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.

Partridge Finished

Paulette finished stitching #1061 - Partridge and Pears Quilt - and it's already framed and ready to hang for Christmas, 2011 (until I borrow it back for the January TNNA market.

We're working on the stitch guide now and should have it finished in a few weeks.  This is a rather large guide - lots of stitches - but according to Paulette it was also lots of fun to stitch.

September ORTS

We started a new one this month...let's see how fast we can fill this one up!  With all the new projects being stitched this month I'm betting on the end of October.