Incoherent Scribblings

Miss Me?

Some of you may have noticed (and then again maybe not) that I have been MIA for a few days. The reason for this is because of a hardware malfunction.

On Tuesday evening I abruptly lost my Internet connection for no apparent reason. After 24 hours of home troubleshooting and hoping the connection would magically repair itself, Hubby called our provider. Of course the repairman couldn’t come to look at things until late yesterday and then when he finally did it turned out it wasn’t our DSL line at all! Instead our DSL modem had died an untimely death.

As a result during the past few days when I wasn’t aimlessly wandering over to the computer to check my email, comments, or bulletin boards only to realize that I couldn’t do it, I was stitching.
On Wednesday I made an executive decision to put my rotation on hold and finish my square for Dawn’s Seasonal Round Robin. Even though I am still waiting to hear from her and get her new address, I still want to have her square finished by May 15 (our post date) so that as soon as I do hear from her I can mail her robin back to her.

I would guesstimate that I am between 30 and 50% done with my spring chair. In my opinion, the square itself only looks about 30% finished, but the chair doesn’t take up the entire square so I may actually be closer to half way done. Since I will be working on it exclusively until it is finished, I should be done with it some time in the coming week.

A Dragon Named Confetti

I have been trying to name my “Above the Clouds” dragon for a couple of weeks now. At first I wanted to name him Norbert in honor of Hagrid’s baby dragon in Harry Potter and the Philosopher (Sorcerer)’s Stone, but upon investigating my Harry Potter Lexicon I realized this dragon doesn’t fit the description of a Norwegian Ridgeback.

Tonight however, I came upon the perfect name for him: I am going to call him Confetti in honor(?) of all the @!#?%$ confetti stitching that I did today and will be doing on him in the future!

This is the first time that I have had to do so much confetti stitching for one project. In the past I have had a couple projects with a few little areas, but never have I done anything with so much of it! Two stitches here, change colors, rethread the needle, three stitches there, change colors, rethread the needle, weave the loose thread under, and start again. Egads! My progress was so slow today that at this rate I will have both “Celtic Spring” AND “Fairy Flora” done before I finish this TW “Petite!”

Of course, this leads me to believe that I must be going about this whole confetti stitching thing rather inefficiently. If you have any suggestions for better confetti stitching, please leave me a comment… But for now think I will go have a look online for some tips. Cheers!

Mae (and) Flowers

The weather was so beautiful and springy this weekend that instead of stitching pansies on “Stiefmütterchen” I decided to go out and get some of the real thing instead!

I usually have pretty good luck growing seedlings, so I bought some violas yesterday and today I planted them in my window box. I have never tried to grow pansies directly from seeds, but I thought it might be a fun challenge, so I also bought a package of pansy seeds. I planted the seeds in a pot and in 15-20 days we will see what happens… Wish me luck!

Anyway, when I wasn’t outside playing in the dirt this weekend I was working on “Celtic Spring” and I managed to make some good progress on Mae’s dress. I now have (approximately) the top half of Mae done so next weekend I plan to work some on the border. I am quite happy with how quickly “Celtic Spring” seems to be stitching up. I seriously doubt I will get her done before the official end of spring, but I am pretty sure she should be done before autumn!

Fun with Overdyed Floss

I haven’t had as productive a stitching week as usual because I am working on a new household organization system, but I managed to squeak in a little happy dance nevertheless!

My order of Weeks Dye Works arrived on Wednesday and on Thursday I started stitching Brittercup Designs “Britty Kitties: I Love My Cat” with them. I briefly considered stitching over one, but since I wanted to get the full effect of the floss I opted to stitch over two on plain old 30 count white evenweave instead.

Though I found it an interesting experiment to stitch with these fibers, I am not sure I am overly impressed. I stitched one full cross at a time as recommended and I must say that it was a bit awkward at first: Once I got a rhythm figured out though I was pleased with the way the back turned out. However, beyond that I am afraid I was a bit disappointed because in the end I didn’t see as much variation in the floss color as I had hoped.

I do really like these Britty Kitty designs and I have five more to stitch. However, whether I will order the overdyes to stitch the rest of them remains to be seen…

BTW: The design didn’t call for it, but I decided it would be fun to personalize it with my kitties’ names. (Mouse, Scooter, and Harley)

In Over Your Head?

It’s Wednesday and time for the SBQ! This week’s question was suggested by Jenna and is:

Do you do obligation or deadline-based stitching? Why or why not? If you do, do you tend to get in over your head and why?

As a matter of fact, I do do obligation or deadline-based stitching in the form of round robins and exchanges. I mostly started doing them just because I was curious. However, they have really turned into great socialization activities for me and though I prefer round robins over exchanges I have lots of fun with both.

I will admit that I was definitely concerned about getting in over my head when I first started doing round robins and exchanges, but I took it slow and by now I know my limits. For example, I know that if I have more than two round robins going at a time I may get them finished by their deadlines, but I won’t have any time to stitch for myself.