Meet "Maria" and Kelly

"Maria" is the first of a new series of six Talavera angels that will be introduced at Sample It.  She is stitched in a combination of fibers and comes packaged with a full-color stitch guide and a beaded red chili pepper embellishment from One World Buttons.

The stitch guide was written by Kelly Doyle, who picked up and finished this project after MaryLu Leger's untimely death.  She has included stitches such as Diagonal Burden, Amadeus, and a Hedabo Ring.

Kelly has taught needlepoint embellishment for A Needlework Place in Mesa, Arizona and Phoenix Needlepoint Co. before relocating to Houston. She has also taught classes at previous TNNA markets for Anne Jerlow's geisha series and Garden Cat Square.  Kelly stitched several ornaments for the White House Christmas tree during the Clinton reign, and her Sandy Jenkins Sunflower Girl appears in the revised edition of Jo Christensen's The Needlepoint Book.  She is available to travel and teach classes.

Kelly will be helping me at the Sample It table and is bringing along "Consuela", the next angel in the series, so please stop by and say hi!

Happy New Year!

                                                 New Years Eve - From our Perpetual Calendar

Wishing everyone a healthy and happy 2012.

Merry Christmas - A Sneak Peek

One of the items we will be offering at TNNA for Sample It is this little penguin ornament "topper".

He and his friends (he's one of a series) can be stitched and added to the top of amost any Christmas ball.  Rather than just using him on an ornament that I already had, I indulged in a shopping spree .  There are some gorgeous ornaments in the stores this year - jeweled, velvet, glittered - you name it!

Next will be a set of ornament toppers for Halloween if I can find some ornaments in the appropriate colors.  Has anyone seen these in orange, black, purple or lime green?

Happy Chanukah

                                          #818 - Judaic Bear

A Use for Those *#!*** ORTS

This is what we did with all the ORTS we've saved this year from stitched models....with a few jewels glued on  and maybe a little work with a glitter pen they might actually be useful!

Happy Thanksgiving

                                          #1056 Quilted Gobbler
Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Needlepoint and Quilting

Finally stopped stitching long enough to take a few photos and sit down at the computer.  This is the final step in completing the Partridge & Pears Wreath - crazy quilting the seams and (hopefully) padding each section.

I have to give all those Crazy Quilters a lot of credit - this technique is not so easy to adapt to needlepoint!  From scouring a lot of quilting blogs and websites it seems that they take a basic embroidery stitch and embellish it with beads, ribbons,sequins, and even add additional stitches to create these elaborate seams.  You can see some gorgeous examples of this on:
http://plays-with-needles.blogspot.com/
http://inaminuteage.com/stitchindex.html
I found these two resources on Janes Chilly Hollow blog and they were most helpful, even though my workmanship isn't quite as precise as the stitching of these talented ladies.

Only 2 more seams to go, and then off to the finisher for final construction.  Keeping my fingers crossed that the trapunto aspect of this project works.