Bah Humbug

Yes, that's how I feel this year - bah humbug - just not in the holiday spirit, actually a bit depressed....hopefully this will pass soon.

I've been doing a little cross-stitch in the evenings, very fun. I have so many patterns already put aside with fabric and floss. This little sheep was actually a kit from Heart in Hand. I love the piece of wool appliqued on for the face with the googley big button eyes. The fabric that was in the kit had discolored from the plastic pouch it had come in - what a shame.........but I found a similar size fabric in my stash. I'm loving working on these little cross-stitches. I used to do a lot of it years ago but there's just no time anymore......but I'm going to be making time for fun projects from now on........in addition to my weaving..........

So, the bad news with this stitching is that it aggravates my thumb. The past few months I've been having issues with my thumb hurting from the knuckle closest to my palm to my wrist, possibly tendonitis. I think the tremendous amount of knitting I was doing this year might have done me in, it also bothers me throwing the shuttle although not as bad, and interestingly it doesn't bother me spinning. But I think the position of holding a needle doing the cross-stitch is the worst of all. I may have to put the cross-stitch aside for a bit and rest my hand.

In the pink........

Isn't this a beautiful dogwood?  It was up the street from where our spinning group met on Tuesday, I just had to capture a picture of it. I love the older neighborhoods in town with the established trees and plantings - so colorful this time of year.

Not much happening here fiber wise - life gets in the way - why does that keep happening??? It never used to. I did get 17 sheep towels embroidered for a June wedding - I had already done 20 of them for the same wedding and the gal said the guest list is growing and she needed more - they're being used as bread basket cloths.  Today I'm hoping to get to the loom to weave on that scarf warp. Guess I better take Bailey for a walk and get moving.........

Lots of sheep.....

.....working on a big order for embroidered sheep towels to use as bread/roll basket liners for a wedding......I bet it's going to be one fun wedding based on these.......wonder what other fun ideas they've got planned..........just another way to sidetrack from doing the inevitable, pulling my business tax stuff together and sitting down with Turbo Tax Home & Business..........at least the personal tax stuff is ready...........

Having fun embroidering

Had fun embroidering this weekend. I had sold out of many embroidered towels in my etsy shop so yesterday afternoon I got to work.  I still have some other sheep and spinning wheels towels to embroider - those are on linen/cotton towels, hopefully sometime this week. Today a friend came over and we embroidered 2 t-shirts for her, she got a lesson on the machine, I think I've enabled her to buy one too.

I love this sheep with heart towel - great for Valentine's Day - love the soft flour sack towels too.....

......and here's a sheep with a star......

....and I couldn't resist this heartwood embroidery pattern, this is new to my shop........

.....and these oh so cute chickens, sold out of them recently.

 

Hubby Sam 'may' have figured out a way around the Internet Explorer 11/blogger issue - he uninstalled IE11 on the netbook and I was able to load pictures just fine for this post - next he'll do it on the desktop and hopefully that will work like it used to a few weeks ago too.  When blogger supports IE 11 (which they aren't doing yet) then we'll update. In case anyone else is having this problem (lots of folks on the blogger community forum are) I will update once IE11 is uninstalled on the desktop and I do a post to see if it's working again.

 

 

Steampunk

I had the embroidery machine running today while taking photographs of handwoven towels and scarves for my etsy shops. I need to stay close by since it's an inexpensive machine and I have to be there to change thread colors unlike commercial machines where there are many needles threaded with all the different thread colors.

I love this new to me steampunk spinning wheel embroidery design. I only stitched two of them in case no one else is as enamored as I am with this funky wheel.

This is a nice soft cotton flour sack towel with red twill stripes - I thought the primitive country sheep with heart embroidery suited it well. I like this towel as it has a handy twill tape to hang it with.

And more of the white sheep on oatmeal linen towels - a variation of ones done in the past - they're very popular.

These towels are up for sale now in my etsy shop. I also got the last of the Deep Blue Sea Waves scarves up in the shop for sale. And tomorrow handwoven towels will go up after friend Yvonne picks out the ones she wants to buy.

I am longing for a day of frittering but it doesn't seem to happen - too much to do - and I've still got pounds and pounds of roving that arrived last week waiting to be weighed, bagged, labeled and relisted in the shop.....not to mention weighing out roving for future dye days. No rest for the wicked.........

More dragonflies and felted heart update.......

Here's this morning's scarf.......one more scarf on the warp but not sure when I'll get to it, have other things on the 'to-do' list for a few days.

I've been asked by several about my felted Valentine.  I made this back in 2008 to donate to a fund raiser called Heart 2 Heart to raise money to purchase automated defibrillator devices for the public schools where I live.  You can see my heart in progress here - I don't know who ended up with it, would have been fun to know since several folks I ran into wanted it. There were so many beautiful hearts on display in the bank that month - it must have been a feeding frenzy when the day to sell them came.

Happy Valentine's Day

A bit of this and that ........

A bit of this and that getting done around here this week. Yesterday and today I played with the embroidery machine, as if I didn't have more pressing things to do but this was more fun. I have to stick around while the machine is running to change thread colors and to fix broken threads once in a while so I worked on hemming numerous pairs of exercise pants and twisting fringes on handwoven scarves. I'm hoping (think positive) to sell these fingertip towels at Fiber Mania, in my etsy shop or wherever. All are stitched on nice crisp commercially woven towels of 55% linen and 45% cotton. I stitched multiples of a number of them......need to order more towels, this is fun. Tomorrow it's back to mundane things - weighing out bags of wool roving from a shipment that arrived yesterday and running up and down the stairs doing massive amounts of laundry.

These sheep are as cute as the dickens (hmm, what does that mean? are dickens cute? what are dickens?) They're the same thread colors but on different colored towels, oatmeal and natural........

......oatmeal hemstitched towels with deep red stitching.....

......oatmeal with black stitching - I love these simple sheep........need to make some for myself.....

.....cute sheep and butterfly - and isn't the weaving one fun.......

......alpacas on natural and oatmeal towels.......

.......lovely traditional spinning wheel with distaff - the natural towels have a little dot woven in the towel in-between the hemstitching.......