On dust bunnies and dirty laundry

Seems like every time I turn around another week whooshes by, depositing a pile of dirty laundry and an army of dust bunnies at my feet. I've yet to succeed in training the dust bunnies to operate the washing machine. Damn stubborn animals! And so i resort to the help of my own trusty hands and a vacuum to show those dust bunnies and dirty rags who's the boss! Again, and again, and again... The on-going cleanliness battle combined with other silliness like work and occasional need for nourishment forced me to become mighty creative at finding time to do important things like knit and x-stitch. Ever noticed a sleep-deprived, slightly disheveled and mostly mad woman on a local commuter train with her nearly-four-year-old junior in tow, at ungodly hour of 7 am, poking some yarn with a hook or a pair of funny-looking sticks? Hah! That was yours truly having some "me" time. Yes, I am that crazy and no, I don't last long till I give up and snooze the rest of the way, drooling over my offspring's shoulder. With time these little spurts add up and I do manage to finish a piece or two. 

The Heart Birth Sampler form the Historical Sampler Company was finished, washed, stretched and framed. It just reached its new home and reported to be loved and admired.

Stitching this piece was a joy. I still have plenty of DMC threads left over, so no shortage in that department. I did have to extend the canvas to in order to lace-mount before framing it.

The frame came from pictureframes.com. Their service was impeccable as always.

A few blankets for friends' bundles of joy were made and shipped off before I had a chance to take any pictures of the finished goods. Blankies were soft and cuddly - that's all you need to know.

Junior grew another 3 inches over the summer, I am still working on the ram, still knitting a sweater (a brown one this time, the green one was done long ago), oh, and I picked up running! I might even talk about it in another post (trust me, it's epic). And that is all that happened aside from dust bunny training.

Until we meet again, happy stitching!

On therapy

A thought popped into my head this morning, at the none-existing hour of 5 am, over a pot of coffee I was making to bring my very dead self to life - I should stop feeling guilty whenever I steal a little bit of  finances and time away from my family and splurge on one of my stitching hobbies. Often I catch myself thinking "ankle-biter needs new shoes, so forget about that yarn you wanted to buy just 'cause it looked pretty, you don't even have a project in mind for it" or "this x-stitching piece sure is pretty, but unless you want to hang it in the corridor to cover the ugly switch box, use your time somewhere else, where it's more needed - teach junior to put his underpants on correctly or go make something for dinner that doesn't come out of a box."

Growing up I was encouraged to have a hobby. "Idleness is the root of mischief" was my parents' motto and off I went learning to sew clothes for my dolls, crocheted tiny blankies and pillows for their beds. Mama taught me to embroider napkins and handkerchiefs, and gramma showed me how to x-stitch on pillow cases. A bit later, a teenager, I moved onto sewing and knitting some of my eclectic, to say the least, wardrobe. The message was clear - craft what you can utilize. Growing up I watched mama knit my sweaters and put together elaborate carnival costumes for me in the dead of the night. Family obligations like dinner, house cleaning and helping me with homework came first, crafts came second.

These memories keep feeding the chastising voice in my head: "Ain't you got something better to do with your time?" whenever I cast a fleeting look at the rolls of fabric in the window display of my favorite quilt store or a basket of WIP projects at the foot of our couch. But this morning with the cuppa coffee in my hand I vowed to silence the ever-present nagger. My crafts are my therapy! They keep me grounded and my family out of the harms way of my explosive personality. A few minutes of knitting after a particularly taxing day at work is all I require to not take my frustration out on my husband and son. A glance at a row of pretty thread bobbins in my x-stitching box instantly elevates my mood and keeps the cat alive, when everything else fails. Compared to the shrink's hourly rates in the city, my self-medicating with crafts is relatively cheap. And so, I will ignore the chatter in my head, and spoil myself once in a while with a sewing pattern and some stitching time in the name of world peace and happiness!

Until we meet again, happy stitching.

On variety

I can't commit to one kind of craft. Nope! Not me. I jump from x-stitching, to knitting, to sewing to crocheting often. I do find that I tend to sew more in the summer and knit and x-stitch in the winter. Crocheting is all over the place - usually when I'm bored of everything else. Currently, I am alternating between knitting the Gnarly Oak Cardigan and stitching the Heart Birth Sampler.

Knitting and crocheting are the two most portable of my craft hobbies - I can whip a project out and make a few stitches here and there, whenever life gifts me a few spare seconds, and stuff it right back in the bag when the duty calls. Also, since I make a lot of the woolly items for my son's everyday wear in the cold months, I experience much less of a craft-induced "i neglect my child for this" guilt than with other hobbies.

X-stitching is the second in line - it is still easy to start and stop  on a whim, however, the need to refer to a chart is much greater than with knitting. My preferred time to x-stitch is in the evenings. The dinner is history. The little ankle-biter is in bed and the cat is in a food coma.  I can spread out my charts, my threads, my needles and scissors, without having to worry about little grabby hands and paws. The aforementioned mama guilt is also kept at bay. And though I do move at a snail's pace, I am a process x-stitcher, as long as there are some pretty threads to fondle, I'm a happy camper.

Sewing is a whole other animal. On one hand, it gives me an almost instant gratification, comparing to knitting or x-stitching. A couple of hours of uninterrupted work and tah-dah! a pair of pants for my son or hemmed curtains materialize out of thin air - magic, I tell ya! On the other hand, a couple of hours of uninterrupted craft is hard to come by at my house. And so I sew in stages: planning stage (choosing and tracing patterns), cutting stage, sewing stage (includes time to set up my sewing machine and serger) and finishing stage (includes clean-up time). Living in a smallish city apartment adds some to the complexity of the process. I am  lucky though, I claimed the walk-in closet as my studio space when we first moved in. My husband helped me build a custom L-shape desk to utilize all the potential working space in said closet. This set up allows me to leave my sewing mess behind closed doors between stages.

Yesterday I noticed that munchkin's pants are a good 1.5 inches too short - I swear he grows some every time I look away. And that means a bit of sewing is in the cards for yours truly!

Are you a craft hopper?

Until we meet again, happy stitching!

On beauty and ramen noodles

Look what came in the mail the other day! The Elizabeth by Mirabilia. A complete kit was purchased from the ABC Stitch Therapy. It did take a little while for this beauty to materialize at my doorstep, but the wait was worth it! The colors, the beads, the linen!

And no, I don't get to keep this one. The proud new owner of this scrumptious piece of thready goodness is my mama, a recreational stitcher with some major OCD tendencies. Seriously, the woman is so meticulous with her stitching that in her head she calculates the shortest trajectory for her threads to travel before making a single stitch. The back sides of her finished pieces are a work of art worth a personal MoMa exhibit! I kid you not! Happy stitching, mama!

While ordering Elizabeth, something else fell into my shopping cart. Oops! Cue the bugle fanfare music... My very own Royal Holiday chart! 

I have an excuse though - I've had all the materials for this puppy forever! Like 6 years forever! First I had to finish some projects to undertake such a major piece (remember, I'm uber slow). Then my son was born, and out went my sleep taking my brain along for a ride. Well, the brain ain't back, but some semblance of free time is. I keep taking the box with the thread bobbins and beads out and drooling over it, caressing the linen and whispering "my precccccious" and scaring the daylights out of my cat. Time to put this girl to rest (up on my wall), before my husband commits me to a mental institution. There was one hiccup in the execution plan - the lack of the chart. Back in the days when I first met this lovey, I was a piss-poor art student with no respect or appreciation for the copyright protection laws. I grabbed the chart off the "webinets" and stashed it away for "future reference". Fast forward to about 3 weeks ago - I'm still piss-poor (for the most part), but I do realize that everyone needs to eat and clothe themselves, and have some play money, including Nora Corbett, who designed this piece. Thus, the appearance of the aforementioned chart in my shopping cart and... ramen noodles for lunch for the next few weeks.

I'll keep you posted on the progress. Until then, happy stitching!

Beggars can't be choosers

Last time I talked at length about my love for tidy edges of my stitching fabric, and a serger as the tool du jour to attain the state of neatness nirvana. Well... A serger was an industrial piece of equipment I couldn't dream possessing while growing up - home sergers were not in the picture then. A serger was a $300 chunk of money I didn't have while surviving on pennies a day in college. I bet, a great deal of stitchers out there are in the same boat - just enough money to keep our expensive stitching hobby going, but not enough for fancy machinery. What a poor stitcher to do, but to drop on one's knees and weep in desperation surrounded by fraying fabric! Enough, with the drama, I say! Nothing should hinder one's ability to dive head first into the thready goodness of a new project! Enter three relatively inexpensive (two of them outright dirt cheap) ways of keeping one's canvas in check:

• The cheap, but somewhat laborious way - hand-sewn blanket stitch (you can also use a simple overcast stitch, however, I find that I tend to over tighten it making the fabric curl).

• The more expensive, but faster way - zig-zag stitch on a sewing machine (it doesn't have to be a fancy one - most machines will have some sort of zig-zag setting).

• The cheap and fast way  - acid-free artist tape (acid-free is the key, if you want your masterpiece to last). 

I used the last method often in my art-student years, as the tape was a staple in my tool box, I had no access to a sewing machine and no patience for the hand-sewn blanket stitch. Yes, the edges do get a little funky, if you are like me and drag your projects along everywhere you go. However, most of my pieces were framed, so the bound edges ended up at the back of the mounting board. As long as the tape is acid free you don't have to worry about your fabric yellowing with time. You can also cut the bound edges off altogether right before you mount your work. 

Cry no more, dear stitcher! Neatness nirvana is within your reach! Grab your needle, sewing machine or acid-free artist tape and charge ahead! The ram says you should.

Until we meet again, happy stitching!

Progress

I have made some progress over the last couple of days on my Heart Birth Sampler. The border now extends down the left side about half way.

And look, ma! No more fraying edges! I let you in on a little secret - I own a serger. So instead of bitching and moaning about the sad state of the fraying linen that came unfinished with the kit, I took the matter in my own hands and voila! Nice and neat, no?

Understandably, not everyone has a serger to keep things from unravelling. Neither did I until very recently. The lack of a serger does not mean you have to put up with a hot mess of shedding edges. Next time I will show a couple of techniques that do not require expensive tools to keep things in check. 

Happy sewing until then!

On the quest to stay organized

I'm not the most organized person on the face of the planet by any stretch of imagination! However, with a two-year old, a cat and a husband in a small-ish city apartment, one must exercise some degree of organization in order to stay sane. I always have a few on-going projects: knitting, cross-stitching, sewing, home improvement - you name it, I have it! Thus, the never-ending hunt for the perfect "Organize it ALL" solution. Here's where I am at now:

This is my "work-on-it-while-you-have-two-seconds" pile of projects.. Ingenious, right? The storage solution "du jour" is an IKEA MAGGA basket. It's small enough so not to attract too much of husband's attention to the amount of money spent on my various hobbies, but big enough to hold an almost finished baby blanket, a third of a sweater and a cross-stitching project. Win-win situation!

When it comes to my cross-stitching, I adore the clear/frosted plastic containers from the local craft store:

The little cubbies are perfect for the DMC floss bobbins, and the longer compartment in the middle holds my scissors, needles and odd bits and ends beautifully. 

I wind my floss onto the DMC bobbins and then label the bobbins either by hand or using DMC stickers (for DMC thread). I tend to reuse the bobbins for the same color thread, so I use a permanent pen to write the numbers or a sticker. If, however, you want to be flexible what thread goes where, go a head and use a pencil to mark your bobbins.

Last but not least, my needles are stored in a re-used bottom part of the needle packaging. I just tore the top plastic top off and trimmed the bottom one to get rid of any hanging paper.

Do you have any clever project storage ideas?