Slow Sunday Stitching - November 8, 2020

 This weekend is the last #24HoursOfCrossStitch virtual retreat for this year, but before I get into that, let's talk about the other crafting stuff.

Knitting.  I am very close to the corner (about 15 rows) on the Sock Yarn Blanket, which is also the end of round 7.  It's now too big to easily  take a picture of, but I'll try to figure something out and share it next week.  

And my birthday sock start is on hold (sigh).  When I went to cake the yarn, this happened.  It may look like a collection of long Popsicle sticks, but it's an umbrella swift.  You put skeined yarn around it with the 'umbrella' part being that it can expand and contract to carry different sizes of yarn skeins.  Then it spins around freely for you to wind off the yarn into balls or cakes (with a ball winder).  No swift = yarn still in a big skein = no sock knitting.........

My poor swift.  It's from the mid 1970s so it's had a long and faithful service.  And this is the third arm of it that I have broken.  Walt's dad, who was a master woodworker, was able to craft a new arm to replace the first when it happened back around 2002.  The second time was only a crack, not a true break and it was at a place where Walt was able to reinforce it. 

I spent a solid ten days futzing around with this break, trying various ways to fix or reinforce it (because I am NOT a master woodworker) before I finally gave up.  A new one is on order, has shipped and should be delivered tomorrow, so cakes of yarn should happen on Monday evening. 

And a quick report on the "not counted" embroidery project.  I got the rest of the center of the lily petals done and that puckered place where the thread was carried too far on the back fixed.  And finished off the left hand leaf.   The right hand leaf just has its stem so far, but it's coming along fairly well.  I switched to a smaller hoop, which helped.  The close blanket/buttonhole stitch is easier if you can get to the center of the hoop to put some pressure from underneath since that stitch totally worked from the top of the fabric ("Sewing" style).  (Just a note, I DO take it out of the hoop at the end of the day, this is a 'mid stitching session' shot.  Even then, the hoop marks are plain to see. 

As mentioned above, the majority of the crafting happened during the virtual cross stitch retreat.  It started for me after work on Friday.  The idea behind this retreat is put in 24 hours of stitching time over Friday - Sunday.   It can be consecutive hours (#teamstitchallnight) or in chunks (#teamsleep).  I'm on team Sleep every time - my days of staying up all night are long behind me LOL.  We post lots of progress pictures and encouragement on the Facebook group and some people meet up and others do small livestreams.  All kinds of fun.

So Friday afternoon at 4, I started with more beading on the Teresa Wentzler Millennium piece.   Getting this DONE was my focus for the weekend. I put in about five hours on the beading on Friday night and got the sky and space all done with crystal petite beads.

Then on Saturday after errands were all run, I started in on the gold petite beads in the upper arch foilage.  That took about 2 hours. 

I rolled the work down enough to put on the garnet beads in the broaches and sword hilts, then took the project off the scroll bars.  I don't have any longer side bars for this particular frame (it's my only K's Creations frame), and I was afraid that rolling up over all the beading in the space and upper arch would damage something.   Each of the lower foliage areas in the bottom only got about 15 or so beads, so it was reasonable to do those two areas in hand.   And here it is in all it's glory.

Color is a bit off, since I took this picture under artificial light.  I'll try for some better pictures for the finish post later today.  

In the mean time, I am on to working on my next goal - more assembly on the Sampler Sweetbag.  I really need to get that one done since it's dated 2020!  (And I want to check in on the SSS crew - link to this week's roundup).