Slow Sunday Stitching

 Slow progress is progress, right? That’s what slow stitching is all about..... taking time to enjoy the process rather than just rushing though. I’m working on knitting my franken-socks and my sweater. I have one sock finished. I thought I’d post a picture of the sock and the 3 yarns I’m using. Even if it isn’t the prettiest pair of socks I’ve ever made, they will  still keep my feet warm and cozy. Way back when we first started our english paper piecing  business that we have since sold, I bought a digital scale so we could weight our products for shipping. We kept the scale and it is sensitive enough to be able to weight yarn. I’m able to take my leftover yarns and weigh them and then divide them up to get accurate amounts for the 2 socks.

I’ve made some progress on my new sweater as well. I’m on round 23 of the first yoke chart. It’s turning out as pretty as I hoped it would. 

And finally, I have a UFO finish. This started its life in 2014 as a rainbow scrap challenge. It was intended then to be a full sized quilt. However it stalled out and sat in its zip lock bag for 7 years. In that time so much has changed, and the need and ability to make full sized quilts no longer exists. So it is finishing its life as a lap quilt that will be donated to the Prayers and Squares group. There are still 24 six inch bow ties left that need to become something. I just thought..... maybe a table topper. I never used to make those but now I’m finding I like them. Yep that’s it, that’s  what I’ll do and then they are completely used up.

I’m linking up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I just checked the date of my last post and discovered that it was a month ago. WOW! I knew it had been a while, but not that long. I wish I could say I’ve been busy and have lots to show.... alas that is not the case. The opposite is true, hence the lack of posts. I’m running out of sock yarn leftovers, and so am working on the last of my “frankensocks”. This one will have 3 different yarns in it. I’ve got the top part done, using 2 different yarns and alternating the yarn every other row, similar to doing a fade type sweater.  The third yarn will be worked into the foot in the same way until I run out of the light yarn.

I did start a new sweater but have very little progress to show on it yet. It’s another of Valentina Bogdonova’s designs called Ariya that has the very complex lace and cable charts for the yoke. At least this one doesn’t also go all the way down the sleeves. 

I can only work on this when my concentration levels are good.

I also picked up my cross stitching again and made a little bit of progress. When I last showed it I was here. Now I have the lettering done and have started on the second lighthouse.

It is bright and clear and cold out here today. There was a clear cloudless sky last night. The moon was so bright that the trees were casting shadows. The sun is so bright today that it is melting some of the snow on our deck, even though it is -16C out there. Where it has melted there is fog coming off it, just in small amounts and not enough  to be able to capture on film. Just enough to be able to sit and marvel. We have some bird feeders out and are getting regular visits from blue jays, chickadees, nut hatches, gold finches in their winter colours and slate coloured dark eyed juncos.

 A group of friends and I are doing a UFO challenge. Last month I managed to get my UFO which was a temperature quilt started in 2020 all the way to having the quilting finished. Now it waits to be trimmed and bound. I found a fabulous fabric in my stash that was just waiting for its perfect use. I couldn’t bring myself to cut it up into small pieces. 

This month’s UFO is some very old bow tie blocks. According to this blog I started them in January of 2014 and did some monthly for a while during the Rainbow scrap challenge that year. Sometime during that year they got left by the wayside and languished in their bag until I dragged them out this month.  I am going to work with what I have and do a small 48x60 lap quilt. I think I ended up with 4 colours.... pink, green, bright blue and aqua.

And I think I am now all caught up on the not very much happening in our lives. I am going to link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 The days and weeks are flying by, aren’t they? It’s the  middle of January already. How did that  happen so quickly? Most days now are spent slowly, working on hand projects and some days on machine sewing quilts.  Our prayers and squares group is back to meeting again and we have started a new quilt. It’s based around a panel showing a couple of eagles flying over a river.  Here’s the rough Electric quilt graphic of what we are doing. The panel was purchased here. I believe it is from Northcott and called the Spirit of the Skies Panel. The whole scene reminds me of so many beautiful areas up here in  Muskoka. I love that I have the Electric quilt program to use for helping to design these quilts for this group.

In between the stints at the machine and computer I’ve been working on my slow stitching. The latest pair of socks is finished. It’s a good thing too. I’ve been wearing two pairs at a time in an effort to keep my feet warm. I need to dig out some more sock yarn and start another pair. 

I’ve also gotten a little more done on my cross stitch. I’m almost finished the lettering. The whole thing says “the peace of the hills is about me and the leisure of the summer clouds is mine”. Not much more to do before I can get at the second light house.

I’m linking up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 It’s a snowy Muskoka day today. A perfect day for staying inside, enjoying the wood stove and putting lots of stitches into slow projects. I finished my Anisia sweater this past week. I looked back through my blog, one of the reasons why I keep it up, in order to find when I started this sweater. I thought I’d been at it longer than this, but apparently I started it in October of 2021. So it took only 3 months to do. Somehow it seemed a lot longer than that. I love everything about this sweater. The detail in the design is fabulous. I love how the lace design at the neck forms little scallops. I will be doing more of her patterns for sure. Her name is Valentina Bogdanova. 

To give my knitting attention span a break, I started another pair of socks using yet more yarn left from another pair that I think ended up as a gift. With self striping yarn I often buy 2 balls of yarn. It’s easier to get them with the stripes matching that way. So there was enough of this yarn left for another pair. And if I do happen to run out before I get to the toes, I’ll patch in another colour.

I finally got myself sorted as to where I left off with my Harbour Village cross stitch yesterday and managed to put in a few stitches. The lighthouse is almost done. It needs some black outlining, but I think I’ll wait and do it all at the same time, since there is another lighthouse on the right hand side of this row. The lettering is done with one strand of floss over one thread of the linen, so it is going to take a while to get back into the swing of doing it.

I’m linking up with Kathy and the group of Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I finished off a couple of slow stitching projects this past week. I started a pair of thrummed mittens for my husband a couple of days before Christmas, with no real  thoughts of having them done by Christmas Day. And that was correct. But I did get them finished yesterday. A good way to start the New Year off right, with some finishes. He normally only wears gloves, but he discovered that gloves aren’t quite warm enough for the cold Muskoka winter days. 

The other finish was my Peppermint Purple 2021 weekly stitch along. I’ll need to find a frame for it at some point, but I’m reluctant at this point in time to go into too many stores for non essentials.

So I’ve packed up all my DMC floss that I was using for the stitch along and have dug out my Harbour Village cross stitch sampler. It’s going to take some studying to find out where I am in the next row. But finding it and digging it out is a start in that direction.

The other Slow Stitching finishes I had over the past month have been a couple of Christmas themed embroideries. I made them up into pillows which were given as Christmas gifts. The pile of unfinished projects is slowly going down, which feels really good.

I’m linking up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My slow stitching is slow going. As most of us who are creatively bent, I have been working on Christmas gifts. The rest of the time I’ve been working on finishes for the Prayers and Squares group I belong to. My slow stitching time has been relegated to the evenings. And some of those evenings I have been so tired that all I can do is vanilla sock knitting, (a highly technical name for knitting plain no pattern
socks). We had a power outage here last weekend which meant knitting by candle light, not ideal conditions for knitting complicated lace sleeves on a sweater. Also not ideal conditions for finding full skeins of sock yarn. I did manage to find a couple of skeins of yarn that I had previously used for socks although I figured there wouldn’t be enough for a full sock. And there wasn’t, so I’ve added in some other yarn to do the toe.

 I think it works, and it has the added bonus of using up leftover yarns. I have enough of the yarn for the toes to do the second sock so the pair will match.

As for that sweater, I do have the first sleeve all finished now and the second sleeve has about 8 of the required 15 inches done so it’s almost there. 

I’ve got a couple of quilty finishes but I will try to do them in a separate post later this week. I’m linking to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.

Quilty Catch up

I’m finally getting around to writing that post about all the quilts finishes I’ve had in the last month or so. Some friends and I are doing a UFO challenge and then there have been a few others as well. My chosen quilt for November was very old Disappearing Nine Patch. The block piecing was started way back in 2010. I sewed the blocks together a couple of years ago and then quilted it the spring of 2019 before I sold the long arm. This quit has a twin to it. They are going out as Christmas gifts this year to a couple of boys. I found a good place for taking pictures.... the back of the wood pile. A couple of clamps hold the quilts quite nicely. This one has a fun back to it as well.

I mentioned a while ago that I have joined a group of ladies making quilts for the Prayers and Squares ministry. I’ve been working on some quilts for them. I did up a top using some scraps of mine and sewed them into a 36 patch quilt. It’s been set aside waiting for quilting and the appropriate person. We had a couple of requests lately, one of whom is a child who likes unicorns and purples. One of the ladies in the group picked up this panel in a store and the we brain stormed what to put with it. We decided on pinwheels.

This is another quilt the top of which was donated to our group from the Owen Sound group. It’s been quilted and bound and needs the ties put into it.

The other finish that I’ve had lately is my Summer Kitchen quilt. One of the bedrooms here is minus a door. I hadn’t finished the piecing on the quilt before we moved, so it got sized and designed specifically to cover the doorway. I had some leftover embroidery blocks and also some stars, so I pieced those into the back. I quilted it on my domestic sewing machine and wasn’t that a challenge. It’s the first one I’ve quilted since selling the long arm. These pictures are actually from before it was layered and quilted.The backing fabrics are leftovers from those that were bought for the top. I’m trying to not generate too many more scraps. 

That’s it for my catch up post. Hopefully from here on I will record quilt progress as regularly as hand work progress.