September TUSAL

I meant to post this two weeks ago, hoping to publish two posts in one week, but time just ran away from me. Work has been taking up most of my time and I was coming home late for the past two weeks. I did do some stitching on the weekends.

I managed to finish what I need for my upcoming class in November, so that's a relief. I have one more weekend before I leave for Winnipeg. I potentially might have time on Sunday to do some work on some of the started elements, but if I don't it's okay.

I finished Mermaid of the Deep on Sunday. I'll take pictures when we have a good bright day. Once it's ironed, I can take it to the framer but that will have to wait till I get back.

Here's a sneak peek. I swapped one of the beads that I didn't like for Swarovski crystal pearls and I love how it looks. I really want to use pearls more in projects, they are my favorite stone.

So next week I'll be in Winnipeg. There will be stitching as the flight is 3 hours one way and I'll probably have time when I'm not working. I just need to decide what I'm going to take with me. Last time I took three WIPs and only worked on the hedebo piece. I'm kind of avoiding it right now. Decisions, decisions...

Weekend Update + Make

I'm not late for once! I had the entire weekend to myself so I was able to make lots of progress. I even made pancakes on Saturday.

I was able to finish restitching my woven effect leaf. It looks much better now.

I got lots of beading done as well. I emptied my second pack of beads. This pieces uses a lot of beads in this champagne color. It's very pretty but I'm looking forward to switching to another color. Not long now, I'm at the midway point. I'm currently trying to decide if I should switch out one of the beads for a different color.

And I made something :) About two months ago, I bought my first sewing machine. I've been wanting one for ages and started to seriously shop for one. After picking one, a Janome QDC machine, I was going to wait a little to save up for it, but an opportunity came up that I couldn't pass up. The manufacturer had a special rebate and the store put an additional promotion on top of it. It meant I was able to shave the tax and a bit more of the final price. We have a 15% sales tax here in Quebec, so it was a pretty good discount.

It's been in it's box since I brought it home as I try to figure out a place to put it. I still haven't setup a place, but decided I needed to make myself a fabric basket to hold all my stitching frames while they are not in use. I usually put them in a corner of my room but they keep falling over. It took me ALL day. Sweat and blood (literally) went into making this piece, but I ended up with something that I can use. It's a little floppy, I guess my interfacing wasn't thick enough, and I noticed one side is coming apart (I can fix that!). Still pretty good for my first time. The fabric is Blue Peonies by Rifle Paper Co. who is fast becoming my favorite fabric designer, and the lining is by Robert Kaufman from their Essex series.

I'm hoping to gain enough skills to make this bag. I bought the pattern from a quilt shop in Calgary with the fabric and hardware. Now just need courage to start. I found the hardest part was making sure everything is straight. Cutting straight, stitching straight... Any tips would be helpful.

Really Late Update

I meant to post these last week but got busy. My guild's exhibition was coming up (it was this weekend, more this in a later post) and I wanted to submit the Tree of Life. It needed to be stretched and the back covered first though. So I spent a few evenings working on that.

On nights when I didn't have much stitching time, I would work on Hedebo Starburst. By putting in a 30 minutes here and there, I was able to clear up two corners and am halfway to getting a third done.

When I have more time in the evening, I would work on beading the mermaids. I'm slowly making my way up to the middle.

What I've really wanted to do was work on my Japanese embroidery, but it's not something I can just work on at the spur of the moment. It requires a full free day and those have been very rare this summer. I finally got a free Sunday two weeks ago (it was raining all day) and I sat down to rework the woven effect leaf. I decided after speaking with the group that I can do better. You can see where the arrow is pointing my mistake. So I spent a few hours ripping everything out.

I was only able to get this far as I ran out of the blue. Luckily someone from my group had a spare reel so I'll be able to work on it this weekend (crossing my fingers).

August TUSAL

As I write this today I'm realizing I haven't posted in almost a month. I really need to do better. It's not like I'm not stitching as you can see from my ORT jar. This month I do have a legitimate reason, I was in Calgary for two weeks for work (yes, there were some stash purchases made) and then when I got back I caught a cold and was out for a week. I'm just starting to get back to my regular schedule now.

I do have some progress to share with you. I've started working on the drawn thread portion of my hedebo piece. It's very slow right now as I'm unwinding fabric thread and taking it to the back. I'm going to be doing this for a while.

I also completed all the stitching on my mermaids and have started putting in beads.

There are so many beads in this piece, I'm loving it.

July TUSAL

My ORT jar looks a little smaller than last month but I did get some stitching done. I've been splitting most of my time between stitching outdoors on my hedebo piece and stitching on the Mermaids.

The center of my hedebo piece is all finished (love those eyelets), I've moved onto the border. I'll have to go around twice, but when it's finished it will form a star pattern.

I've completed the skin on the second mermaid and started on her hair.

I have more to share, but I will leave that for a separate post.

June TUSAL

I'm really behind on my posts as things are getting very busy at work. I usually write my posts during my lunch break, which leave more time for stitching when I get home, but recently I haven't been able to take long ones. So I'm going to use this post to both share a picture of my ORT jar and my progress on two of the pieces I've been working on.

Outdoors stitching has started. I'm making some progress on the center motif of my hedebo piece.

During the week, I've been working on my mermaid piece for about half an hour to an hour a day. I've missed my sister's birthday, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to finish it before the end of the year.

The skin takes forever to stitch as I'm working 1 over 1, so I have double the amount of stitches to put in. To speed things up, I've been practicing two handed stitching. It works really well if the strands is not too long. Now I just need to be able to do the same on non-counted fabric.

(click on the post to see the video below)

Weekend Stitching

This weekend I finished the first mermaid on my Mirabilia piece. I unrolled the frame a little so I can take a picture. She's still missing beads but I'm leaving those till the end. There is a lot of Kreinik in this piece. I'm finding that I'm not having as much difficulty stitching with it as I used to. It might come down to my having more stitching experience now.

On Sunday, I worked on getting my lattice done. I didn't have any trouble undoing it, but I was still having trouble with the measurement. Despite my being careful I still started off measuring 1.8 cm but after wards started measuring 0.8 cm again. Not sure what was wrong with me. I had to undo it again a second time, but it worked on my third attempt. My second cloud is officially done. 

Now I just need to get that third one done. It's the biggest one yet, so it will take some time to finish as I'm limited with how long my twisted strand can be. Since we're incorporating a strand of gold, our silk can only be as long as our gold strand, which is about 18-19 inches long. I can twist 4 strands in about 30 minutes and then use them up in half that time. So very slow going.

Japanese Embroidery Phase 2-3 - A new beginning

I can finally share with you my kit for the next phase in Japanese embroidery. I mentioned back in September that I had picked Hiogi as the next piece. We placed a group order at the beginning of October and got it at the end of the month.

I got a little extra something for me, a pair of professional Japanese scissors, called nigiri-basami in Japanese. This will be my gift for finishing phase 1, so it will stay packed until I do. It will be my carrot to finish the piece.

If you're curious to know what a 1000 CAD worth of Japanese embroidery material looks like, here it is. It's basically two kits. Japanese embroidery is not an inexpensive hobby. As you move up the phases, kits get more and more expensive. Most of the cost is from the fabric, since as you do more phases you'll need to buy less silk reels and metal threads. Many colors come back and by the time you get to phase 9 or 10 you will have accumulated stock.

Back to my next piece. I ended up having to buy a second frame. I figured I would need a second one regardless for the future as I want to pursue Japanese bead embroidery, the frame cost is not that expensive and they are can be used for any large project. So it's a good investment. We spent the whole day on Saturday putting it on the frame and double lacing it. It's not often that we need to frame pieces so we had to refresh our memories. It's all ready to go, I'm just waiting on confirmation of what we're expected to have ready for our class in the spring.

Now that I've covered the next phase, I can give an update about the present phase... it hasn't moved forward. In fact it moved backwards. My last progress didn't sit well with me, so after consulting my group I decided to remove the cords on the bouquet. I spent Sunday morning unpicking them. I made a little surgical error snipping the threads at the front, so I flipped the frame and finished unpicking from the back. It wasn't anything major and easily fixed.

I wasn't planning on trying the cords again on Sunday, but I still had the afternoon so I made a second attempt. The second attempt didn't go any better than the first.

I sent a picture of my progress to my friend and she suggested working on a different area of the piece for now. She also suggested doing some counted work as a change. Like me, she finds surface stitching stressful, so maybe a switch would work. It's funny she mentioned that because three weeks ago, when I started getting frustrated with the cords, I had already started a new WIP. I set up the Mirabilia kit I bought for my sister's birthday and have been stitching on it every night for about an hour or two. I forgot how addicting cross stitch could be.

Back to the phase 1 piece, I think the best course of action for now is work on the last pink flower, add in the gold thread for all the pinks and then go back to the cords. Maybe not the cords on the wrapping paper, but the cords on the other side that don't have a curve. It could possibly help me get into the groove.