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Showing posts from March, 2006

Ecola State Park

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Ecola State Park, just south of Seaside. Not a state park like I'm used to here in Michigan, many of them near me involve sand, lots of people frying in the sun and Lake Michigan. In the distance you can see the Coast Range. Following the path that you can see in the previous picture brings into view Crescent Beach. We could have gone down here but the trail was washed out by rain in 1996 (according to the internet) and I'm not a hiker to climb those walls. :) A shot of the rock formations in the water looking out at the Pacific from the trail. There was a whale out in the water just north of this point that several people were out watching. I didn't manage to get a single focused shot of it though. :( Once again a certain "show off" has to get his picture taken. What he doesn't realize is one good gust of wind would have had him falling quite far down onto the rocks in the ocean. ;) Behind again is the coast range and the large rock formatio

TGIF

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Another little project gets snuck into the mix. This is a piece of my mom's that she was having some problems with the buttonhole stitch along the outside edge so I was working on it last night at sit and stitch. Moments like this remind me why I joined EGA so many years ago, I knew these moments would happen just as there are some things I'm not as good at that I like to bribe my mom to finish for me.  As long as it gets stitched I suppose it really doesn't matter. I love books, the wrap below was on a model in the store and I've been drooling over it for a while now. I finally got my hands on a copy of the book its in, now I just have to decide on the yarn. The store had it made up in a beige yarn that had small flecks of other colors that I loved but its not a yarn they carry anymore so I am now on the prowl for some cool yarn. In addition to what you see in the photo the wrap come down just below the waist. Its basically a big rectangle with a collar in the

Garden Spot Update

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Here is the grand total of all my stitching on the plane headed off on my trip. I got the small strawberry done and then started on the hardanger in the bottom corner. I was planning to work on this on the way back, we drove home in a moving van, but I was having far too much fun taking pictures as I drove along to stop and make myself focus on stitching. I've had a couple days off from it now that I am back home as well as I sort through pictures and find the ones I want to upload to share. I took around 750 pics, many of which are good, several of which are not. As soon as that is done I'll put a link up to the album for anyone who'd like to see. In the mean time I've been posting bits of it over on my other blog, The Cave as well.

Arriving in Seaside

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This is my first shot coming into Seaside . One of many cute shops in the downtown. On the far left you can see the Ocean Front hotel as well :) The Ocean was deceiving. The sun and the breeze was comfortable but I know from the Christmas I was in L.A. and went to the beach it is anything but warm in the water. Still there were many people out on the beach doing... whatever. Kites flying, kids playing and looking for shells. This was taken from the Promenade along the beach. Again Pig decides that he is tired from his hard day of doing nothing. The worst he had to endure was the x-ray machine at the airport but he thought he should try to get a tan anyway. That didn't last long after he saw the Pig N Pancake down the street and hid before he could become breakfast.

Arriving in Oregon

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Now this is not the first picture of Oregon I would have liked to show you but the flight was packed and I couldn't get a seat next to the window *sulk* We were coming in for a landing and practically flew around Mt Hood. It was so close to the plane I had to wonder for a second if the pilot meant to get that close but I kept getting distracted by the GPS display on my monitor showing where the plane was to worry about it too much. We also had a great view of most of the other volcanoes as well. Mt St Helens, Mt Adams and Mt Washington were also visable. Thinking back I should have pushed the two women next to me out of the way and took pictures anyway, the whole way from Denver they were competing as to who's life was more dramatic. Just the same we made it as did out luggage at the airport in Portland. Not a terribly exciting shot but then it was rather blah out. I still was happier with the rain than what we left in. We got to the airport to leave at whatever insane hour of

Moving right along

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Although you can't really see it, I got some work on the fur trim to her wrap last night. I really need to mess with this camera of mine to see how to get this to show up a bit better, the auto" setting is letting me down.  I'm trying to be good and work on the white as I go as its my least favorite color to stitch with. Its hard to see where I've been since I'm working on white and I'm never happy with how the stitches look. I've been using Thread Heaven on the thread to make it lay more smoothly, at least it should  smooth out once the rest of the color is in.

Spring is here

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Spring is here, finally. I got outside this weekend a bit and got to open the house up to enjoy warmer weather which is always nice. It wasn't however, nice enough to go lounging on the beach yet so I did and get a bit of stitching done among other things. I had to do some work on my floor stand, it is the style that clamps at the top not the side and I haven't really liked that fact since I dug it out of the attic to use. That is fine for my needlepoint frames but I didn't like clamping directly onto the linen on my scrolls so I made a trip to the home improvement store and got a few new bolts so I could make a couple modifications to the stand and now I have a side attaching stand so I can put my feet up in the recliner while I'm stitching.

Another day, another project

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Now that the blackwork sampler is done I'm getting back to my regular projects. Here is my latest progress on the Garden Spot Sampler. This is turning out to be quite a fun piece as well, although I am finding the colors called for rather, interesting. The yellow that you see is bright canary yellow which I was cringing over the whole time I stitched that motif. I had intended to work on my Winter Queen last night as she is the project currently in my stand but I wasn't in the mood so I grabbed this one instead. I seem to have lost some momentum on my larger projects which really needs to change but yesterday was quite the day. I've never posted about this before but over the past few months I've been going through the joy of a divorce. Yesterday was my court appearnce to make everything final and all that actually sounded good was a nice glass of wine and a big box of chocolate. I managed to refrain from too much of the wine, I had a glass when I got home and then

More of Black and White

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I've been moving right along on this piece. I really haven't worked on anything else, the teacher really would like feedback on it to know if there were any areas she needed to fix so I've made it a priority for me to complete. Provided I get the time to work on it tonight I think I may have it finished as there are 4 more blackwork bands and 3 small thin ones that I know will stitch in a few minutes. Thanks for all your comments on this one, I really am having a great time stitching it. If you are thinking about trying blackwork I suggest whatever pattern you choose, open it up and see how its charted. This one, and most of the bigger designs have each area laid out on a graph with numbers for each stitch to show you the direction to go to get the desired reversibility, not all the designers will do this and if you've never done it before it makes learning the technique much easier. Here is the most recent back photo. Not all of the bands are reversible as you can

Black and White Sampler

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This is my project from my Blackwork class on Saturday. The teacher is a member of my EGA chapter, she was a bit unsure on the accuracy of the directions so she had a group of us over as a test class to have us stitch the piece and see if there were other errors she had missed in the charts. I am almost halfway done right now and its been pretty good, only a few small things, definitely not something for someone with no clue how to do blackwork to take up as a couple of them weren't so easy to catch. I hopefully will have this done this week so I can get back to her with anything else I might find, then the matter will be in the finishing. I was actually thinking this would look fabulous as a bell pull, no frame at all. This is my first true blackwork piece even though there has been a lot of it in the Indigo Rose pieces I've done. And for the most part this one is reversible with a few exceptions for things like the alphabet and the queen stitches.

New Stash

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I know, I know, I said no more shopping, what can I say, I am weak. I have been good, for me, but I love when they have market. It was a tough decision to pick which I wanted but these were among the favorites. I also liked Three Friends from The Drawn Thread which mom bought so if I really want to stitch it I can get her stash. The bonus after market is that most of the LNS's are marking down some of their old stock to make room for the new market merchandise. I got these 4 on clearance for almost nothing. My hardanger addiction also got fed when mom decided to do some more organizing and found some more charts she didn't want. I really need to start working on one of these. I think now that I may have almost a complete set of Cross N Patch designs. The angel was a fabulous addition, I have the 2003 Angel as well if I'm not mistaken.

A knitting we will go

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Here is my progress so far on my felted jar that I mentioned yesterday. The yarn, as I said, is leftover wool from other projects. The bottom will be this mixed color and the top 1/3 of it will be solid blue. Provided the felting works like its supposed to this will go on my sewing table to give me a place for my scissors and marking pencils, etc instead of having them scattered all over. ---------------------------------- Here is my Lee purse as well, I got this for Christmas and have been undecided as to how I wanted to stitch it. I've finally gotten the needlepoint books off the shelf and started flipping through them to get some ideas. They also had some nice ideas at Sit and Stitch Monday. This is the stitch I'm considering for the hat, done in a Mandarin Floss if I can find one to match the purse. I think this stitch will make it look a bit like a woven hat which should be fun and create some nice texture on the design without a big bulky stitch to snag when