Twice as Nice

What's better than having a finish? Two finishes!

First we have this sweet one...

'Tis the Season

by It's Sew Emma

(from the FQS Stitch Quarterly Club)

stitched on 14-ct. Pistachio Aida

with DMC and CC Peanut Brittle

Then if that wasn't enough, we have a second finish!

A Year of Celebrations - January

by Hands On Design

stitched with DMC and CC Snowball

(on mystery linen)

I already have a start on February but I'm not loving the fabric I'm using so I'll be scraping that and starting over. I'd love to do the whole series on the same linen but I only have a small piece of it, hence the rather skimpy cut I used for January. The plan is to get this finish finished as soon as Aida gets up from her nap. That way I'll have a whole two days to display it before next month!

Here's November all done up so you get an idea of what it might look like...

I'm using magnets so I can swap them out every month. (Whoever came up with that idea is an absolute genius!)

My craft room organization continues! I'm up to four of those rolling carts with the drawers now and I just ordered a bunch of those cloth storage cubes to use on my shelves. In my mind everything is neatly arranged and color coordinated but I'm afraid by the time I'm done I won't be able to find a darn thing!

Tell me I'm not the only one with this problem!

Snow Day

There was no stitching done yesterday. Aida did take an afternoon nap but her spot of choice was my lap. I gave up trying to work around her after I'd bopped her on the head with my hoop a half dozen times. That girl has zero padding anywhere, and I swear she's all knees and elbows when she's sleeping next to me at night. Luckily I had a new Book of the Month selection to dive into (A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall... creepy family, remote location, no cell service... my kind of book!).

 

So today was all about getting that snow finished once and for all...

I'm happy to report I have finished all the white stitching on this piece! White has never been my favorite to stitch with and this project needed almost an entire skein of it! That's 8.7 yards! Times three because I was using two of the six strands! That's over 26 yards of white stitching! 78 feet! That's like 14 of me laying head to toe! If I could get her to hold still long enough I could tell you how many Aida's that would be! Best guess is around 35 and no one needs that many Aida's!

Speaking of... are dogs like children? When they're babies you tell yourself never again, one is enough, but then they get to be a certain age and you start thinking, how bad could having another one be?

I should ask myself that question tonight when all those knees and elbows are jabbing into me!

 

Tidying Up

I've been busy revamping the way I store supplies in my craft room. I seem to do this every six months or so, which is about how long it takes the room to reach its saturation point. I'd been using the 'plastic bin method' of storage, but it obviously wasn't working for me. Apparently it's too difficult to pull out a bin and pop the lid off when I needed to put something away. Things stayed wherever they landed and I was running out of space to do any actual crafting.

 

This iteration of craft room organization, I decided to go with rolling carts with drawers.

I love the way they fit under my work space! I've managed to fill three of these so far and will probably end up buying one more, just to be safe. I bought plastic dividers to use inside the drawers but they don't fit as well as I'd like, so this is all still a work in progress.

 

I've been working on 'Tis the Season...

If I can talk Aida into taking a nap this afternoon, I should be able to finish the snow and start on the border. Although a nap does sound tempting!

I hope everyone's week is off to a fabulous start!

 

202... wait... what?

Please tell me it's still November.

 

I'm feeling a smidge guilty that the holiday season passed without much fanfare here at the Chicken Ottoman Empire. We did have a few Christmas presents to open and had our traditional 'sit around the house in our pajamas eating nothing but sausage cheese balls and peppermint bark" day. We enjoyed it so much we did it the next day. And the next. I must confess to making three batches of sausage cheese balls (SCBs in Paispeak) and consuming an entire bag of peppermint bark over the course of five days. When I finally emerged from my lair and stepped into the daylight, my neighbor asked me if I'd been away for the holidays.

 

Uh... no...

I think I was hiberbating.

Some basic instinct must have told me I needed to stay inside and consume sixty million calories while being as idle as possible.

So that's what we did. We ate and slept and watched bad TV. We made a blanket fort and threw balls in the house and allowed ourselves to lose track of the days.

Of course, now that it's the new year, there's hell to pay!

There's lists and diets and organizing and cleaning and checking in with the world.

So hello world! I hope your new year is off to a fabulous start and you're checking things off your lists, having success with your diets, and getting your homes clean and organized!