Shopping & Mail

Hi all! I'm trying to post more often. It just so happened that I made a trip to JoAnn's today. Yay! For me that means more embroidery floss. My goal is to collect 3 each of every DMC color.
To start I plan on stitching a fairy cross-sitch so I am grabbing the colors needed for that first. There are 97 colors needed for the cross-stitch. After today I have 34 of those colors.

This pile of threads is a result of two shopping trips. I try not to purchase more than $20-$30 worth at a time. I always feel so bad when the cashier is swiping one strand of thread at a time and there is a huge mountain of thread on the counter.

I have actually been cutting my own bobbins out of card stock. It is very time consuming. To my delight I found pre-made plastic ones made by DMC.

I also bought this scroll frame. I figured it might be easier and less damaging to use on both my band sampler and my cross-stitch. I have already played around with it. I fit my band sampler into it and it seems to work pretty well.

Yesterday I recieved swap block. It is beautiful. Check out the pics.

In the picture below the frame is made from a doily with the center cut out.

In case you couldn't tell, my swap partner was Nicki Lee. She also sent me these gorgeous laces.

I am absolutely obsessed with Tambour Embroidery. Shirlee Fassell is to blame. I first saw the technique on her blog. I love how clean the work looks since you are actually working from the back. I really want to take her class next year at the Adventure in Crazy Quilting Retreat. However, I don't think that will happen because me and my husband are focusing all our energy and money into getting a house before the end of the year. So instead I have been searching online for any information at all. I must say it is almost impossible to find tutorial for the technique. I have been searching for a couple of weeks now and I have still only found two shabby tutorials where you really can't see what's going on. In my wandering through youtube videos I found a random video for something called a bead spinner. It is pretty much a bowl that spins around using a knob in the middle. You place the seed beads inside and spin the bowl. It comes with a hooked needle that pretty much pushes the beads onto it by itself. Anyway thye tutorial used gave me the inspiration to create this.

These are the dangles I placed at the ends.

I am very sad. The thread I used wasn't the best apparently and already started breakin. I will have to re-thread the whole thing with stronger thread.

Well that is all for now. I will be posting soon because there is alot of stitching going on for me right now. Until then....stitch and be merry!