Incoherent Scribblings

April Goals and May Rotation

It’s that time again…

For April, I planned to:

1. Continue my Sunday “Harvest Witch” SAL with Dawn. - Yep!
2. Participate in the April SAT. - Yep!
3. Work on “Fairy Flora.” - Yep!
4. Work on “Poet’s Heart.” - Yep! Finished it too!
5. Stitch (and finish) a Christmas Ornament for my 10 Ornies Challenge - Yep!
6. Order the Kreiniks and charms for “Harvest Witch” and the beads for “Spring Queen” and “In Cupid’s Garden.” - Yep!

All in all a very successful month if I do say so myself!

I think I will stick with “Fairy Flora” as my focus piece in May and go from there. So, for May I plan to:

1. Continue my Sunday SAL with Dawn. (While we wait for her Kreiniks to arrive we may go ahead and start our new SAL piece “Summer’s Magic” by Dragon Dreams.)
2. Participate in the May SAT.
3. Work for at least 10 hours on “Fairy Flora.”
4. Work on (and finish?) “The Bookshelf.”
5. Work on “Spring Queen.”
6. Stitch (and finish) one of my PIF gifts.

SBQ: Heirlooms

This week’s SBQ was suggested by Jennifer and is:

Do you have any pieces that you would liked passed on to future generations as family heirlooms?

Although I would love for any of my BAPs to become family heirlooms, I think of all the pieces that I have stitched the ones that I would most like to become heirlooms are the birth samplers that I stitched for my niece and nephew.

Booking Along

Such an appropriate post title: My weekend was all about books in one form or another!

First up, here is the progress that I made on “The Bookshelf” this weekend. I have now added the authors’ names. At first I thought it was odd that Oscar Wilde was a member of this group of female authors (well, if you know anything about Oscar Wilde, maybe not) but then I realized it was Wilder as in Laura Ingalls Wilder, not Oscar Wilde!

And because I am a stickler for accent marks over letters in words (perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my first name has one of those elusive babies) I added the umlaut symbols over Emily (or Charlotte or Anne) Brontë’s name.

I also read this weekend. I finished reading John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for my novel writing class. I must say that out of all the books we have read this semester I was most dissatisfied with this one. Although I did find the glimpse into East Germany in the late 50s/early 60s slightly interesting from a personal point of view, overall I guess spy novels just don’t do anything for me.

Of course, considering that May is nearly here, the semester is quickly coming to an end. This means that tomorrow I have to hand in a portfolio of everything I have written this semester. This includes 45 pages written towards my novel, 16 “elements,” and any other writings that we included in our journal. Next week we hand in our final assignment which includes 15 polished, revised pages that (more or less) comprise a chapter of our novel and a reworked copy of our midterm project: A proposal to a publisher.

When we began the semester Dr. B. warned us that by the end of the term we would be sick of looking at our novel and at this stage I whole heartedly agree! Although I hope to take my novel and turn it into my Master’s project (aka “thesis”), I am also ready to take a bit of a break from it. Right now I feel that the story and the characters are a bit stagnant.

I think I need a new perspective on the manuscript. I am not sure which will help me more though: A month’s break from it or a pitcher of margaritas!

A New LHN Start

Even before I was close to finishing either “Above the Clouds” or “Poet’s Heart” I knew the pieces that were going to fill their rotation spots when I was done. I planned on filling the spot vacated by Confetti with TW’s “Tapestry Cat” and “Poet’s Heart” with “The Bookshelf” by Little House Needleworks.

“Tapestry Cat” is my absolute favorite TW piece and I have been trying to start it for almost two years. In fact, I was so determined to start it that I bought a fat quarter for it shortly after I received the chart and I almost started it two or three times while I was still working on Confetti. However, given the problems I had with Confetti on different occasions, each time I sat down to kit up “Tapestry Cat” I decided that I better wait until I had finished one TW before starting another one.

Well, as we all know, I finally finished “Above the Clouds” a couple of months ago and although I wanted to jump into “Tapestry Cat” right away I thought I should make progress on some other pieces before I did so. I worked on Flo, finished “Poet’s Heart,” and then the other day I decided “Tapestry Cat’s” time had come.

I rummaged through my stash until I found the chart and the fabric. I was so excited that I danced around my dining/cat/craft room singing nonsense to myself as I washed the 28 count antique white Cashel linen and began to iron it in preparation for those long-awaited first stitches.

But then I remembered something.

I remembered using a chunk of the fabric here and there for a couple of smalls because “Tapestry Cat” didn’t need the entire fat quarter and suddenly I wasn’t sure whether or not I had enough fabric to start “Tapestry Cat” after all this time.

So I got out my tape measure and measured.

And then I started “The Bookshelf” by Little House Needleworks.

SBQ: Blends

I seem to have taken to posting the SBQ every other week lately but I am going to get back on track… starting next week!

This week’s SBQ was suggested by Christine and is:

How do you handle blended threads? Do you kit the blends up before you start a piece, or do you grab what colors you need and blend when the need arises? If you kit up the blends beforehand, how do you store them? Do you have another option for blends to share?

I blend (or tweed) on the fly. However, I have tried a couple of different methods for storing blends if I have a left-over length after I finish a section.

I tried punching holes in a length of cardboard and then writing the color numbers (e.g., 415/503) over the holes once, but for some reason this method didn’t really do anything for me.

Instead I just take the left-over length and wrap it around one of the bobbins that composes the blend. (e.g., In the 415/503 combo I would wrap the left-overs around the 415 or 503 bobbin) Since I usually work on the same project for a few days at a time this works pretty well as long as I don’t have two or more blends using the same colors. When I move on to a different project I either toss the blend or, if the length is still usable, separate the threads and return them to their respective bobbins.