The Treehouse

One last finish for 2011

I finished stitching my Wildflower cross stitch by SamSarah Designs yesterday. The colours are lovely and the little buttons are a sweet addition. I'll be starting CCN January Cottage along with Carole at the weekend and also making a start on another stitchalong that I'm doing with my cropping friends (the ones that aren't allergice to needle and thread that is!). 

 

I think this is destined to become a cushion rather than being framed - just need to select some fabric for a border and the back. I've had quite a good year for cross stitch finishes and I've already got some lovely charts lined up for stitching in 2012 from my favourite designers.

This will be my last post for 2011 so I would like to wish a very Happy and healthy New Year to everybody.

Some Kind of Wonderful and Autumn

I finally finished the backstitching on the last block of the first part of the Some Kind of Wonderful stitch a long. Part one is now all stitching together and it's looking very nice indeed. Here's the little suitcase block...

and here are is the first column stitched together with its border on...

I've also been working on the Autumn part of the Blackbird Designs Loose Feathers mystery - it's just as lovely as Summer and I'm enjoying stitching it. Not quite sure why I started stitching the bird from the bottom up - must have been that my hoop was down there and I couldn't be bothered to move it, lol! I'll be reattaching my hoop at the top when I do some more on this - hopefully over the holidays. I'm hoping that the postman will visit today with my order for CCN January cottage. I've been stitching again on my Berries and Bluebirds applique by Gail Pan - haven't a picture to show yet, I keep forgetting to take one so that's definitely a job for the new year!

 

I doubt that I'll get chance to post again before Christmas now so I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a very happy, healthy and stitchy New Year :)

 

 

Some Kind of Wonderful - part 1

I decided to take a little break from stitching Wildflower and carry on with my blocks for the Some Kind of Wonderful stitch a long. I had stitched the first two blocks a little while ago and had only 3 blocks to stitch to be up to date with the schedule. These little blocks are hard to stop stitching - very addictive indeed! Here are the first four completed blocks - the fifth one, the suitcase, is almost done I'm in the middle of stitching the words on it.

  

I'm stitching the little patchwork sections on as I go and then stitching the blocks together - just the suitcase to finish and I'll have the first column complete and can stitch on the first two borders.

Here's where I'm up to with Wildflower...I've two large flowers left to do, a couple of words and the coloured stitches in the large leaf. Might stitch on this at the weekend at our crop but then again, I might stitch some of the Autumn Blackbird Designs instead :)

 

I mentioned to Carole about the new CCN monthly cottages. Looks like we'll be having a little shopping spree sometime soon :grin: I asked yesterday and Karla at Patchwork Rabbit has the January chart just waiting to be ordered up!

Summer and Wildflower

I've been having a little break from blogging for the last little while. My Dad died at the beginning of November after a long illness and although it wasn't unexpected it still really knocked the stuffing out of me. I'm slowly getting back to some semblance of normality and some days are better than others... I have lost myself in some good books and pondered matters and reminisced while doing some quiet stitching. 

I did manage to finish the Summer part of Blackbird Designs Loose Feathers before the next part arrived. I was really enjoying stitching it and would have gone straight on to stitching Autumn but needed a few threads to arrive in the post and decided to wait for those until beginning the new chart. A couple were out of stock and they've just arrived this morning so I'm looking forward to putting some Autumn stitches into place very soon. Here's a pic of Summer...

The colours are beautiful and the photo really doesn't do them any justice at all - it's a very dull and dark day here today and difficult to get a good pic.

I am stitching along with Carole again this month on Wildflower which is turning out to be lovely. The colours are most unusual and probably not something that I would ordinarily choose but I'm thoroughly enjoying seeing them come together. I started this while away with friends for a weekend of crafting and made quite a good bit of progress there. Unfortunately I also managed to stitch the letters in the wrong colour and didn't realise until I started stitching again last Friday so there was quite a bit of unpicking going on!

The letters are actually in a variegated blue thread some of which is quite bright compared to the dark parts - it looks very well with all the other lovely threads in this piece. 

I have done a little work on my sewing machine but not a lot. I'm keeping up with the Blogger's BOM blocks and will take a photo of my latest block soon. I've also been playing with my new embroidery machine which my lovely husband treated me to on my birthday last month. I've not been able to give it a thorough workout as yet but am looking forward to using it more very soon. I'll be back soon with an update on the Some Kind of Wonderful quilt blocks too - again, not much done on that yet but I don't plan on being behind come the end of December!

Coffee Menu by LHN

Last night I put the final stitches into Little House Needleworks' Coffee Menu. I've been stitching along on this one with Carole - it's the first in a series of charts that we decided to stitch together. I think I enjoyed every stitch on this - well, maybe not the ones that I had to unstitch but it has been a lovely design to stitch and the colours are lovely. I corrected the mistake that I mentioned last time - I had stitched Dark Roast one stitch to the right. I suppose I could have left it as was but it would have been screaming out to me from behind the glass once it was framed so I took it out and restitched it! 

Our next stitch is going to be Wildflower by SamSarah Designs. I've not stitched anything by this designer yet and I'm looking forward to starting this with Carole in November...it has some very sweet buttons on it and the colours are lovely.

I am also going to be joining in with the Some Kind of Wonderful Stitch a Long on the Stitch a long blog I'm so glad to have been given a place on this. I bought the book back in July and there are so many lovely things in it that I didn't want it to sit on the shelf waiting forever! I'm going to use some of my Fig Tree stash for the quilt and have begun cutting out the cream backgrounds into strips. Next job is to cut the cream backgrounds for the applique blocks.

I'm hoping to prepare the first blocks and start sewing on them soon and perhaps take some away with me in November when my friends and I have our second crafting weekend of the year.

I noticed this morning that the sign ups are ready now for this month's Friday Night Sew In. I wasn't able to join in for the last few months but hopefully I'll manage to do so this month - it's the day before my birthday! You can click on the link in my sidebar to join in with the fun.

Coffee Menu update and a new start...

Carole pointed out earlier on today that I hadn't updated my progress on Coffee Menu for a while and shouldn't I do so before I'd gone and finished it altogether! After a few days rest for the arm, I set off on the words last night and this lunchtime I started on the green borders and finished off Dark Roast. Just as I was crowing to Carole that I'd got this far I had the misfortune of noticing a mistake :sigh: I'm not pointing it out yet as I'm in two minds whether to remove it or not. It all depends upon how much it bugs me and whether or not I can live it. Eventually though - I will probably remove it, lol!

 

I wasn't really in the market for making any new starts just now until Carole came along with a temptation the other day. Over the past year I've made a tentative start at learning different counted stitches and when Carole showed me the Tree of Life design by Abi Gurden I was a lost cause! Abi runs a Yahoo group called the Stitch Specialists and the design is available for members only. Without further ado I joined the group and found a lovely warm welcome and knowledge a plenty. Most of my cross stitching is done on some shade of cream/brown fabric so I decided to go out on a limb and use a green background for the tree project and a shade of Threadworx called limestone - that way I don't have to worry about choosing colours and I can concentrate on learning the stitches. My fabric arrived this morning and I've made a small start this afternoon.

The design begins at the roots of the tree with cross stitch. The next part is comrpised of either French or Colonial knots. As I can do French knots I'm going to try the Colonial on this design. I did say it was a small start, the picture is really so that Carole can see the colour of my fabric!

There is a second stitch a long available to the group called The Great Escape. It features an owl - how could I resist! I've bought some fabric for that in a shade of blue but at the moment I'm not convinced that it's the right shade of blue - it's lovely but maybe not quite the right thing, we'll see.

I've not achieved much on the sewing machine at all this week so nothing to show there I'm sorry to say - hopefully next week :)

 

Bloggers Block of the Month

I saw that this was coming up a little while ago and tried to resist. Then I remembered some very pretty fabric that was sitting in my cupboard just waiting to leap into action. It had been sitting in there quite a while - so long that I can't recall who the designer is. I chose a couple of the prints and matched it up with some Fig Tree polka dots (they're orange, it doesn't show too well in the picture.) Here's the result...

This is block one by Sherri of "A Quilting Life" all of the information about the BOM can be found by clicking on the link in my sidebar and visiting Jackie's Canton Village Quiltworks blog.

Coffee and Grandmother's Flower Garden

I started stitching on the LHN Coffee at the weekend - this is a SAL that I'm doing along with Carole following the shopathon that I reported on a little while ago (I think we'll have to do it again, it was good fun!). I had wanted to get all of the word stitched but my eyes were demanding some that I close them last night - we had a busy day out at a bowling competition and a football match. Otherwise, I'm pleased with the progress I managed to make and it's a very enjoyable stitch - I'm looking forward to stitching the friends taking coffee together this week :)

I'm using the recommended threads and some lovely fabric that I had sitting in my stash from a previous (still underway!) project - Vintage Country Mocha.

Last week I did quite a bit of stitching on my GFG flowers  -  I made 11 and started to put the outer rings on. I've dragged this project out for quite a while now and I would like to get some serious progress made on it - wrist/elbow permitting - I need to move onto machine stitching this week to give them a rest.

I had been going to surround all of the flowers with the blue fabric but last week I happened across some of the plain green and plain rust coloured fabric and decided that it would look better with more than just the blue colour so I'm awaiting the arrival of these fabrics so that I can print up some hexagons and try them out. It was a lucky find I think as it's quite some time since Harvest Home was first released. Whatever is leftover I intend to use to piece the back of the quilt.

Back online and with a finish...

Well August turned out to be a busy month - it was also the month that my monitor decided to go kaput! It didn't like the fact that I unplugged it during my decorating and carpet cleaning frenzy. I thought I was doing it a favour by getting it out of the way of the paint and the carpet cleaner but no! It wasn't happy at all and refused to co-operate once I plugged it back in.Once we got back from our holiday on the Isle of Wight I was heavily engaged by curtain hanging and back to school activities...once that was all sorted out my Dear One beetled off and came back with a bright and shiny new widescreen monitor - I like it, I like it a lot :D

Due to all the decorating activity that was taking place there wasn't a lot of stitching achieved during the month of August. Although I did take a bag full of goodies to play with on holiday I didn't lift a needle once so not a single stitch was made. The light was too poor at night in the lovely little cottage that we rented and during the daytime it was too windy on by the sea! I did a lot of reading instead so I'm not complaining at all. We had a lovely time and the weather behaved very well indeed.

I have managed a finish this week - Country Cottage Needleworks "Bee Joyful". This was a lovely stitch, the colours are gorgeous. I used recommended threads and fabric but my fabric was 32 count instead of the prescribed 28 count because I had that in my stash :)

 

I'm still working on a few other cross stitches - The Library (LHN) is still being built bit by bit; Snow Garden I've not touched since I last updated about that one and I have begun the new Blackbird Designs Loose Feathers project which is lovely - I'll be putting a few stitches into that one tonight and then tomorrow I'll be starting Coffee Menu by Little House Needleworks which I'm going to stitch along with Carole. I've had a nasty cold this week so a little cross stitching and hexagon stitching during the afternoon has been good medicine - next week I'm hoping to get back to some quilting and catch up with Henrietta Whiskers!

Sunday Sewing

The rest of the family have been out splashing about in boats today so I've had plenty of lovely sewing time. Yesterday while they were splashing about in Coniston I made a couple of GFG flowers and did a little bit of stitching on the sunflower wall hanging. I made another GFG flower this afternoon when it was too hot to be in my sewing room and did a little more stitching of the poem on the sunflower.

I've not stitched any of these for quite a while and it was lovely to get back into the swing of things with them. I'm going to try again with the one-a-day and see if I can get them finished off...then it'll be onto the next ring and then the diamonds. No pic of the sunflower just yet, I'll wait until I've finished stitching the poem.

I made another 3 Summer Bow Ties this morning and stitched them together with the one that I made on Friday - I really like the look. I saw this layout on Jodi's Pleasant Home blog and it convinced me that I needed to make some bow ties!

I did quite a bit of cutting out for the bow ties as well so that I can sneak in the making of one now and again during the week :)

Finally, I made this month's Henrietta Whiskers block and it's another very sweet one - I'm getting spoilt for choice for a favourite block now!

The applique is only stuck down at the moment so I've the treat of stitching that to come as well as the little bit of embroidery that's on the block.

On Friday I picked up my two cross stitches that I'd taken for framing and I'm very pleased with both of them.

 

The teacups are my favourite stitch so far this year, it's a shame I can't get a better picture of them.

I'm itching to get the next block for the Designer BOM sewn, it looks lovely - hopefully I'll fit it in over the course of the week. I had thought I might get it made today but a Henrietta Whiskers block takes quite a well to prepare. I'm away to enjoy some of the evening sunshine with a glass of wine now and then perhaps some stitching on the Library later on.