May 2012.

updated

updateder

And here's the after! Most obviously filled in the bottom right corner because I like to see edges. Gives me a goal, haha. Not too sure how I feel about the dark half stitches, though.  Easy to stitch but ehhhhh.  There's a lot of them too!

Blah. Not at all how I wanted to start out the year! But I did work on something that really should've been finished eons ago so there's that~ :D