Owlishly

Felt flowers, the thread cape & crocheted trim dress...Finally.

Okey dokey, I've finally gotten a bit of time to get my pictures sorted & cropped, up on flickr, blah, blah, blah.  So here they are- proof that I actually have been making various things :)

The felt flowers that I was going to wear in my hair a la Frida Kahlo, but didn't end up using all of them.  I actually made like six or seven of them, but I couldn't find them all to take the picture.

The dress that I embroidered a tiny bit to add red to the colors already there

and crocheted trim on.

The cape I made out of thread from the Japanese pattern book...I can't remember which one right now, but I'll find it & update someday.

Detail of the cape.

And I think that's it.  I'm finishing up some patterns so they'll be up soon too!

Fiesta time!

It's done. And matted, and framed.  Now all that's left is giving it to my mom :)

I had to cut the mat myself since the frame was on the longish side and it's a bit wonky, but hopefully that's not noticed too much. It was my first time doing it, so I tried doing it first with some fiskars cutting tool thingy but that wasn't working so well.  I ended up going to Joann's to get a mat cutter, and that worked SO much better.

Last night, I'd finished the embroidery and ended up using pants hangers with the clips to stretch it by hanging it on opposite sides and letting the weight of one hanger pull out the wrinkles after I sprayed it with water. I didn't really want to cut down the fabric either, so what I ended up doing with that was pretty effective in stretching it taut also. I pulled the sides over the back of the frame and sewed it back and forth to stretch the linen across and iron it out.  Then, since that made it pretty messy I used some brown paper from a roll that we have laying around, to glue it to the back of the frame and cover up all the fabric and thread, and general messiness.

Look on for detailed shots, they're kinda dark because for one, I took them at night, and secondly, they're mounted against the dark tan of the back of the frame. Had I had it to do all over again, I would've either gotten thicker linen, or doubled up two pieces of fabric against each other because it was so sheer.

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What do you think? Now I can get back to crocheting!

Almost "Red"y

Finally! I'm almost completely done with all the embroidery.  Yay! I didn't really take any progress pictures along the way.  I did have some of this girl, but I've finished and I think it's more interesting to see her done.

I'd finished this couple last week too.

Along with this scared (?) girl on the burro.  She's taken the longest of all of them, I think it's because her skirts are ruffled and my stitches have to be smaller to accommodate the curves.

This last hombre with the guitar is what I was hoping to finish before the party on Saturday, and now that I've spent the last 2 nights embroidering him I know there's no way it would've been done.

I'm feeling good about finishing this up, and then I think I'm putting the color red out of commission for a while.  I think when I mount it before framing it I'll take better pictures of it, and that way it won't be so wrinkly, because I do think it turned out pretty well. 

Seeing Red

Here is the doily that I was working on, I'll try to finish it soon.  Otherwise, I have the tendency to selectively forget about things that I start to work on and then it'll never get done.  I need to have my sister print out the pattern for me since my printer decided that working was not an option right now.

Also, yesterday between the gazillion loads of clothes that I was washing from our trip I started working on my mom's redwork gift again, here's my progress-

Slow going...

Let's just say this project is going to take a while... a LONG while.  I think due in part to my being so wishy washy about choosing what border to crochet, and then trying to decide on what transfer to use.  So far, I'm almost finished with the first of 5 parts of the design.

I hadn't really embroidered anything in a while, so I'm still getting my feel for it, and I liked this one the least, so I started with him :)  I'm almost done with him, but I did notice a couple of spots in the photo where the transfer was too light for me to follow the pattern so I'm going to have to go back and try to fix it a tad.   I'm enjoying it, but it is taking a lot longer than I'd anticipated, it is good that I am only using 1 color, because otherwise I'd never finish it!  I'd bought this pattern from PatternBee, it's a reproduction of a design found in a newspaper mail order according to her provenance that she's shared.  I think it's cute, and hopefully my mom will like it, and not look at it too closely so that she doesn't notice the inconsistencies. 

I do hope to get back to more of my own patterns soon, I just really want to get this done before we leave late March, I can crochet in the car, but I've tried to embroider and it just so doesn't work for me!

Redwork, I'm thinking

So, my mom's birthday is on Saturday and as usual, I've sort of waited until the last minute to decide on a gift.  Luckily, no one in my family reads this so I have absolutely no qualms about writing about it before the day. 

I'd been contemplating an embroidered panel of the vintage transfer patterns that I'd bought from PatternBee, a while back.  It's between this one,

or this one,

or this one,

I'm leaning towards the latter, since I like the little boy eating the banana, but I don't like the face of the smallest girl.  I did spill the beans a bit to my mom since I don't even want to bother beginning work on it if she's not going to be interested in it at all.  Her only request was to have boys and girls in it.  Fine by me. 

And now, because I'm lazy and still not quite over being sick, I'm hoping turning it into redwork will be a little easier for me, for a variety of reasons.  First, I don't want to have to think about colors, and not changing color will save some time right?  Second, I think it's an interesting technique and I've been wanting to try it, so why not give it a whirl now.  Third, she likes red; it's the color of all her small appliances & most of her clothes.  Fourth, my sister's baby shower is going to happen the week after we get back from Iowa and they're going to have a fiesta theme (totally stealing my wedding reception idea, but that's something else completely), and that way, since it'll be at my parents house- hey, they'll have even more themed decoration!

I'm also thinking about making a crocheted lace border to fill up white space in the 12x36 in frame that I bought for this purpose.  We'll see, I just really like that thread and want to spend more time crocheting with it, and if I can use it in the gift, all the more reason.

By the way, since I'm totally horrible about bookmarking sites of interest, I'm adding redwork and embroidery ones here for future reference-

Needle'nThread has a video library of stitches & interesting tidbits (lots of ads though, not really my thing).

J.F.Ingalls has a catalog of 1886 embroidery stamping patterns with gobs of scans.

There a Redwork Embroidery Primer over at pretty impressive stuff with tons of links and information, that is indeed pretty impressive.

Anyway, since this is one post I'm writing while the kids are awake, I've got to go!

Sicko

Everyone around me has been getting sick and I hadn't. Until Friday. Then it was BAD.  I hadn't gotten the flu that bad for years, but luckily my husband was home on Friday for President's Day weekend so I stayed in bed the entire day while he took care of our little ones.

I did have staying in bed stuff to do in between dozing off and on all day. 

1. I frogged my silk'n wool scarf and chose a different stitch pattern and got through 1 skein.  (Though I did frog it again because I didn't like how wide it was. And then I resized it and have almost gotten through 3 skeins.)

2.  I started planning in earnest our spring break trip.

I don't know if I'd mentioned before, but we're going to Iowa for 16-ish days towards the end of March and the beginning of April.  We were going to fly, but since we just bought the car, we're going to drive it.  It should be interesting with our 2 little ones, but I think if we try to stay positive and make the best of it, it should be fun, or at least interesting.  Famous last words, huh.  The good thing is, both of them are pretty used to 2-3 hour car trips so with frequent stops I hope the don't get too weary.

We're going to take Route 66 to Oklahoma City and then shoot up through Kansas and then a bit of Nebraska up to the western part of Iowa where my husband's family lives.  We've got that part of the trip decided upon, but now we're sort of stuck on the coming back part.  We're coming back through South Dakota and then Wyoming, down through Utah, Nevada and then back to California, but I've been trying to figure out how long we'll be in South Dakota since there's a lot of sights I want to see, and then where we'll be spending the night the rest of the trip back. 

3. I started planning my mom's birthday gift.  I think I'm going to embroider some of the Vogart Mexican transfers that I'd bought a while back onto something and then frame it. Hopefully she'll like it, and if not, it'll at least work with the theme of my sister's baby shower when we get back in April and they can use it as decoration.

4. I also spent some time working on some other little dolls, but haven't been too inspired to make it a top priority.  I need to get at least the one done that my little boy keeps asking for, hopefully sometime this week I'll be able to finish that.

Okay, this ended up being longer than I intended, but I needed to update, so hopefully next time I write, I'll be all better. :)

tidbits

I think I'm going to have the little lamb pattern available by Monday, I'm still tossing names around.  I was thinking maybe "Mary...was a little lamb", since one of my husband's grandmas is named Mary. Or names that start with L, like Liza- one of my closest friends in grad school, and who ended up having her two children within a couple of months of mine being born, and in opposite order. There were actually 2 Liza's who were friends in grad school, only the first one pronounced it like Lisa and flipped out on me thinking that I was trying to steal her boyfriend (I SO wasn't interested, of for that matter, would've ever done that to a friend if I was) so there went that friendship, and now that name has pluses and minuses.  Maybe Lana, which is Spanish for wool, which I think works a bit better, and it's sort of clever, which I get a kick out of.

I was thinking of an S name that belongs to a person who I absolutely adore and admire, and was actually my boss, the first and only time I ever worked full-time, she is the head of the Reference department at a private university in Los Angeles and is the absolute *best* boss ever.  At least she was to me.  I wanted to do an S, but to me this little doll looks more like a lamb than a sheep.

I got the sweetest compliment from a knitter that I'm thinking found my little lamb over in my Ravelry projects- she said that it'd get a lot of knitters crocheting.  Totally my agenda, just don't tell anyone!

I also wanted to comment on an earlier post, I think it was from last week when I was talking about converting my patterns to booklets.  I don't think I'll ever offer them myself that way, it's too much work for me if I were to do that.  I enjoy sending the .pdf's as attachments so much more than having to stuff & address envelopes.  The reason I was going through the process of converting my patterns to booklets is for yarn stores who are interested in selling the patterns through their stores.  Then if someone wanted to buy a paper pattern from a specific yarn store, they could either order it online from them, or get it from the store.  Also, one store is planning on making kits, so I'll definitely let you know when and where those are available. 

I'm anticipating having a bit less time to crochet too.  My husband is pretty fit, and let's just say that I'm not quite as fit as he is. Okay, I'm really not fit at all since having my babies, and since today is 6 months till our anniversary, I've decided to try to become more physically active.  Maybe by our anniversary I'll be in better shape, but I started up again tonight and I just know that my legs are going to buckle a lot tomorrow.  Dang it.  Well, on that cheery note, I'm off to bed.  G'night.