A Little Yarn On The Side

Today is the 103rd day of 2013, and with a new family of terrorized gingerbread men, and 3 new plum pudding ornaments finished this morning (with some help from Calisto), , I now have 113 ornaments done for the year, which means I'm actually ahead of schedule right now.   Luckily, the shock has not done me in just yet.  Being caught up in April and being caught up in December are very different things.................

is what a bribe looks like.  I am doing our taxes this week, and when I finish them, I get to play with this.  It was a new lace scarf or chocolate, and at least the scarf will lead to a decrease in my stash, and is probably much healthier. I thought I wasn't going to need it, because I managed to get our federal taxes done with only lace icicles as a bribe, but Tuesday night I slept badly and my back ended up in enough pain that yesterday was mostly drugged, so my maturity level has had a corresponding set-back.  I keep telling myself that if I just get the taxes done then I have all weekend to play, and I think it will get me back to my desk, but a little alpaca lace yarn doesn't hurt anything.......................

Isn't he just the cutest thing ever?  The tan one worked out much better than the dark brown, though I think the dark slightly-burned look would be more accurate for my attempt to make cookies.  Aren't they just adorable?  And it's a free pattern --win, win! I love it when brilliant people share things. Not that I still don't love the icicles, but Jeeves can make these while I make adorably-frightened gingerbread men. Maybe this 365-ornament thing might really happen after all...................

Mother Nature was a week off, because we got our usual Easter weather (cold, rain, wind) yesterday.  While Theo chose to spend the day snoozing in a pillow fort, I spent most of the day in the sewing room.  I was inspired by the idea of a Victorian Christmas, so more pink ornaments!  And even more: As you can see, there was a problem with one of the icicles.  Some of you might recognize this as the sort of thing that lead to the long battle with the jerks at Holland's Sew Shoppe.  To anyone who ISN'T a complete jackass of a repair guy who blames everything on user error, this was a mid-design jump, which means the embroidery card is going bad.  I think my machine is one of the last to use these: which is how I transfer designs from the computer to the machine.  So far, it's just one design, so it might mean there's a defect where it wrote this design--in this case, number 11.  So I can still use it, but just won't embroider anything...

 In spite of the fact that I have fallen drastically behind in my ornament-making plans, for the record, these weren't just an attempt to make fast, quick ornaments in a desperate push to catch up.  Or at least, not entirely.  These exist because of this: Sulky embroidery spools like this hold 850 yards of thread.  Which is fine, except that every thread manufacturer uses a different type of spool.  I don't know if this one has a thick or thin center, so while I'm pretty sure there isn't enough thread left on the spool to make a snowflake, I don't actually know how much IS left.  Lace ornaments like this have to have matching thread in the bobbin as well, so I'm making the small ornaments with this so I can use it up without running out of thread in the middle of anything.  I do love the embroidered lace ornaments, but they are thread pigs.  So, there is a point to this BESIDES desperation.  I got the red ornaments blocked, and since ...

Meet finished WIP number 3! I'd like to say that this encouraged me to try to top my own personal record of 14 WIPs in a row (finished, not abandoned--that record is probably much more frightening), but in order to convince myself to get this thing finished, I promised myself this: which uses some FABULOUS cashmere/merino/silk yarn that a friend gave me, and is now finished, and severely in need of blocking.  It's a quite adorable pattern, which is available for free here .  Right now mine currently looks like some ramen noodles had an accident with Pepto Bismal, but if you click on the link, you'll understand why this worked so well as a bribe.  In fact, it worked so well that I'm working on another WIP!  Being my entry for the March Sweater Madness, it's a fairly recent WIP, but I finally got some issues with the pattern figured out, and the sweater is now zipping along again.  With bigger WIPS like this, I've promised myself a quick little rewa...

The last few Finishing Fridays have been a bit short-changed due to other things happening, so yesterday I spent most of the day in the sewing room as a bonus day. YAY! I am not too proud to admit that I may not get caught up without Jeeves's help, so I loaded up my embroidery card with several designs I've done before, as well as four of the more-complicated designs from the package Andy had given me for Christmas.  This  is the first piece of the first design.  The idea seems to be that it is assembled using these dots, the dots go through the corresponding holes and it's all assembled.  Sounds great to me!  I was NOT looking forward to figuring out how to sew them together. I've found it saves on stabilizer to do a very large piece (doubled as these are very thread heavy) and then the hooping can overlap a bit and get ornaments closer together  so I haven't actually tried assembling the new ornament yet, so there's only one.  I want ...