Elaine L*K's A-B-C-razy Name

This is a UFO that should never have become a UFO. It's a small enough design that I should have been able to finish it way sooner than I did. This is for my great-niece Emma. I take care of her before & after school and on no-school days.I stitched this with DMC Variations and a few GAST. I still have to do the one for my grandson Louie. I was almost done with this one today and had to frog twice, the first time almost 100 stitches and the 2nd time 17 stitches. The 2nd time was the same mistake. :p

Meari's Simply Elegant Finished!

Simply Elegant Scissor Case and Fob are finished... Woo Hoo, another UFO outta the way!

Designer: Lorri Birmingham Designs
Started: February 2009 ~ Finished March 2012
Fabric: 28ct Zweigert Cream Linen
Fibers: Needle Necessities, DMC, Kreinik
Embellishments: Satin Ribbon, Pearl Beads, Crystal Heart,
Czech Crystals, and Handmade Cording and Tassel
Stitched by Meari
The pink fabric is what I used for the lining and the back of the fob. I think it looks really good with the stitching. These projects contained several specialty stitches I'd never done before: Rhodes Butterflies, Queen Stitches, Diagonal Queen Stitches, and Hardanger. While I think both turned out beautiful, the instructions on how to assemble each one left a lot to the imagination. I think someone with little finishing experience would've been extremely frustrated.

Seasonal 9-patch Winter - Vickie H

So excited!!!  I finished one more page of my UFO's!!!!  I picked up my Seasonal 9-patch design and finished the winter section!!!  I just have summer left to stitch!! It is going to have to wait...I decided to dig out one of my Haeds to work on for the next 4 days.

Victorian Village 2 finishes-Vickie

I finished two of my buildings on my Victorian Village.  The Mercantile and Ice Cream Parlor are now complete!!!  Just two more buildings and I will have another finished UFO.

I have decided to re-home two of my UFO"s. I just don't like them. So I am giving them a new home to anyone who would like them. You can see them here.

Stitching in Sunny CA's Update

Here is my progress so far in march.  Not as much as I would have liked, but with a 4 year old running around, our lives have changed a lot.  These charts are easy to pick up and put down, so will work on them for while and hopefully get back to the SpiritDancer sometime this summer.  I'm also knitting again, socks!! which are easy to start and stop when I'm just knitting in the round.  The Monkeys are almost done, I took a picture then ended up stitching another hour or so, but I ran out of the light brown thread, so need to get more this weekend.  Hope everyone is having a wonderful month and getting a lot done.  Sandy

Meari's Simply Elegant

I now know the trepidation of making that first cut on Hardanger stitching! Yikes!! I bit the bullet and did it, though. Apparently, I did it correctly since the Earth didn't shatter or anything like that.


I finished up the stitching on Simply Elegant scissor case, and started the beading. I may just keep working on it until it's done since I'm soooo close anyway. Then I'll be back to working on JG.

Clickable for larger image

This Week's Progress

Well, I think I put in about 25 stitches in the Wedding Sampler this week (all backstitching) and it was all last night. But I did manage to stitch. My mother's birthday was yesterday. I think I've mentioned that she suffers from Alzheimer's and about 4 year ago I was forced to remove her from her home and put her in care. She'd forget to eat and had a bad habit of leaving the kitchen stove on. At any rate, it's become difficult to find gifts for her, but the one thing she still responds to is my needlework. So for her birthday I made her a birthday card. I told her that II wanted to give her a bouquet of flowers and these would never wither. It made her laugh. All in all, a really good day. So this is the design. You'll notice a shadow at the top of the card. I took this before I'd finished mounting the stitching into the card.

Elaine-2 UFO finishes

I finished 2 UFOs! In January I finished my L*K months. I really love the way this turned out. It's hard to see the tiny buttons on each one but they are there. I'm hoping to get it in a frame to enter in the county fair this summer.

I also finished some coffee pictures I have been working on for my daughter's kitchen. I stitched the first one in 2005! I don't know why it took me so long to finish them. I guess becaue I kept putting them down to start another piece. Which is why I have so many UFOs! :) They are finally done, framed and in her home.

Right now I'm working on a few small things (not UFOs) and the UFO of my other daughter's wedding piece. Hopefully that one will be done for her 4th anniversary on May 3rd. I can't show that one until it's done because I don't want to take the chance she will see it. :)

Meari's Simply Elegant

I didn't get much stitching in last week... I think I was procrastinating because I didn't want to work on the specialty stitches involved in my next UFO/WIP. Turns out it wasn't the specialty stitches that gave me nightmares, it was the regular cross stitches! I had to rip a set of leaves out THREE times. They're still not right, but I'm not about to frog them again. Can you tell which ones are messed up?

Here's what it looked like before:

12/11/09
(Yeah, it's been THAT long!)
Here's what it looks like now:

Other WIP pics can be seen HERE.
Stitched by Meari

Cathy H Update

Here is an update on Halloween Pup

Andy's 2nd completed page

I have finished page 6 out of 15 pages of my Flower Merchant project. Thanks for all of the nice comments.

Recent UFO Progress Updates

I have to say there are some beautiful pieces in progress here. I haven't had the chance to stop in and scan posts for the last week and the progress updates are really lovely.

Vickie, the apothecary shop is great and I'll bet it was a pain in the you know where to stitch all of those bricks.

Bren, I'm not familiar with Tarot Town, but I do like the colors. Is it a HAED?

Shelleen, I really like SK Sunny. I'm not normally fond of the wide-eyed designs, but this one is really appealing. I'll look forward to seeing this as it progresses.

Meari, I'm going to have to show a friend of mine your progress on Japanese Garden. She's got both this one and Chinese Dragon in progress. She's currently frustrated because she started both of them while she was in Japan last summer on business and she only hard part of the fibers. Even though she was there for six weeks, she really wasn't in the position to be able to order or obtain the ones she was missing and had to work around the missing one. When she got Stateside again, she started ordering the missing floss and got the bead packs from European Crosstitch. But after more than six months she's still playing catch up trying fill in the colors she hadn't been able to work when she started the pieces. She says it feels like she isn't making any progress at all!

Lisa, I'm guessing that Happy Hour is a Hinezit? I love those. I have made several. They're quick, colorful, and eye-catching. I do like this one.

And finally, Social Sue's "Dawn Tuskers" is awesome!

I'm afraid I didn't make as much progress this week as I did the week before. After having been off sick on Thursday and Friday of last week I went back to work to 10-11 hour days and a desk that was totally buried. We're down a person in my office so not only was I trying to catch up on my own work, but trying to get as much of hers done as I could. I managed to more or less get current but it took time and effort and I didn't have much concentration left for stitching by the time I got home, particularly on a Teresa Wentzler design. What little I did get done was on a small design that's going into a card for my mother's birthday next week. I've got one more color to put in and the backstitching to do and it's pretty well finished. As soon as it's done and mounted, I'll post a picture, even if it wasn't on my UFO project list for this group!

Thank you, Vickie, for starting this group. I've managed to achieve more on unfinished projects in the first 2-1/2 months of this year than I have in a very long time. This was a really great idea!

Victorian Village -Vickie H.

This week I decided to work on something new to me.  I haven't worked on this project in over 4 years....It was a Round Robin project and it stayed at someones house for 8 months before it moved on to the next person.  It finally came home at the end of 2010.  It has been sitting in my UFO pile since then.  I stitched the Apothecary building.

Victorian Village - 8 of 12 buildings

 I worked on the Apothecary building.  I love how it turned out but the bricks were a pain in the backside to stitch!

Apothecary stitched March 2012

After finishing this page, I have 41 pages to go to meet my 2012 goal of 50% of pages completed.  To be totally finished with my UFO's =106 pages...sigh....  Each stitch I take is one more stitch closer to being finished!!!!

Tarot Town Update. -Bren

pg 1 This is where it was when I picked it back up again sometime in Jan2012 I started it dec2010!

I took this on my iphone in poor light as well so the colors are off haha. But you can see the progress and I didn't want to go HUNT down where the digital camera was hiding. Originally, I only took the pic to txt to my best friend.

I do want to say that I tend to buy Potato colored fabric for my projects that are fully stitched. Potato is or should be more of a lt cream at most fabric stores but without the sheen most creams have so it dont show as much under the stitches when done.  It makes the white thread stand out more while stitching and the dk threads not have that or as much of that bright white fabby sneaking through the threads.

  

all of pg 1, almost half of pg 10, and pt of pg 2. I would have gone further on pg 10 but this is so huge even my huggie I made for my qsnap for HAEDS which is wider to hold more of the extra fab then most can't hold all the fabric! I'll have to make a wider one right now some of the extra fabric is in the way of the sides of the stitching area and I didn't want to move my frame so I started pg 2 instead. When I get the time I will make a new huggie that will hold more of the fab. First I have to get rdy for the upcoming yard sale and well my craft room is storing most of the boxes and furniture for it so I can't get to my sewing machine if I tried.

 Look you can see the clouds! Well I can kinda LMAO! I wish they were more obvious as with some other HAEDs but most HAEDs it seems when you can stand back and look when more is done they become more obvious. I can't wait to get away from the shades of grey and into the colors of this piece. Its actually colorful once you get the clouds done

Happy Hour Finished!- Lisa N.

I finished my first UFO- Happy Hour!

Before:



Finished!

socialsue's UFO - "Dawn Tuskers"

Happy Dance! I just finished one of my oldest UFOs. It gives me a great feeling to achieved one of my goals.

Meari's Japanese Garden

Black, black, and more black! I worked the entire north black border and northeast corner ornament. Here's what it looked like before:


And now:

Stitched by Meari
Other WIP pics can be seen HERE.

HAED SK Sunny-Shelleen

I stitched on this all week and made some good progress. I have been looking at other progress pics and am impressed. Here is my progress.

I will be stitching on her all week as well.

Vickie and Everyone Else

 To make it clear I posted about posts showing up on my Multiply back the moment I saw them Which was apparently Oct 11,11. The Blogger records can not lie. The link is below so you can stop the hate mail because Multiply said its the settings who only the group blog owner controls and I know Vickie from other groups and she is not the person to do such a thing. So its not mine or her fault so you can grow up and act like the adults we are. Blogger has only answered me in saying its not their fault and Multiply blames the blogger group owner which to me is silly because I HIGHLY doubt Vickie would ever do such a thing.  I know I didn't do it either because I do not control the controls to this blog! My best friends husband is computer tech and my brother is a computer programmer and neither of them found out how or why either. If you know how to fix be my guest I'm sure Vickie and I would both love to know how to fix it along with others.

And THANK YOU to those that emailed simply asking what was going on and to Vickie who is just as clueless as I am about the whole thing. I have enjoyed being a part of the group and seeing everyone's progress, HOWEVER I do not appreciate asking for help ON Oct 11,2011  and getting hate emails because of it instead of getting any actual help.

Those that email accusing me and continues to harass me, well your not very nice so grow up! We are adults not children, stop acting like a teenager on drugs. I sure don't deserve to be treated with such hatred especially when I was the one to ask for HELP in the matter!  And No I don't have time to delete several posts that I didn't even post. I barely have a few hrs a wk to even stitch which I work on my UFO's and HAED's  and I am not about to give up those sparse hours. I rarely but once every few months post to my own blog. Even rarer then that do I log into the Multiply one. Just ask those in the HAED's group with me and those that know me as the original owner of the Cross Stitch Round Robins group on yahoo which I had to pass down because for the last 3yrs I, nor my best friend have had the time to run it like we used to so we pasted it down 2yrs or so ago.  They can tell you I am a nice person and those that were in it know how much time I spent making up for other ppls fallen through commitments and tracking down and returning lost RR's even when they were lost in other ppls groups. So STOP sending me hate emails! Most of which I just delete anyway so I don't treat someone in the nasty way they have been treating me! Get back to stitching or find out what happened and how to fix it PLEASE. There is NO NEED for DRAMA just stop sending me hate emails and start sending emails to Vickie on how to fix the darn thing if you know how to. Neither of us deserve to be treated with such nastiness but those that keep sending me the emails well gee there's a computer programmer and computer tech in the family I bet I can ask them to be real nasty back if I was that type of person, which I'm not, but still stop it please. Leave your nastiness to your own house and let the rest of us enjoy a wonderful group and stitch.  I am tired of waking up everyday since Feb to see such nasty emails and if it was anyone else I'd bet they would have been equally nasty back by now, but I'm just not that kind of person.

http://stitchersufochallenge.blogspot.com/2011/10/can-someone-help.html

Stitching in Sunny CA

Come and see my update on my blog.  I have updated my picture of the Spirit Dancer and also my framed cross stitch of the poem Warning (when i'm an old woman).  Originally I was going to put it in a quilt, but my sister turns 60 and has been battling cancer, so thought I'd frame it and give it to her with the idea that she will re-gifts it when the next sister decides to retire.  Given my Dad is 82 and still working, it might be a long time before that happens :)

http://stitchinginsunnycal.blogspot.com/

Wedding Sampler Progress as of 3/2/12

Well, this has been a week of mixed blessings. A couple of weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my back and have been struggling with it ever since. Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, I went in to see the doctor. The good news is that I have no pinched nerves, herniated disks, or other damage that might require surgery. The bad news is that in favoring my back while trying to let it heal, I've managed to throw a bunch of other stuff out of whack (including my left hip, my right lower back, and both knees). It stinks getting old. And adding insult to injury, my birthday was yesterday. Needless to say, it's not been my best ever.

At any rate, I'm looking at about 4-6 weeks of physical therapy to try to put things right again. And in the meantime they gave me a muscle relaxant that has me homebound for 2-3 days while my body adjusts to it. No driving. So the upside is that I managed to get in a bunch of stitching on Thursday and Friday. I'm a bit like a jack-in-the-box - I can't sit in one place for too long or I simply seize up. But even so I managed to make some decent progress on the Wedding Sampler. An update picture is shown below.

Progress Note

I haven't finished anything since my last post, but I have made progress. You can read about it in this blog post complete with photos: http://theshopsampler.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/tast-week-9-meets-studio-journal/

Since my computer is broken I'm typing a lot less right now. I should have my computer working in May, but am borrowing my partner's when he's not on it!

Fall Nine Patch -Vickie H

I finished the Fall section of seasonal nine patch this weekend.  I only have 2 seasons to go - Winter and Summer.  Then I can mark this off my UFO list!!!!  So excited!!!