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<\/a><\/p>\nAnd his crime fighting buddy: Orange Girl! If that’s not enough to scare the evil pants off of the bad dudes, here is the even scarier formation: Tower of Granades! to get the bad guys attention. Stephen is welding the pickle-pult for full defensive action. How do I fight crime, you ask? Well, I bore them to death with tales of organizing my office and photos of cross stitch projects. See below!<\/p>\n My next project is Starry Night<\/a> as reproduced by Golden Kite. This is one of my favorite pieces of art and I’ve wanted to work on it for a while. Several companies have done a repro but none of them get it right like Golden Kite. I got the pattern for Christmas.<\/p>\n Previously, I’ve kept track of my blended threads on the symbol card by sticking the needle through the card next to the symbol. It makes for a very messy symbol chart! The needles then fall out and I end up trashing thread because I don’t know what the colors on the needle are. So blending the threads on their own cards before I start stitching is a new method for me. I can already tell it will, at the very least, be neater than my earlier setup.<\/p>\n Fabric! I bought a slightly undersized piece of linen to use. It was 40% off and I decided that if I ever actually got the piece finished it would have to have fabric sewn to it so it could be stretched anyway. I stitched about 30 stitches and realized two things: I needed to stop and pre-blend all the thread AND I desperately needed Aida fabric. <\/p>\n I’ve not used Aida much in the past few years. It’s the fabric you use when you start stitching. It’s heavier, starchier, and even the best quality Aida doesn’t look as good as the lowest quality linen. However, for this project, I realized that it would go much faster if I wasn’t counting holes in the linen to get the stitches right. Also, since the finished piece is solid stitches the fabric wasn’t going to show anyway.<\/p>\n I got it all stretched on the frame last night and almost, almost got the 30 stitches done I’d made earlier in the week on the linen.<\/p>\n Are you dead yet? A couple of photos of the office since it looks so amazing right now. As Stephen posted earlier today: Life! it is busy! We have a wounded hot water heater that we’re dealing with. I have a root canal scheduled for Tuesday. My blood pressure has been crazy high and I’m dealing with that. And in and around all these other things, we’re trying to get Eli’s birthday party … Continue reading An everything update in one post!<\/span>
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\nHere is The Fortunate Traveler as I packed it up this past week. I’m moving on to a new stitching project so I wanted to show off the progress I made over the past four months.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThis is the box of thread I worked out of for Traveler. I remember when I organized this box I thought it was the largest project I’d ever undertake. I was so very wrong.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe box on the left is thread I had to purchase for this project. The box on the right is thread I already had. I also had to purchase another box like the one on the right to hold all the thread.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe second box I purchased holds about 1\/3 of the regular colors and then 2\/3s of the box is blended colors. What is a blended color? Take two colors, separate the individual six strands of each and them combine one strand out of each two. Makes for a beautiful color set. Starry Night has 88 blended threads. I know, because I’ve numbered the cards for easy reorganization. Getting the thread wound took three separate nights of work.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThat ruler? Inside the frame in the center of the fabric? It’s seven inches long. That piece of fabric is 36 inches by 31 inches. The finished piece will be 29 1\/2 inches wide by 24 inches high.<\/p>\n
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\nThe monument to paper! Notice I have labeled all the drawers!<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nNew boxes! New books! New labels! I might be able to actually find things! Crazy talk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"