Erica's Stitches

For a holiday diversion I decided to experiment with hexagons.  I had seen this technique demonstrated years ago and kept in the back of my mind.  First, you start with strip sets and then cut at 60 degree angles to form hexagons.  I don't have the special ruler but I managed it with my standard ruler. Then came the fun, making hexagons.  I happened to make enough hexagons so they fit together into a bigger hexagon - just the right size for a table topper. All that needs to be done is to finish sewing the binding on.  Hopefully, that will be done by next weekend. In the meantime, I'm thinking up more quilts that I could make with this technique.

Every so often I end up with an extra quilt block and they have been piling up.  So, I turned them into potholders. I experimented with different binding techniques and loops.  The grandmothers flower garden is from years ago.  Once I realized I wasn't going to piece enough for a quilt, I made them into some blocks and then did nothing with it (the other block I made was much bigger and is going to become a table topper). These are from semi-recent quilts.  One block is from this quilt .  And two are from this quilt.   I guess that means that they aren't orphans.  Since they were small, I just added a border big enough to make them potholder sized. My favorite potholder came from my least favorite (and oldest) block.  This was from a quilt done long ago that I learned many lessons from.  The first was about contrast:  the white and yellow looked great together at the quilt store but they didn't have enoug...

I haven't done much of anything stitch related all week.  I've been overwhelmingly tired every evening.  My head and hands hurt and I'm afraid of making mistakes and having to undo everything I tried to do. I'm incapable of doing nothing so instead of present projects, I'm looking towards future projects.  I doodled on graph paper.  If I make a mistake with magic markers it's easy to start again (and I made lots of mistakes which justified my decision).  I also looked for a new stitching project and found a hand-painted canvas that I had forgotten about.  One evening was spent going through all my threads. I've gotten the canvas mounted on stretcher bars and 5 different baggies of threads (one bag for each different area of the the canvas). I'm hoping for quiet time in the next few weeks to get rested and finish up the projects that I have going.  I have to finish them because I'm getting excited about stitching on this can...

I started out so organized.  I sorted the thread and attached it to the card in the kit.  For the first part of the kit I carefully removed some floss, split it and put the unused portion back on the card. Then I got lazy.  I was too much work to keep the thread neat. Now my unused floss is mixed in with the ends.  I'm almost done, so I'll clean up the mess when I'm totally finished.

I've got lots of pine trees ... and the squirrels took all the acorns from the scrub oak.  But ... I finished stitching the Pine Tree and Acorns mini-sampler. This seemed like it took a long time to start but it's only been since before Thanksgiving.  I had trouble finding time to work on it and I think I spent more time ripping then stitching. I still need to decide how to finish it.  If I could find a 6 inch frame easily I would be done.  Instead I'm trying to decide between a pillow or a wall hanging.

I keep all my cross-stitch charts in a file cabinet.  I haven't been in there too much recently so I pulled out my favorite folder:  Minis It's filled with free charts and smaller chart cards. I picked the Acorns and Pines Sampler from Little House Needleworks. I've been doing too much crafty sewing and not enough cross-stitching.  So, I'll probably work on a few of these for a while.  I saw some Christmas patterns in there that look like fun.

Here's my Christmas ornament for this year. I wanted it to have a house so I started with my house.  The front of the house is rather boring, so I used the side view.  And I changed the proportions.   And changed the color (a green house with a green tree in front of it just won't work).  Speaking of a tree, I had to add a better looking one.  I wanted snowflakes around the house, but nothing I tried looked right.  So, I added a simple border and then extended it.  All the sudden I had circles where I could add eyelets and I had snowflakes.  I originally planned on eyelets along the top.  But, once I started stitching I squeezed in an eyelet anywhere I could. That means that there are partial eyelets along the edge of the house that required some compensating. I also had some negative space around the circles with room for 5 letters. I used P-E-A-C-E and squeezed the year into another negative space. ...