Friday Funday

 A few photos of what I've been doing lately:

This is Miss Polly Nosegay by Queenstown Sampler Designs. Barbara is kind of local to me and I know her through the Loudoun Sampler Guild. She says she found a girl on a sampler with a large nose and this design is a bit of homage to something stitched long ago. I just thought she was cute. I did change out the DMC floss for Au Ver au Soie silks. I think that made my colors just a big darker than originally called for. And I threw into this frame for a guild meeting, but I think I'm going to make it into an ornament. Yes. I have visions of a Christmas tree that has only stitched ornaments on it. In fact, if I made that my goal, I could accomplish it pretty quickly. But that's not my goal. 

This is an original piece by me that I'm called Kites Aloft. This is the result of 2013's Presidents' Challenge where we gave guild members 6 small pearls and challenged them to use them. 

Kites Aloft is my third attempt at this Challenge. The first one I discarded because I'm honest with myself - I don't enjoy freeform embroidery all that much. The second one grew too large for me to finish and I abandoned all hope in May when it became apparent that I bit off more than I had time to chew. That meant I needed another idea. And one morning I just woke up and there it was. I'd use the pearls on the tails of kites. 

I'm going to be completely honest here. All the threads were leftover bits and bobs in my stash. Everything is silk except the teal kite which is an overdyed cotton and the background which is Kreinik #4 braid. There was no planning. I sat down on Friday to see if I could make a kite shape - that's the pink one. On Saturday and came back and stitched the other 5 kites and started the border. On Sunday I finished the border and started the greenery. On Monday I finished the greenery and started the background. On Tuesday I finished the background and kite tails. Five days from start to finish. And I think it turned out pretty darn good considering the lack of planning. It would really be something if I'd put more thought into placement first! LOL

And here's where I am on the Ghordian Knot correspondence course from ANG. We're meeting again next weekend and I'd like to have the next section finished by then. It goes pretty fast when I sit and apply myself. But like always I'm flitting from one thing to the other. But the plan for now is to concentrate on this and the Loudoun Sampler Guild Mystery project.