Friday, October 31, 2003

happy halloween

It's that haunting time of year again. Tonight I'll sit home alone passing out treats while DH takes DD to see "les Mis" and DS goes out with friends. For the first time in many years, it will not be raining or frigidly cold where we are. Amazing.

I have had an epiphany about our Christmas tree. Other than my perforated paper cross-stitched Santas, I do not have any stitched ornaments on my tree. Not that I haven't had a long, fulfilling career stitching ornaments. But all have been given away either as gifts or to charity auctions.

In the spirit of redeeming this oversight, I've been going through the JCS ornament issues marking down designs I'd like to stitch. I've narrowed it down to 12, and have managed to kit up 3 of them.
This means a nice long drive out of not-needlework-paradise next week for some well-deserved stashing. Meanwhile I've started with Ellen Chester's of With My Needle ornament from the 2002 issue.

I realized I'm drawn to ornaments that have the title or words from favorite Xmas carols on them.
And yes, this means we have already begun listening to seasonal music at my house. We've started playing our favorites - Ed Gerhard's two lovely acoustic guitar CDs and the Bobs too funny for words CD.

Monday, October 27, 2003

football and stitching

it's that time of year again. Time for football viewing and stitching. Yesterday I didn't think I could concentrate enough to work on Agnes Scott, so I cut a piece of 18ct black mono canvas and started to work a needlecase for myself with Wildflowers Forest Fire. Boy, do I know myself. In between stitching I was getting up to do laundry and cook (stuffed flank steak)- translation not paying close enough attention to what I was doing.

I'm stitching smyrna crosses all the way around and when I get nearly back to the beginning I realize that I've stitched 64 smyrnas down the long side, not 68! No way am I going to unpick nearly 80 smyrnas!

Now I had been contemplating changing the design, but now I guess I have to change things to accomodate my error. At least the colors look wonderful on black. Maybe I need to come up with a falling leaves design of some sort. Guess that is now the project of the day.