It's HOW Many Days 'Til Christmas?!

Back in July, when I was working on the little stocking ornaments at work, a co-worker commented that it was 'awfully early to be doing things like that'.

This week, when I was working on a Santa during breaks, the same co-worker commented 'it's getting about that time, isn't it?'

And yikes! Is it ever! Where did this year go?!

Here's the progress on Santa, by the way.



A few more lunch breaks and he'll be done.

By the way, thanks for the comments on my last post! Can't get signed in to blogger (it'll let me post, but if I'm on an actual blog, it says I'm not signed in) so I can't reply. I do plan to have the HAED framed - I know a little bitty place that does plain, simple framing, which is what I want for her, at ridiculously cheap prices. I have Bent Creek's 'Mom' and the chibi-Snape I stitched there right now, and it's gonna be $27 plus tax. For both, not each. I'll be taking the mermaid in next week.

October TUSAL

I had a lot of finishes laid out while deciding how to really finish them, so I couldn't resist the photo op!

Juliet Again

It took me 13 tries to get a half-decent pic... I don't know what's going on with my camera. Low light is not usually this much trouble.

Anyway, the Juliet dress is now just above knee-length.



Looks very 'hourglass', doesn't it?

I had a pic of the Goth Chick holding it up to her, but it was hopelessly blurry. I'll have to try again the next time she comes around.

Here's a close-up of the pattern stitch - I hope you can see it. It's shell-stitch, which usually makes me think of granny squares, but Miss Goth will not look even slightly 'granny' in this XD

AAUUUGGHHH!!!

It's a ALIEN!!!



Run for your lives!

Or, sail away on a finished boat?

My IHSW Report

'What I did during IHSW'

This:


15 Stockings done, which was my goal for this year! I was going to keep on going, but then I realized just how close to Christmas it is and I need to work on presents! So that's prolly it for the stockings this year.

And I worked a tiny bit on my Prairie Schooler Santa:

From this:


To this:


And I worked a little bit on Ice Wind. I don't know what it is with my current HAEDs... Rapture has mange and now Ice Wind...


...well, she could prolly use a visit to a dermatologist. Poor wee projects XD

The rest of the weekend I worked on getting all the pics onto my WIP page (one of those buttons up top). It was little bit fun and a little bit depressing at the same time. I really do have a problem with little bitty starts, more than I realized! It's amusing. Also, I found three projects I had forgotten existed, so in spite of finishing off the Loon, my numbers went up and not down.

Oh well. Good thing there aren't any real stitching police. I'm off to check out everyone's progress!

Words to Live By

So very, very true.

(I couldn't resist, sorry!)

I finished the Loon!



One more off my WIP list, and a present finished. Just needs framing now :D

In a Stash Daze

I saved my quarters in a jar for an entire year, just for the fun of it. I decided that when the year was up (end of September) I'd count it, even if the jar wasn't full, and then blow it all on stash or computer games (that's the other driving passion of my life. I really need a games console NO I DON'T so I can start buying those games).

Anyway, even though the jar was only about half full, it turned out to be a nice little chunk of, um, change.

I got several Sims 2 expansion packs off eBay, a few time-management games, a few mystery games...

...and then it was stash time.

I got the last package today. By using eBay, JoAnn's coupons, and those socked-away quarters, I've knocked quite a few things off my wishlist. I won't show the pile of floss for HAEDs, but here's my luffly, luffly new kits :D



The Sebastian the Cat kit is actually two kits in one - here's the other pic, on the back.



Some littler kits







Now if I can just keep myself from starting every last darn one of them RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE, I'll be doing okay :D

Candy and a UFO

A few days ago, the Goth Chick and I were making candy.



Well, okay, she was making the candy, I was taking pictures. She didn't like the pics of her actually stirring the stuff, but I thought the candy itself was beautiful.



It's very golden and glowing. It's glass candy, but she poured it thicker and scored it when it was slightly set, so that it broke into beautiful squares. When Mum used to make it, she would pour it out in a big sheet and then break it once it was set, so that it shattered - like, well, glass. The odd shapes were fun, but I like this, too.



Tea-flavored. Our mum and the Goth Chick's Husband ate most of it :D

I didn't plan very well for Christmas presents this year - so the other day I went through all my UFOs and dug this one out.



It's in thread, which is why it became a UFO, but after all those ornaments last year I've become much better at working with the hateful, twisty stuff. So I think this could be a quick finish. It's always been intended for my brother.

Beware!

I should steal this off of my parents' porch and put it in my stitching room.



I was working on Nautical, but something just didn't look right. I don't know if you can see it or not - I didn't save the 'big' picture I took, just the trimmed down version, but it turned out that when I bought floss to replace the long-lost floss for this project, the blues didn't quite match up.



See it in those two half-finished flags on the right? The top two-thirds of the plus-sign one is darker. It looked almost the same in real life. I couldn't figure it out. It was the right color number. I thought maybe it had faded, or that DMC had changed their dyeing process, or that it was just regular dye-lot variance. But no, because I went and pulled every single skein of that color I own (which was oddly a lot) and they were all the same.

So I went and got my handy-dandy DMC floss color fold-out thingie (I'm pretty sure that's its official name) and checked. Yup, it matched - and I got the one with real floss samples, not the printed pictures. So I took the project off the q-snaps, held it up to the colors, and it turned out that ages ago, when I bought the floss, they must have been out of the color I needed so I bought one number off. 796 instead of 797. Luckily I had one skein of the first color, so I've been restitching. Looks much better.



This is my favorite page of my Floss Card Thingie. I love all the blues. The pink/red page is pretty, too, but I like this one best. I lucked out finding the Thingie on eBay - I don't think you can buy the real-floss cards anymore, and the ones I used to see were with little loose ends of floss, not smooth floss like this. I use it a lot.

So anyway, I frogged what turned out to be quite a bit more than just those two flags, restitched and it looks much better, yes? Though I'm not quite done.



My goal for this in October is to finish the boat and all the backstitching to this point, then possibly stitch the knots and little sailors that go below the boat.

42 Degrees

It's very cold here today, so I broke my no-furnace streak and turned on the heat.

Hope it doesn't melt my snowman :D

Lots to Talk About

I have lots of things going on with my stitching - but it would be a really pic-heavy post if I wrote about all of it today. So I'll spread it out, but I did want to post something on the first day of October :D

I chose Rapture. I've been working on filling in the top row of 10x10 squares - it's almost all confetti - and adding stitches to the second row if I happen to have that thread in my needle.



The strategy is working. Well, a little. I have goals for October, and one of them is to finish off the top two rows of this page. Little goals are easier to meet XD

The Juliet dress is continuing on very well. The Goth Chick tried it on a few days ago, when we were both at our parents' house and I needed to see if the waist was long enough for her. She immediately pulled the shoulders down too far, but says she prefers it that way when I offered to tighten it a bit by adding another row or two. It looks good on her.



Do you guys like her dreads? They're not 100% years-to-grow real, but it takes her hours and hours and hours upon hours to do this to her hair.



She cut them all off yesterday! It was a little bit shocking to see her with shoulder-length hair. She said she was cold without them - I think she was wearing two shirts and a jacket.

I'll finish off this post with a bit more stitching - my experiment with green fabric for a stocking ornament.



So far, so good.