A Happy Dance of sorts

Sorry, no pictures today. :o(

Last night, I finished the last of the cross stitching on my Beginner's Exhange. I only have a little backstitching left to do (I've been keeping up with it as I went along) and then the finishing!

Woo hoo!!

I can't wait to share pictures of it with you all. It's really been such an enjoyable project to work on that I'll be doing it all over again for myself!

Something to sink your teeth into...

Well, not literally. Last weekend, it was Itchey's turn to visit the dentist and have her teeth cleaned. (we had Abner's done a couple years earlier) I felt like a heel the entire week before we took her, because I didn't want to say anything to her, but I knew of her impending doom... (Yes, I DO talk to my cats, thank you)

She did beautifully. When we went to pick her up, they brought her into the examination room and let me hold her before we put her in her carrier (she was still very groggy), she put her head on my shoulder with her her paw holding onto the top of my arm (Don't leave me here, Mummy).

It was funny, they told us that when we took her home, she’ll probably want to go off somewhere and sleep for the rest of the day and we could try to give her a tablespoon of food at around 5 pm (because she may not want to eat so soon after surgery).

I guess they didn't realize she's actually a Hoover vacuum with fur! :o)

She wanted no part of being shut away in the guest room, and when we went to feed them, I gave her the one tablespoon of soft (they suggested soft because her teeth might be a little tender – our kitties mostly eat dry with occasional sushi) and I had to have DH hold her off of Abner’s food (while he was trying to eat – poor thing!) until I could get her some more of the soft food. It’s one of the bigger cans of food, not the Fancy Feast size (that you use a can opener on), and she ended up eating almost a ½ of that!

Here are some pictures of my poor little girl with her shaved paw for the IV... These are from right after her cleaning a week ago, so she's starting to get black fuzz there now.





And a picture of Abner for good measure...




I got a lot of cross stitch done on my Beginner's Exchange piece. The weather has been finally warm enough to sit out on the back deck and stitch. I'm on the home stretch, and by this weekend, I plan to do the finishing.



Just to tease Joanne, here's a picture of all the floss colors that I've used for her exchange piece. ;o)

Happy Easter!

Just got back from a 4-day weekend! Lovely! We stayed home, got up very late each morning (I'm blaming that on the kitties - they looked just too comfortable lying there, sleeping peacefully, yeah, that's it), got a lot of seasonal work done around the house, as well as some cross stitch, knitting and sewing.

A warning: Don't watch The Five People You Meet in Heaven without at least a carton of Kleenex. Excellent, excellent movie. A MUST see. I tried to cross-stitch while watching it, but after Eddie goes to Heaven and starts meeting his five people (no, I'm not giving anything away), it was all over. I didn't want to get mascara on Joann's exchange project!

Here's some rotation work from last week:

Snapperville - I got a little done on the pine tree. I admit, the bigger copy makes life much easier!




All holiday weekend, I exclusively cross-stitched my Beginner's Exchange. It's a lovely piece (and I can't wait to share a picture soon), but I think I was a bit ambitious on my design selection (this was my first exchange ever). I'm absolutely loving working on it, so all the extra time spent on it has been enjoyable. And, I'm so close...

You Spin Me 'Round (On Rotation...)

You Spin Me Round was just playing on Launch. (Hey, get some pants on that kid!)

I am getting (and staying) on my rotation starting this week! I really accomplish a lot more stitching when I see different designs each day.

Last night, I was able to sit out on the back deck (until it got just a little too chilly) and cross stitched while basking in the setting sun. My Monday piece is the Harvest Sampler and here's my progress on the top part of the border:



When I did the vertical border (on the left), I did the gold lattice before stitching the solid border and made more counting mistakes on the lattice . I figured doing the solid border first then the lattice would let me know immediately if I stitched one to many or too few stitches or was off by a thread. It did work, and so I was able to get a lot more done.

Today, during lunch and this evening, Snapperville is the stitch du jour.

**** Eye of the Tiger is now playing on Launch. (I'm listening to the 'Big Hits of the 80's' channel) OK, be honest, besides me, how many of you have skated to this song at the local skating rink back in the 80's....

In a previous post, I mentioned that I could no longer stitch in the car (all those holes make me woozy). This is true for any evenweave or linen type fabric, but I was curious if I could still stitch on perforated paper in the car. Well, heck, I can! I found a project from and old issue of Cross Stitch and Country Crafts that I had to make. They're kitties that look like Abner. I started the Abner cat (with slight modification), and will update the design to make an Itchey cat. They'll probably end up as magnets to hang in my cubicle at work. I did this yesterday, 45 min on the ride in and 45 min on the ride home. (DH was driving :o)



***And with that I leave you to go listen to Hungry Like the Wolf. Yes, I was a Durannie and yes, I liked Simon Le Bon... He was quite good looking in this video... *sigh*

French Knots at 4am

What do you do when you can't sleep at 4am? French knots. And lots of them! They were worth it, because it means that Purr-Pals is now a Happy Dance! (And, of course, I had to work around two kitties who decided that I needed some company). And, yes, notice that real kitty fur made it into the stitched kitties.



After all those French knots, I went back to bed! :o)

It's quite convenient, that DH's birthday and my parents' wedding anniversary are on the same day, because I can remember two events with one day! To celebrate, we had a small family gathering at our house this weekend. Me, DH, my parents, my sister and her boyfriend. BTW, it was their 50th anniversary. It's well known that the majority of the guests at this shindig like a piece of cake with a rose. I make sure that everyone had at least one rose...



I love giving the cake decorator a good challenge. Over the years, they've done a basket (the side of the cake) filled with flowers (the top), a birthday cake for Mum of a 3D slot machine with coins coming out, and a birthday cake for DH with a rocket and planets.

The kitties greeted the guests from the comfort of the steps...



They love my Mum, even Itchey who is very particular about with whom she socializes. We think it's because both me and my Mum are the cat people of the family. She and I have similar touch and way with the kitties, that, aside from our scents, our interaction with the kitties are almost exactly the same.

Dad brought me a present, too! Since he's been retired, he loves to do little woodworking projects. He used to do full-blown woodworking when he was younger. When my parents first bought their house (back in the mid-70's), my Mum picked out all of her dining room furniture out of a Pennsylvania House catty and he drew up the plans and made it for her, as well as our kitchen table, both me and my sister's bedroom sets and various little things here and there over the years.

When I invite friends over to knit or cross stitch, I love to serve tea and sweet treats, so he made me this:



When I moved out of their house into my first apartment, I showed him a picture from a Yield House catalog (awesome country stuff!) and he made me this:



Typically, I like to keep this blog focused on my needlework pursuits (with some kitties thrown in for good measure), but I guess having the family out at the house this weekend got me in the nostalgic frame of mind. Hope you don't mind me sharing. :o)

SBQ Question...

This week's Question...

Do you stitch “on the go?” (On the commute to and from work, during your lunch break, waiting for the kids, etc.) If so, do you have a specific “travel” project or do you just grab whatever you happen to be working on and take it with you?


Absolutely!

When I had younger eyes, I cross stitched in the car. After my cross stitch hiatus, I tried cross stitching in the car, but found that not only could I not see the holes properly, it actually made me nauseous looking at the holes. So now, I only knit in the car.

Otherwise, I rarely travel anywhere without a pair of socks to knit and a cross stitch project.

A number of years back, my commute to work involved a lot of start-stop traffic, where it took maybe 3-4 light cycles to get down this long hill. At the time, I was working on one of the Cross Stitch and Country Crafts stockings (the Kitchen stocking for my Mum, I believe), and I would save fill-in areas for my morning commute. I would drape the fabric up over the steering wheel and stitch while we were stopped. I could see the brake light of the car in front of me, so I knew when traffic started to move. Over the course of those red lights, I'd get maybe 10-15 minutes of stitching done each morning.

Toasty Toes

I've finally finshed my my Lorna's Laces socks. Normally, socks don't take this long for me to complete, but, oh well. I love the colors! The colorway is called Flames, and it really captures the color of a cozy fire in the fireplace. (And doesn't Abner make the socks look so much better?)



Maybe five years ago, when I took a knitted sock class at my LYS, I was taught the top-down method. I've been intrigued with the toe-up version, but never got up the courage to actually try it. (It's like when you first tried waste canvas to cross stitch on a sweatshirt - after you tried it, you wonder why it seemed so intimidating). Wendy at Wendy Knits kindly shared her toe-up sock pattern on her blog, so I'll be trying it as my first toe-up.



I have no idea what yarn or colorway this is. I've had the yarn for a while, and previously started socks with it and changed my mind, so it's now just two balls of naked yarn. The colors remind me of the popping corn (the old fashioned kind, not microwave :o) where the kernels were colored. (As a child, I was so bummed that the popped corn wasn't also colored - but that's another story)

I'm making these on US#1.5 INOX needles with a gauge of 6st/inch (INOX are metal needles, and have sharper points). I would typically knit this weight of yarn with US#1 or #0 needles, but I wanted a thinner sock fabric.

On the cross stitch front: I have been stitching, but I've been working on my exchange piece almost exclusively this past week. I am 4/7 complete! It's getting there! (I SO hope that JoAnn is not allergic to cat hair!)