Enemy of Entropy

New Year’s Eve

31 December 2008, 8:52 pm. 4 Comments. Filed under Family, Needlework.

I hate com­ing up with titles. Can you tell?

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope to see more of you in per­son this year!

I’m still not feel­ing well at all, so I haven’t been online much. Despite that, my wrists have been aching as if I were work­ing again. How does that happen?

Our Yule was qui­etly pleas­ant. I hope your win­ter hol­i­day was as good.

I did finally fin­ish stitch­ing the Fairy Tale Sam­pler for Sam. It didn’t take that much stitch­ing (so it can’t be blamed for the wrist pain), but I did have to re-​​purchase some Mill Hill beads. That gave me an excuse (like I needed it) to talk to Susan of Nease’s Needle­work, which is always lovely. But now it’s finished!

My cam­era bat­tery won’t recharge any­more, so I’ll have to con­vince the girl to take a photo of the piece for me.

I think I’m finally ready to do Deep Peace. It’s a gor­geous piece, and some peo­ple I love dearly got all the sup­plies for it as a gift for me a few years back. Unfor­tu­nately, we broke up right after that, and every time I started to work on it, I cried. I think there’s been enough time now that I can focus on the happy mem­o­ries instead of the hard stuff.

I think I need to start a smaller project, too, that I can carry around with me. Com­plex projects don’t lend them­selves to pro­duc­tiv­ity while doing any­thing else, any­way. Sam tends to get me so inter­ested in gam­ing that I can’t get much stitch­ing done. Multi-​​person games are bet­ter for needle­work, because I stitch while the focus is on some­one else.

I’m not really into New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions, and if I made them seri­ously, I’d be more likely to do so at Samhain than the end of January/​beginning of Decem­ber. Still, I’ve been real­iz­ing how much I’ve missed needle­work. My eyes are still giv­ing me trou­ble, but I got out an old, portable magnifier/​travel light and that helps. I think it may be worth­while to check into a mag­ni­fier attach­ment for my Ott Lite (after get­ting new glasses). I’m going to try stitch­ing more reg­u­larly, and I’d really like to learn needle­point and knit­ting and/​or cro­chet­ing. I think I can man­age the needle­point on my own, but not the yarn stuff. Hope­fully I can find some­one local who is will­ing to teach me. Appar­ently there’s a group meet­ing at a local library that may be a possibility.

I thought my DMC was get­ting too old for use or some­thing, because it kept fray­ing apart while I was stitch­ing. I finally real­ized (after buy­ing 3 new skeins of black floss) that I’d been using those nee­dles that doesn’t require thread­ing (which I love), and that they stress the floss (and the floss slips out eas­ily). I switched back to a reg­u­lar tapes­try nee­dle and presto! the prob­lem was gone. I can’t find those no-​​thread nee­dles any­where online, so I guess other folks fig­ured that out far more quickly than I did! I have a two-​​sided nee­dle that came with a mag­a­zine or some such, but I don’t know that I can quite fig­ure out how to use it.

Sam and I are stay­ing in this evening, avoid­ing all the obnox­ious drunks in favor of our own cel­e­bra­tion. The girl is here, too, because her beau is in Europe with his fam­ily and most of her other friends are also out of town (some­thing about a Flam­ing Lips concert?).

After get­ting caught up with all the shows I enjoy, I went look­ing for some­thing else to view. I enjoy Bones, but I find the sizist com­ments (and plots) highly offen­sive. I tried to watch the first episode of The Men­tal­ist online, but it keeps tim­ing out. Sam got the first disc of The Tudors from Net­flix, and it’s inter­est­ing at times. I tend to get annoyed with the lib­er­ties they’ve taken with his­tory, though.

SBQ: Stitching Publications

19 June 2008, 5:00 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Needlework, SBQ.

The Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion of the Week:
Do you cur­rently sub­scribe to any stitch­ing pub­li­ca­tions or have you in the past? (Either in print or online) If so, which ones?

I don’t sub­scribe to any at the moment, and I rarely buy them off the rack. I have hun­dreds of them in my stash, and I keep mean­ing to go through and just keep the designs I’m still plan­ning to stitch, but I never get around to doing it! I stopped buy­ing them because I real­ized that I haven’t ever stitched one sin­gle pat­tern in any of those hun­dreds of mag­a­zines.
Read on…

SBQ: Stitching Terms/​Acronyms

16 May 2008, 7:32 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Needlework, SBQ.

This week’s Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion of the Week:

For sea­soned stitch­ers: Define a stitch­ing term or acronym for new
stitchers.

Gah. I don’t play in the needle­work news­group any more, so I don’t think in acronyms. Rail­road­ing is the only term that I can think of that wasn’t obvi­ous or explained in a pattern’s instruc­tions. There’s a decent expla­na­tion here, and an arti­cle with good pho­tos here.

SBQ: Family Heirlooms

7 May 2008, 10:44 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Family, Needlework, SBQ.


Tigerlily
And another Stitch­ing Blog­ger Ques­tion of the week, which should leave me all caught up:

Do you have any pieces that you would liked passed on to future
gen­er­a­tions as fam­ily heirlooms?

Marine Corps Emblem
At one time, I thought so. My mother has a Tigerlily piece I did for her, and my father has a big Marine Corps Emblem that hangs in his office. Unfor­tu­nately, the first piece I ever framed and gave to them suf­fered smoke dam­age, and I haven’t been able to get it com­pletely clean yet. They haven’t expressed any inter­est in hav­ing it back, either. Mom stuck another piece I did and gave to her in a drawer, and for­got that I’d done it at all.

Bloom Where You Are PlantedSome of the pieces I did for my first husband’s fam­ily, like a baby sam­pler and a nice serv­ing tray, may get passed on. Maybe. They may have got­ten rid of them because of the asso­ci­a­tion with an ex-​​spouse. Who knows?

SBQ: Blended Threads

6 May 2008, 10:37 am. Comments Off. Filed under Needlework, SBQ.

And another Stitch­ing Blog­ger Question:

How do you han­dle blended threads? Do you kit the blends up before you
start a piece, or do you grab what col­ors you need and blend when the
need arises? If you kit up the blends before­hand, how do you store
them? Do you have another option for blends to share?

I can’t remem­ber the last time I did a piece that used blended threads. Obvi­ously, I haven’t got­ten around to stitch­ing any­thing by Teresa Went­zler ;-)

When I’ve had to use them, I just blend them as the need arises. I keep most of my threads (DMC, def­i­nitely) on plas­tic bob­bins, so when I start a project I gather all the col­ors required and put them on a metal ring. As I cut a length, I wind what­ever I didn’t use back on the bob­bin for later use, to avoid waste.

 

Powered by WebRing.