Stitchy Happiness!!!!

Have you ever had two of your favourite people come together? Well it just happened to me. I am so, so excited.

As you may know I have been a long time fan of Jenny Hart at Sublime Stitching. In fact, back when it was just her and an assistant, my husband wrote to her and asked to to include a personalized note in my package as a gift and she graciously complied with the cutest handwritten card.

And on the side of my blog, I have been following Andrees Illustration for a couple years, and have a framed print of hers outside my office door which I look at about 40 times a day.

So you can imagine my glee when I see a little image pop up on the side of my blog of a little house drawn by Andree. My first thought was "I'd love to embroider that". I follow the link to Andree's blog and that's when I find out she's collaborated with Sublime Stitching! Very excited. And yes, I have already placed an order for the patterns.

Showgirl Embroidery/Molly Crabapple

What else do you do on a rainy long weekend? Well I do laundry and finish projects - after getting soaked to the skin in less than 5 minutes during today's dog walk.

Finished showgirl embroidery:

Embroidery stitching by me. Pattern by http://sublimestitching.com/. Artwork by Molly Crabapple. I encourage you to check out her page, her artwork is quite fascinating.

This is a really big deal

For years I've been a customer and followed the path of Jenny Hart and Sublime - an impressive women who has made a career and business out of hand stitched embroidery. She not only sells patterns and the tools but she also has her own branded embroidery floss (what you stitch with) and multiple books over the years. She's also been a speaker on TedTalks as well as multiple TV shows.

Now she's just announced that Restoration Hardware will be carrying one of her kits this Christmas. This is HUGE! This is big for most companies but for a small one practically run out of Jenny's house with a small staff and in the craft market - HUGE I say.

Her story is inspirational and after being a customer and following her for years, I'm very proud of someone who almost feels like a friend! Congratulations Jenny!

Flowered Tote Embroidery

Here's the finished flower embroidery that I couldn't show you before because all the pattern transfer lines made it too ugly and confusing to look at:

Believe me, I couldn't wait to get it wet (water soluble marker) and wash away all the blue lines.

It's a simple design, stitched only in straight stitches on the outlines only. I may be interesting to do it again filling more of it in - we'll see, I don't usually like to do the same pattern twice. If you'd like to make one yourself, here's where I got the pattern - and you can learn how to dye your embroidery thread as well. It was because of this post that I decided to use only variegated thread for this project. Oh and the finished tote bag came from Sublime Stitching.

It's Sunday Night Already?

Yesterday was a nice sunny day, so I spent most of the day in the garden putting away plants and ornaments and getting things ready for winter.

Then we were off to Jp's sister's house because we were  lucky enough to have a second Thanksgiving dinner, it's good to get the family together and enjoy yummy food. And one of the best parts was that his sister gave us the turkey carcass and leftover meat so we could make some turkey noodle soup! Yummy, guess what I'll be doing tomorrow.

I also worked on two little projects this weekend. The first is a little cuff to go around my thermal coffee container which sometimes dribbles if I don't dry the threads or the lid well enough, so I whipped up this little cozy using some leftover yarn and a crochet hook: 

I know I am solving the wrong problem - maybe I just wanted an excuse to crochet. 

And, I also did some embroidery as hand stitching is one of my favourite things.  I really liked these cute little Halloween bunnies plus I wanted to use my glow-in-the-dark thread: 

If you'd like to stitch one up too, the pattern can be found here. Be sure to tell me where I can see your photos in my comments as it's so much fun seeing how other people stitch things up! (In case you're wondering what's wrong with the Dracula bunny, my disappearning ink from my transfer pen didn't disappear fast enough and/or I didn't want to wait any longer for it to disappear! )

Now to watch TV - Boardwalk Empire and Dexter tonight.

Embroidery on the Go

When I went to Kelowna for my mini vacation, I decided to take some embroidery instead of knitting.

By the way, here's a sunset from our room:

When I was packing up the supplies for my project bag, I realized  I didn't know what colour I would need and wondered "what if I leave the very colour I need at home? Then what?" So I decided to take all the floss that I had already on cards.

My embroidery box before:

My embroidery box after I packed for the trip:

Packing to leave, was the easy part, but coming home and arranging all the colours in some sort of spectrum was a wee bit harder.

What was I working on? Two Molly Crabapple designs from Sublime Stitching. I'm thinking of adding a red stage curtain around this girl:

I really don't like showing unfinished, unironed work, but well, we're among friends, so here goes:

The Complete Apron

So if you have been following along lately, you've seen sneak peeks of an embroidered project. Now that Christmas is over and the gift has been received, you may see the complete piece:

Look - I'm featured

Today on Sublime Stitching Facebook Fan Page - the little deer that I embroidered was featured! Yes, it's Sublime Stitching's pattern transfer, but my embroidery!

Yay me! 

Edit:  as of 5:50 on Thursday, there were over 270 views of that photo on Flickr.

Another sneak peek

Would you like to see a little more of what I worked on this month?

 (part of a larger piece)

Meat Dreams

I was stuck for Christmas ideas for Jp, as he usually doesn't wait for the things he really likes, so I though maybe he'd like an embroidered pillowcase (ya right, what was I thinking?). Anyway, since he's not much of a sweet tooth, but loves meat, I made him this... a Meat Dreams pillowcase.

In case you're interested, the images are iron-on transfers from Sublime Stitching's Meaty Treats, except for the word "dream".