A Little Yarn On The Side

I love all the suggestions of embroidered shapes on the table runner instead of buttons--I think that will work much better.  I've been working on the reverse side, which I had originally planned to appliqué as well, but I started messing around with stitch options, found one I liked, then found a second one I liked, and I think they make a nice contrast to each other.   I think Theo likes it as well... It's interesting to stick only with primary colors as I've never really done it, but it definitely feels very cheerful and vibrant.  Now to pry the cat off of it and get it sewn together!

So, guess who I got an email from this week?  The new Husqvarna dealer (Twin Falls Sewing Center in case anyone needs a great dealer).  They were just checking to make sure everything was working as it should. Okay--I think I have just the slightest  case of hero-worship now...

I thought it only appropriate to start Craft Weekend with some embroidery and I think Theo is thrilled. I can't blame him--I'm pretty thrilled to have Jeeves working again, but so far, laying on kitchen towels doesn't have the same effect on me.  Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Next up, I started working on a table runner for my friends for whom I recently made the primary color placemats.  I haven't done much with applique, but I like how it looks with the decorative stitching instead of satin stitching around the edges.  Now I'm stuck, though.  I can't decide if I should add buttons or just leave it with the main shapes.  I'm going to make this reversible, so adding buttons to one side might not be a great idea for the opposite side, but I don't know how flat it really needs to be.  So, what do we think--buttons or no?

Whoo hoo!  After a marathon canning day on Thursday, I did absolutely nothing yesterday except craft.  Okay, and a little laundry.  I decided I needed a quick project after all the non-crafting activity of the last 2 weeks, so I dug some of the novelty yarn out of my stashdash basket and: we have a "feather" boa for the costume basket!  I am a big fan of costumes and Halloween and murder mystery costume parties, so new costume ideas are always welcome.  Now I just need the dress to go with the boa or the courage to wear a boa in public.  I also finished yet another scarf: which doesn't look like much right now because it hasn't been blocked and this one will need some SEVERE blocking to look good, but I think it will be nice. That's 4 projects finished from the "dead heat" basket, and I still have the whole weekend before me........ 

Elann.com has new sock yarn.  In case you haven't noticed my mentioning them over and over and over, I am a bit of an Elann groupie.  I've never bought a yarn from them I didn't like, and that says a lot as it's online and I have had troubles with Knitpicks with hating a few of their yarns and colors always being WAY off from their website pictures.  But Elann?  Never.  It doesn't help my case that they are such wonderful folks that when I discovered on lace skien had multiple breaks over a year after I bought it, they gave me credit for it.  They didn't have to--I knew the rules, and it was such an unusual occurrence for them that I sent it back so they could maybe find the problem in their supply chain.  Customer service above and beyond expectations ALWAYS makes me a loyal customer, so I'm even more susceptible to them.  So when I saw that they brought back the Sock It To Me sock yarn, I was almost lost.  I teetered.  I pl...

So after being gone for 4 days, the garden is.....well, let's be nice and say "ready for some attention" ("stupid mangy pain-in-the-arse monstrosity" was my first choice) Sigh....what I would really like to do this week is to lock myself in the sewing room and craft my little heart out now that Jeeves finally works.  What I am going to do is to garden/can like a maniac today and tomorrow, then maybe I can take Friday and Saturday as a crafting mini-vacation.  For the first time since I don't know when, we do not have anyone coming over for any reason all weekend.  Not to be anti-social, but WHOO HOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Traveling with two men, there's no way we were going to be browsing knitting or sewing stores, but our weekend did turn into quite a "tour of historic crafting." First, while on the Pendleton Underground Tour (highly recommended--I'll be adding more info to my main blog), we saw this: It's a trade blanket made by the Pendleton Wool Mill.  Those black stripes are how many pelts it represents--this one being 4 pelts.  Wool as a form of currency!!!!  It turns out I don't have a stash after all--I have a nest egg .  This may have been my favorite part of the entire weekend! If you have any interest at all in historic clothing (though not going back beyond mid-1800s--this is the Oregon Territory of the Old West after all), do yourself a favor and visit the Union County Museum .  It's got a very lousy website, unfortunately, and it's only open from Mother's Day to mid-October, but we spent two hours there and could have easily stayed longer.  They ...

No sewing, not too much knitting, but lots of fun.  Pictures to come!  I have to go do some of that pesky laundry, as Andy and I had a discussion and decided naked is not really a way of life.....

Remember when I said I had probably put way more yarn in my stash-dash basket than I could reasonably  expect to knit?  So far I've finished two scarves and used up 4 1/2 balls from my basket.  The newest scarf:  and the next one already on the needles: and the first ball of the gift vest. the entire thing is not part of my basket (thank heavens--cable needle, size 5 needles)--just this one ball. Shall we just stop pretending that I'm not trying to finish the entire basket by September 1, no matter how idiotic this might be?

After cherry-picking yesterday, I finally had a chance to give Jeeves a test run, and decided it would be fitting to try to finish the summer towels that I had started a year ago  when I found out that Holland's Sew Shoppe had sent Jeeves home with more problems than he went in with.  I stabilized, hooped, and everything was going along swimmingly until I apologize for the blurry pictures, but until I actually take the time to A) find my camera manual and B) figure out how to focus said camera, I take a lot of blurry zoomed pictures.  It's a much smaller jump, but it's still a jump.  Now, I have a LOT of faith in Larry at the Twin Falls Sewing Center, and Jeeves had certainly improved, so I took several pictures, explained the problem, and emailed them to Larry so he could look at it when he came in today.  I turned Jeeves off and set everything aside, because I wanted to confirm with Larry what he might need to see if I had to take Jeeves back to Twin Falls. ...

 .....is the guilt-free knitting time.  The blue Foreign Correspondent scarf is done, and I'm already a little over halfway on a scarf for another niece: which means I've already used up FOUR balls of yarn in my Dead Heat stash-dash basket, which has me giddily thinking that I just might get through all of this: before the end of August.  Boy, good thing I decided to be more realistic about my goals, isn't it?????

Jeeves is home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  But, after 4 hours of driving it's actually too late to set him up for a test run, and tomorrow morning EARLY we're going to pick cherries with a friend, so stand by for test-embroidering Sunday night!

I suppose it's possible to get a cold in the summer, but I think we can't rule out the shock of the Husqvarna saga finally being over.  I'm planning to drive down to get Jeeves tomorrow, so I hope I feel better then. In the mean time, I finished the blue scarf!  I have another Finished Project!   Only 58 more to go..... Rats, that doesn't sound nearly as exciting.............

It's been more than a year since the problems with my Husqvarna Platinum 950e surfaced, and after 10 months of working with the incompetent and rude Holland's Sew Shoppe, the lovely people at the Twin Falls Sewing Center finally have found the problem (the one that Holland's continually asserted didn't exist) and have fixed it.  I have asked the new dealer to report the exact details to the dealer manager from the VSM parent company.  Not that I think they actually are that concerned about how dealers treat customers, but I'd like them to have to go forward KNOWING how I was treated. In the meantime, I have been so discouraged with all of this that I haven't even considered the possibility that I'd have a working  embroidery machine again, so I can't even think what to embroider first.  Towels?

I have a new obsession, and it is called the Foreign Correspondent's Scarf .  Possibly my fascination is just because it's not pink , but I spent all of Finishing Friday with it.  It's other big draw might be that the yarn for it (besides being delightfully soft and blue), comes in 109-yard balls, which would normally irritate me to no end because it means lots of splicing, but I can only change that stash tally on the right when I use UP a skein, so I am willing to splice in order to be able to brag that I have already knit up 109 yards from my "Dead Heat" stash-dash basket.  and if I'm knit that much already, maybe I really could knit it all up in two months....................

Today is a significant day.  Want to know why? 1.  It is the start of the mid-point of the year, which shows us that I am behind  on my 111 projects goal, and probably impossibly behind on my 25,000 yards of yarn goal.  I might  have to start considering being--and I shudder to say this--"realistic." 2.  It starts the "Dead Heat" stashdash on Ravelry, which will run until August 31, and I have compiled an impressively crazy  optimistic basket of yarn to knit up in two months. 3.  In the crafting world, it is time to get serious  about Christmas crafting, which in my world usually means that it's time to decide I should make 5 quilts and 3 sweaters between now and Christmas.  Stand by for insanity updates. 4.  It is Finishing Friday, so I am crafting to my little heart's content.  Which is knitting today, because it's easier to knit outside than it is to sew.  It's only 83 today, so I am enjoying nice weather while I c...