I'm Finished Waiting!!

Just a quick post. I've finally finished "Waiting"!
She was done last night around midnight. Now all I have to do is get her stretched and framed when I have a few extra dollars for this.

I skipped stitching the blackwork border around the picture because I didn't leave enough room. Even with what's there it'll be a stretch (pun not intended) to get this piece stretched and framed properly. I've only got about 2 inches at the top and bottom right now, so if I had stitched the border as the pattern shows I would have only had about an inch left.

Anyway, enough talking. Here she is!

Waiting by Linda Jary

Stitched in DMC 28ct cream(?) Linen

Started sometime in 2005 - REstarted at 20 hours July 14, 2006

Finished - May 22, 2007

100 Hours Waiting

Well, I made it to the magical 100 hour mark on Waiting, but I'm still nowhere close to finished. Well, I guess close is a ?? word here. I'm much closer than I was 10, 20, 30 hours ago, but I've still got a ways to go. I'm guessing 30 or 40 more hours, stitching at my pace. I've barely touched her the past few months, only getting an hour or so here and there, so god knows when I'll get her finished.


Janice has been watching me work away on her (she's my cousin for those who don't know who I'm talking about.) and decided she wanted to stitch her as well. (Enabling points for me!) But I think she's actually got just as much-- if not more-- done than I do. I know she's waiting until last to work on the drapes. I advised her to do that, because I found even though I was getting a lot of stitching done, I didn't see much progress since the picture didn't seem to shape up very fast. Anyway, when she's done I'll get her to email me a pic and I'll post it here too. She stitched it on bright white evenweave (the pattern calls for white) instead of the almost mushroom coloured linen that I used. It makes a big difference in the look of the project. I didn't think it would make that much of a difference, since they're both light coloured fabrics, but it does.


Anyway, here's my 100 hour picture, and here's hoping that I can actually get her finished soon. I've got several more big ones that I want to start, especially Fairy Moon, since I've now got the fabric for her.

Impatiently Waiting

I'm (Im)patiently waiting for my fabrics to arrive from Silkweaver. After nearly mauling my mail carrier for the last month and a half wondering when my free fabrics were going to be here, I got an email on Tuesday telling me that they'd been shipped. I can't complain too much about the speed though. I emailed Tracey at Silkweaver and asked if I could trade a few of my 10 smaller free pieces for one large piece that I need to finally start stitching Fairy Celebration. (see the bottom of this post) She had no problem with that and said that she was crazy busy right now but as soon as she got the piece dyed she'd ship them out to me. Since the piece I was looking for was a custom size piece and she had to cut and then dye it for me, it wouldn't be one she normally had in her stash.

I'm hoping that US/Canada Post don't take too long with the delivery. Hopefully they'll be here early in the week, because I could go completely nuts knowing that they should be here any day but not knowing when. The worst part is Canada Post recently assessed our mailbox as being too dangerous where it is and moved us to a community mailbox. We now get our mail about 1km down the road, which is nice when it comes to shoveling out our mailbox in the winter time, but it also means that I can't just run down to the mailbox while the baby's sleeping. I've actually got to get the kids up, dressed and ready for outside, then head over to the mailbox-- only to find that there's a flyer for the Beltone hearing test that comes to town once a month.
Needless to say, I don't make it to the mailbox every day now that it's moved.


Speaking of "Waiting", I realized that I never posted the 90 hour picture I took back in January. lol. It's been a while since I've done much stitching on it. Here's the most recent picture, taken January 31, 2007 at 90 hours work. The window and outside the window are completely done. I'm now working on the dreaded bieges in her dress again, though I haven't been working on her much, so no more pictures yet.

Tomorrow is Olivia's Ice show and she's going to be a snowflake with the other preschoolers. (the boys are snowmen) The costume is finally finished as of last night. I spent the evening hot glueing stars and sequens in the shape of snowflakes onto her costume. Then I velcroed a large snowflake on the back that one of the other mothers cut out and spraypainted silver.
The whole thing is very cute. I'll post some pictures tomorrow after the show is done.

Tonight however I'll be spending the evening decorating trees. The theme for the ice show is A Walk in the Park - Four Seasons, and we need 4 trees-- one for each season. We cut down four small birch trees in the woods behind my house and put them in buckets half filled with cement. Of course the winter tree is easy, I spreay painted some white on it to look like snow/frost and it's ready. Easy Peasy. But the other three are quite a bit more work.


I'm currently working on the summer tree. I'm using green painters tape to tape bunched up squares of green tissue paper to the branches. I've only got about forty minutes on it so far because I can't work on it when the kids are up. I'll most likely be spending all evening and half the night tonight working on it. Janice is coming over right now to pick up the spring and fall trees. They only need about half the amount of "leaves" on the trees because they would either be just starting to grow in the spring, or already half gone in the fall. Hopefully we'll get them done without losing too much sleep. It would have been a lot easier if Jason didn't have to work, then I could spend the whole day downstairs working on it, but unfortunately he does, and I couldn't get anyone to come watch the kids for a few hours, so I'm stuck doing it tonight instead.


Here's a picture so far. I got about 40 minutes work on it when Rachel was napping earlier. Olivia was a bit of a pest getting into everything down there while I was working, but we managed for a bit. Hopefully I have enough green tissue paper to finish it. Janice stopped and checked at one of the local stores to see if there was any more, but there wasn't. She picked up some green crepe paper streamers instead. I can attach these the same way, I think, but it might still look quite a bit different. Instead, I might try mixing the streamers in with the tissue paper so it looks more naturally mixed in, instead of on half one shade of green and the other half another shade. I dunno, we'll see how it looks tomorrow.

Edit: It's 11:15 pm and we just finished the tree. I wanted to log on and add a picture of the finished result. For some reason in the picture the tape holding the apples on (green painters tape) reflects the flash a lot more than the tissue paper or crepe paper streamers and it looks like it's quite a bit brighter. (It's almost glowing on the tops of the apples.) But IRL you don't even see it. It matches almost exactly the colour green of the papers. It looks pretty good.

Looking at it again in the picture, I think I might tie up that rogue branch on the left side and make it a bit more uniform looking. Then again life's not always about uniformity is it?
Damn, I get all profound and stuff at a quarter after 11 at night don't I?

Alright, I'm pooped. Off to bed for me! Later everyone.

A bit more Waiting

I just realized that I never posted a pic of my 70 hour progress of Waiting. I've now finished over 80 hours and so I have two pictures to post of this one today. I also have another small finish to show off. I saw a picture on an egroup I belong to where someone (Sorry, I can't remember who) posted a pic of a design she came up with. It said "Never trust a skinny cook" and had a small teddy bear with a chef's hat on. I fell in love with the phrase and decided to come up with my own version of this. I "thiefed" a few elements from some other patterns I had, so they're not all mine, but the overall design is.

Here are some pictures...

Waiting at 70 hours. Arm, Back and Scarf completed.

Waiting at 80 Hours - Other arm, Hair and 2/3 of the windowpanes completed. (My god that hair had a LOT of quarter stitches!)

Never trust a SKINNY Cook. (My new motto)

Waiting, Cravings and the Weather

It seems like everyone everywhere is posting about the strange weather lately, but we're seeing a lot of strange goings on here in Atlantic Canada especially. I mean, hell, it's January 6th and they're calling for a high of 11 degrees and a low of 1 degree Celcius (That's a high of 52 and a low of 34 degrees F for any American friends reading this.) The regional norms are between -15 and -4 degrees C (between 5 and 25 degrees F) This is CRAZY. We're having a pretty torrential downpour right now and for the past few days it's felt like early spring here! This has got to be one of the mildest winters on record for the area. I actually saw on TV the other day that 10 of the warmest years (worldwide) have occured since 1994 (12 years)... so 10 of the past 12 years have been the warmest years EVER recorded! It really makes you think about the whole Global Warming issue, doesn't it?



Rachel is getting ready to pop a few more teeth. Her two top incisors are starting to push through. You can see her gums are getting whiter as the teeth are getting closer to the surface. It should be any day now and my little one is going to move from 2 to 4 teeth. She's getting so big now, I'm almost getting depressed thinking about it. With Olivia it didn't seem as bad because I always knew I wanted another baby. But now that we have 2, we're pretty much sure we're done having kids. (not 100%, but about 99% sure) And, now that we're pretty sure of this, every new milestone is not only exciting, but saddening becasue this is my LAST baby! This is the last time I'll see one of my babies getting their teeth, learning to crawl, learning to talk etc etc etc. I know there are some (if not many) of you who know exactly what I'm talking about.



I had the chance to get my tubes tied when I went in for surgery on my Ovarian Cysts, but I didn't want to commit to something like that. I'd rather wait a while and go back for another surgery (or send Jason for surgery *lol*) once we're 100% sure we're done... but not until then.





Something weird happend to me yesterday. I was in Rachel's room getting her up after her nap and all of a sudden, out of the blue, I got hit with a VERY STRONG craving for a cigarette! Funny thing is, I quit smoking in June 1997 so it's been almost 10 years! I backslid a few times, afterwards but never for long, mostly just party smoking (I know you understand that Aunt "C"! That and "New Brunswick Smoking" *lol*) and I haven't even had a drag off of a cig in at LEAST 5 years, I'm not sure exactly how long it's been since I had a drag, but I know I've never had one since I've been living in this house. (5 years in May) It just seems weird to hit all of a sudden out of the blue like that. Honestly, it's something I never really expected to have to wrorry about anymore. Not after this long. Strange.



Well, now that I'm done with Christmas ornies and Fairy Celebration, I can finally get back to stitching on Waiting. It's been sitting for quite a long time (sometime in October was the last time I stitched on her) and I finally got my next 10 hours done with. I'm now at 60 hours as of the other night when I took the pictures. In reality I'm at about 64 hours now, but I don't have any pictures for that far yet. I'll have some more at 70. I've finished the lady's arm and have started on the blue scarf on her dress. She's coming along pretty well, hopefully I can stick with her for a while now and get quite a lot done. It shouldn't be too hard now that I'm done all of the "boring" stitching on the drapes. Here's a picture of my progress so far. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Waiting at 51 hours. The drapes are finished!!!

I know it's been a while since I've posted an update on my "Waiting" cross-stitch, but I took a break from stitching for a few weeks. I do that quite often in fact. That's the main reason I take so long to actually finish anything. My Mr. Bear X-stitch took me somewhere in the vicinity of 4 years to complete. Often I'll leave off stitching for several months at a time.

But anyway, enough about that. Here's my progress picture. I took it at 51 hours instead of 50 hours. I was so close to finishing the drapes that I didn't want to stop long enough to take the picture because I was scared that I'd get lazy and not pick it back up again. *lol* So, the drapes are finally finished and I FINALLY get to move on to more interesting areas to stitch! Woohoo!!

Notice the colour of the fabric and floss. I recently got a cheap lamp for my Cross stitch area that I put a "true light" lightbulb in. If you look back at the old posts with pictures of this project you can see the difference the light makes in the colours. I never realized how much difference it made until I saw the pictures side by side.

(Click on the "Waiting" label at the bottom of this post to see all the posts about this project.)

Rain Rain Go Away...

It's been a few days since I last posted. I haven't had a lot to say lately. Life's been pretty slow around here. I have been stitching quite a bit lately in the evenings so I've actually got another 10 hours done on my "Waiting" cross stitch. That being said, here's a picture of the progress so far.

I've also taken my first foray into the world of eBay! I was looking for some cross stitch patterns and saw a few that I wanted to get. I won the bid on two of them so far. The first one I bid on was a Stoney Creek pattern leaflet called Family Blessings. The pattern they showed on the ebay page was the Family Tree. It's so gorgeous! I HAD to have it. According to the Stoney Creek site the 6 patterns included in the book are "Prosperity Quilt Block Welcome", "Bookmark Vine Border", "Grandchildren", "Our Family Tree", "Irish Marriage Blessing", and "Home" I got this book for the great deal of $3.99 US (apx $4.54 CAN)

Here's the pic of the family tree I desperately want to stitch.

The second one that I purchased is Theresa Wentzler's Egyptian Sampler. I saw some progress pictures of this by someone else and liked it, but when I saw a pic of the finished product at the ebay site, I fell in love with it! I got the pattern for only $1.99 US ($2.26 CAN)

I also bid on two other auctions, but they're not finished yet. I'll find out in a few days if I won those bids or not. They're all from the same seller so I'll be able to combine them to save on shipping... I bid on Theresa Wentzler's English Cottage Sampler and Lavender & Lace's Celtic Spring. I was going to upload pics of them too, but blogger isn't letting me upload anymore pics right now...I'll have to post pics of them another day.

Waiting update

I finally managed to get a picture of the Cross Stitch "Waiting" that I've been working on.
Here is my progress so far. Like I said in the post a few days ago when I first mentioned it, I think I've got about 20 hours done on it. It doesn't look like much, but it's a LOT of stitching... It's just that it's fairly boring looking so far being that I've only got part of the panels on the curtains done so far.

"Waiting"
Designed by Linda Gordanier Jary
Stitched over 2 on 28 Count Linnen (DMC)
(Sorry, I can't remember the colour... Mushroom maybe?)
Apx 20 hours completed

I've also been working on a new layout for my blog. Even though I like the look of this one, it's still one of the "standard" layouts that you can choose after you sign up to Blogger. I like to be a bit more unique...The one I'm working on isn't a great artistic achievement or anything like that... It's just a customized version of one of the other layouts... With my own title bar and footer as well as my own background... Not a LOT different than the one I'm working off of, but enough that I'll feel like I no longer have a cookie-cutter blog either... Hopefully I'll be revealing it within the next few days after I've played with it a bit more to make all the final adjustments.

Stitching and Waiting...

It's been a while since my last post and recently I've been wanting to get back into Cross stitching more. I've been reading quite a few stitching blogs and checking out the "WIP" or "Works In Progress" and it makes me want to get back to it. I had picked it up again shortly before my trip to the hospital, but I haven't done much since then. It's hard to find the time with everything going on around here. There's absolutely NO time during the day. I can't dig my stitching out at all because Olivia wants to "help" me. *lol* I had started, on the advice of another stitcher, to take it out about 15 or 20 minutes each evening. It's not a lot of progress at once, but it's definitely better than no progress.

Here's a picture of the pattern I'm working on. It's called Waiting by Linda Gordanier Jary. It was a "free" pattern from Charles Craft I got a few years ago and just recently started on. (read: last year, which is recent for me as Cross Stitch projects go) I think that I've only got about 20 hours on it so far. I say "I think" because until I started stitching again a few weeks ago, I never counted my time. I'm estimating based on the time it takes me to stitch one block. Since I've been stitching solid colours only so far (the panels in the curtain) it's pretty easy to estimate.

When I get the picture taken, I'll upload a picture of the work so far. But for now everyone will have to make due with a very blury scan of the picture I got with the pattern. I think I'll put it in my bedroom when it's finished.

Also, I'm uploading a picture of one of the next patterns I want to stitch. It's from an old magazine I have and it's called Summer Blooms. I scanned it quite a while back so I don't mark up the mag. It's going to go in my kitchen when It's finished, and when my kitchen is finally finished *lol*