Here's a crow I stitched early this summer but was too lazy to post ;-)
Pattern name: Crow from Garden Birds (Prairie Schooler leaflet #56)
Threads: my choice of overdyes
Fabric: can't remember, will update!
Stitched over one with one thread.
One day I plan to send it to a finisher to make it into a rustic pillow.
Okay, so I am still sorting, throwing out and packing into boxes to drive to the storage. In one of the boxes with (very) old stuff which I packed when my father moved from their new house a couple of years ago, I re-discovered my first cross-stitch pieces. Well, I must have been 8 to 11 at the time, and I really really really remember that everyone including me was making those ohs and ahs! over those pieces, but... they are plain ugly!! Except two which might look acceptable once framed and hung somewhere in a dark place :), the rest is awful. H. begged me not to throw them, he's such a garbage-collector, worse than me LOL! So no, I won't throw them and no, I won't exhibit them, at least not until I move into a huge house with a small dark room to put them in. I washed them, didn't iron, and drove to the storage with a bag full of clothes. They'll be safe there and out of sight! ;-)
See some of the horrors I'm talking about:
If you haven't seen it yet, here it is!
Tanya also announces:
*Coming in 2007...
The Sampler Girl designs a sampler for The Gift of
Stitching Magazine ~ to be in their March issue! If you haven't already
signed up for this wonderful online publication, you are missing out.
Kirsten, the Editor, does a beautiful job bringing this monthly magazine to
online format.
Can't wait to see it!
I have a subscription to TGOSM and I can only encourage everyone to do the same, it's a great magazine which you download directly from Internet (click on the magazine photo in my blog header to go to the TGSOM website).
YAY! How can that be? I rearranged my webshots pictures and folders tonight, finally got inspired enough to do it after many months of laziness, and yes! My easy-to-find wishlist includes 166 items!! As an excuse, I must say this must be the list of *all* the charts I am really after.
Would you like to have a look if there's an item you have and don't mind exchanging, selling, whatever? :)
Here is the direct link to the album.
I don't mind if the chart is slightly damaged but useable!
Serious warning: if you're a sampler girl like me, you're lost!
http://users.skynet.be/bk236098/CARINNE/g-pggrillesgratuites.htm
The site is in French (which I know well) but it's pretty easy to browse.
On this sub-page http://users.skynet.be/bk236098/CARINNE/G_surprise.htm
I found the most beautiful scissor case and needle pin keep... I've never done one but these will be those I will stitch as my first. I just can't keep my eyes off them!
Important: bottom of some pages, it says "Suite Free" etc. If you click on the thread-thing (what's the name in English?), you'll be transfered to a page with more of the freebies from the same cathegory.
Happy browsing!
Still haven't felt inspired to take photos of current WIPS and finishes, the few of them, but the day will come soon! LOL
So this post will be not cross-stitch related again, sorry for that. I've only worked a little bit more on the FAS sampler, oh my, that one will take forever to finish.
On Saturday I moved the first things to the storage surface I rented and signed the contract. I just love the place! Not cheap though, but clean, safe, and generally I am so enthusiastic about it. Now it's just to sort, pack and repack, and move old papers/clothes/stuff from my small flat to the storage place. It'll take me some weeks but it's well worth it. Already without the air conditioning unit and Happy's plane transporter it looks like the flat is a lot more empty.
Here's a photo of the small hall where my storage is located (door to the left):
Apart from that, the bad period continues but I won't extend on that. Nah.
You'll love this one! Try to make the hill too steep or unconnected... LOL!
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40255643/?offset=10
(BLOGGER ATE HAlF AN HOUR OF WRITING, HEY, BETA VERSION, ARE YOU OKAY???) :(
.......
http://www.bodilbroderi.dk/
I especially love the 2003 Angel on one of the pages.
Enjoy!
See the Executive Coloring Book.
The comments are just hilarious!
http://commercial-archive.com/791e47b7f09c3ef030d7a29989118702/2006/tebc/theexecutivecoloringbook.html
Subject: How to make a woman happy
It's not difficult to make a woman happy. A man only needs to be:
1. a friend
2. a companion
3. a lover
4. a brother
5. a father
6. a master
7. a chef
8. an electrician
9. a carpenter
10. a plumber
11. a mechanic
12. a decorator
13. a stylist
14. a sexologist
15. a gynecologist
16. a psychologist
17. a pest exterminator
18. a psychiatrist
19. a healer
20. a good listener
21. an organizer
22. a good father
23. very clean
24. sympathetic
25. athletic
26. warm
27. attentive
28. gallant
29. intelligent
30. funny
31. creative
32. tender
33. strong
34. understanding
35. tolerant
36. prudent
37. ambitious
38. capable
39. courageous
40. determined
41. true
42. dependable
43. passionate
44. compassionate
WITHOUT FORGETTING TO:
45. give her compliments regularly
46. love shopping
47. be honest
48. be very rich
49. not stress her out
50. not look at other girls
AND AT THE SAME TIME, YOU MUST ALSO:
51. give her lots of attention
52. give her lots of time, especially time for herself
53. give her lots of space, never worrying about where
she goes
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT:
54. Never to forget:
* birthdays
* anniversaries
* arrangements she makes
HOW TO MAKE A MAN HAPPY
1. Show up naked
2. Bring food
Here is the piece I stitched and finished for my partner in the PS group last month, oops, time flies by, it was in August. I am so delayed in posting my recent finishes and WIPs.
I loved that piece. I used a LE fabric from Silkweaver and my choice of overdyes, and the finishing was done using a piece of styrofoam and hand-dyed hemp string. It took me a whole evening to assemble it but I was very proud of the result.
In return, I received the most adorable little cube from Teresa D. with a PS owl. The cube is a real sweetie and a joy to look at! I`ll post a photo tomorrow, it is now too dark to get a good shot. Other than this, I am back to Warsaw after my > two Norwegian months and unhappy. Last week-end I travelled to attend my aunt's 70th birthday, she invited about 20 persons of family and closest friends for lunch+coffee to a nearby restaurant, the food was great, the atmosphere relaxing. I brought back Toska the cat queen, the 3h trip in train with her went very well.
When it comes to my WIPs: I just need to do about 6 squares (I think) on the afghan for H. I stopped working on it when I left Norway. I am now working on the French Alphabet Sampler - I finally received it, the store owner sent it to Poland despite swearing 1) she would remember to send to Norway back in July 2) that she did not send to Poland. She did. I am so upset by the way she handled this order. Also, when I asked for help thinking she could get another copy from the designer (because we assumed the one she had sent had got lost), she promised help but I never heard from her since. Beware if you ever plan to order this expensive sampler, make extra sure this is handled better than it went with me.
Thus, I won't able to finish it in time for H's 50th birthday in November. No way. It is 411x411, and I chose to do it 1 over 2 on a SW 40 ct. linen (Cameo is the color). It goes extremely slow.
If I had known, I wouldn't have ordered it this year. I'm trying very hard to work fast on it, so I am not stitching anything else.
You'll notice this post is unhappy, it just shows the way I feel recently. Everything is just plain wrong around, in all possible aspects in my life, and for the first time in my life, I just don't see a way out. Some things have gone too far, and I can't get help from anywhere, anyone. I feel terribly lonely these days. Most of the week I have sleep problems, oh well, hopefully one day this will solved somehow.
H.'s birthday is in 6 weeks, I still have no idea if I'll go, for money reasons. On the other hand, we'll maybe spend Christmas together away from the families this year.
You know. Families can be great. But sometimes they aren't. And today also brought an unexpected quarrel on the phone with my brother over the last family issue. I know I am oversensitive and I shouldn't feel guilty even when he tried to make me feel bad. But in the middle of that particular family problem, I am upset that instead of offering help and understanding, once again all he does it making it all so much, much worse for me. Okay, fine, I am so tired of all these conflicts that I took the plunge and made a decision: no, we won't go and visit them in Switzerland next month if we attend the concert in Zurich. At my age I am tired of feeling guilty all the time, I want to react and do things the way I feel they should be handled.
The only reason I am not deleting what I wrote, even it it sounds so upsetting, is that I want to remember this week and all last month.
I'll cross my own fingers for a better period... Sometimes I just don't feel for living, and knowing me and my optimistic nature, this is pretty serious LOL!
A town in Poland has just entered the Guiness World Records book for the biggest woven basket in the world. To me it looks weird like in an enchanted world... :)
We're almost done with renewing the laundry room. Will post a picture when we're finished.
On the xstitch side, I have worked a lot on the afghan.
Just a few days now till I fly back to Warsaw. It'll be a busy week trying to pack clever, Norwegian (the budget airlines) allow only a limited number of kgs of luggage. We already have the ticket for Happy. Poor doggie, how will he get used again to my small flat? I also talked to my aunt on the phone, Toska-the-cat-queen seems to have gotten used to the garden and sleeping outdoor. Now both of them will get back to the tiny, tiny flat....
Heh. I suggested we renovate the laundry room at level -1, which you go through to go to the bathroom. Dozens of years ago (the house is from the 1930-ties, but it has been growing by bits here and there - with no plan, obviously), someone squeezed a tiny -and only- bathroom at level -1. It's not very comfortable to have to go there all the time with all the stairs, and it's also extremely small, so H. is planning on developing the WC near the entrance door at level zero this fall/next spring to turn it into a big, comfortable bathroom. I was surprised when he accepted my suggestion to renew the laundry room; he wasn't planning on working on there before some time. As I wrote earlier, he listens to my suggestions and agrees to some of my ideas after some thinking time LOL! Not that all my ideas are good, far from that. Most require lots of money and that is something we're missing at the moment. Here in Norway people do most of work inside/outside their houses by themselves and with the help of friends. Not like in Poland, where I think most people just pay for the services of a building team. But also - whatever they do, Norwegians use a long time on it, and do it very detailed and neat. In Poland I'd venture to say the result is rarely good and works need to be redone within a short time. How come Polish building workers are praised elsewhere in Europe for the quality of their work but that in their own country they're too lazy to deliver a good job? Pfffff! ;-)
Anyway. That laundry room, like most rooms in this house, hasn't been touched for at least 30-40 years. Yes, years. And H.'s mother loved to pick impossible colors. In the case of the laundry room - dark grey on walls, dark grey on ceiling, dark grey on the floor. Makes for a lovely atmosphere! :-)
We're putting antique vanilla on the walls, white on the ceiling and light grey on the floor. In a year or two the floor will be redone with floor heating and tiles, but now we're doing emergency work :)
Actually we're doing it quite detailed and it'll take us a week or 10 days to have it done. Plenty of holes to fill in, surfaces to smoothen etc.
There are moments when I am so pooped that I ask H. why I had the wonderful idea of renewing this room? LOL
I am leaving in less than 2 weeks and it'll be wonderful to have done at least that room plus a lot of small sorting and cleaning here and there, (re)planting plants in the garden etc.
I can't wait to see that room clean, shining and full of light, I just can't!
On the picture, you can see the color of the walls and how damaged they were. Not anymore like this! :) Hakon was ordering a pizza yesterday... and the pink heart post-it is where I put down the phone number to Peppes Pizza for him, it's the biggest Norwegian pizza chain. BTW, what does a large pizza cost in the US? Here it amounts to 40 usd about, plus the delivery. In Poland that would make 4 large pizzas at least and the delivery is free. I toldya, Norwegians are nuts! LOL
Here's what it looked yesterday! Still haven't got my order from the US, so I keep on working on the afghan. Not that I enjoy working on it, mind you. But if I can't finish and give H. his personnalized sampler in November because the order is lost, well, then he'll get the afghan and... hmmm... to be totally honest I am sure he'll love it much much much more than the sampler LOL!
And to the right, the picture shows what the sampler will look like, one day ;-)
If you find it absolutly kitschy, I do agree with you!!! :) :) :)
I'll explain: several hears ago, while we were hiking in the mountains around Zakopane (my old aunt was with us that day), we met a bear mummy with two cubs. The most adorable little creature you can imagine. No stuffed toy will ever recreate that sweetness LOL! I won't venture into a long description now, but the whole experience was life-threatening - actually there aren't that many people in the world who survived a meeting with a bear mother with 2-months old cubs and extremely scary. The bad side to it is that I now tend to be very afraid in the wild nature even when I don't show it. Before that, it didn't occur to me that animals can do harm to me unless I do something very stupid. Now I know that meeting an animal is not always funny, especially when it is accompanied by its young kids. In Norway, I think no human was hurt by a bear since 50 years at least. Or more :) In Poland, each year takes its toll. Our bears are used to people, to getting and finding food at villages and towns, and there are even places where it often happens that people can't get to their cars at the parking because a bear is sleeping on the engine because it's nicely warm! Of course, this only happens in the mountains in the south of the country. And people meet and see bears regularly. I've even heard of a case where a bear was regularly taking food from a trash bin for years and the day when the owner lady decided to stop putting it there, the bear forced its way trough the door and destroyed all the inside of the house, including ovens and other permanent equipment, with one slam of the paw. The poor lady had escaped to the upper floor and called rescues. Here in Norway bears avoid people and seeing one is an event of its own.
The point I am trying to make is that when I saw this chart, I almost shouted :-). It shows the scene where we met the bear mom almost identically to the way it happened, including the view in the background. The only wrong element is the eagle - unless there was one and we didn't see it LOL!
I know that when H. sees the finished afghan, he might not believe his eyes!! :-) I can't wait to see his reaction!!! Well, then we'll have to find a place to hang that "thing" - it's not exactly something I would hang in my living-room! ROTFL
I finished it 3 weeks ago, in just a few evenings. It's okay, but I am not fond of it. I wanted to stitch it as a companion piece to last year's kit, and I like the 2006 version a lot more, but I can't help it - I don't like when the fabric shows through the stitches. My mistake - I should have used the threads from the kit but picked my own fabric, in lower count. Oh well. It'll land in the "finished" pile till I put it into the priority pile of finished pieces to frame.
Still raining today. I observed an unhappy squirrel jump from tree to tree (I didn't know they can "fly" like this!) while I was working this morning and I can't keep wondering - is this the same squirrel I see all the time in the garden, or its partner, or a totally different one? :-) One of those questions one will never get an answer to. LOL!
H. is back from work. After dinner we'll attack the laundry room on level -1. Today we'll be sorting and throwing out stuff, then over the coming week we'll be cleaning and scraping the floor, then painting. I still don't know how I managed to have H. want to do this room now because he has his own little plan when it comes to renewing this old house (it'll take a century, I'm afraid) and most of the elements of this genious plan are not things I can discuss! :) :) :)
That said, I learned that instead of forcing my ideas on him, it's better if I say my opinion (many times, insisting voice LOL!) and he says NO, then the next day he comes to me to say he thought it over and yes, we can do it the way I suggested. And that I was right, of course, but that he needs time to process the idea :-)
Very often this involves getting rid of smthg he loves, but which is awfully old and useless. We often pack these jewels up to the other garbage-house.
Small victories :)
