Stitchy Yule

Happy Hol­i­days!

We’re hav­ing a qui­et, cud­dly day here. shad­owkatt is with my fam­i­ly enjoy­ing a big, loud, exu­ber­ant Christ­mas. sam­bear is put­ter­ing in the kitchen at the moment. I’m going to go back to stitch­ing after I post this. The only thing miss­ing is a blaze of aro­mat­ic woods in a fireplace.

I tried using Oxy Clean to get some old stains off a piece of stitch­ing last night. It worked quite well, so I’ll be able to iron the piece and get a pic­ture of it with the web­cam in a bit. (I do wish we had a bet­ter cam­era.) Next, I’m going to clean a cou­ple of small smudges off the baby sam­pler that was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to be in Katie’s nurs­ery. I also have the first piece Katie did, in Quick­Point. It’s rather sooty from all the can­dles we burned in the bed­room of our pre­vi­ous res­i­dence. I haven’t been able to get it clean before, so I’m hop­ing Oxy Clean will do the trick.

My par­ents have an even old­er piece (high school vin­tage) that was framed using the sticky mount­ing board. Its glass got bro­ken at some point, and some­time after that, it start­ed show­ing a few rusty spots. I’ve nev­er fig­ured out why that hap­pened, but I’m going to reclaim the piece from Mom and try Oxy Clean on it, too. It was hang­ing in the fam­i­ly room in my par­ents’ old house, which was large­ly used by Dad­dy as an office after we kids moved out, so it’s been around a LOT of cig­a­rette smoke. I’ll see how much it’s dis­col­ored when I get it from them. It’s hard­ly fit to dis­play any­where as is, so I fig­ure the Oxy Clean can’t pos­si­bly hurt it.

I’ve made a fair amount of progress on the birth announce­ment, too. I’ve got most of the fid­dly bits in the sun­burst done, as well as a comet that’s above it. I had avoid­ed that part because it involves con­stant col­or changes — one stitch here, anoth­er over there, etc. There are still some stars to add, then the columns to fin­ish (long rows of sol­id col­ors, good to do while gam­ing). After that, there’s just the back­stitch­ing of Zodi­ac sym­bols along the sides and putting the baby’s birth info in the cen­ter. I’m not sure her first and mid­dle names are going to fit, so I may just do the first name.

I’ve done a lit­tle stitch­ing on the light­house late­ly, but since I did­n’t think it would real­ly tick­le any­one in my life, it’s not been much of a pri­or­i­ty. sam­bear just walked past my PC, though, and said, “Oooh, that’s pret­ty.” So I guess some­one will like it 😉

I’ve asked my fam­i­ly to send me pic­tures of the pieces I’ve giv­en them over the years, and pic­tures of the quilts Grand­moth­er made. I want to make albums of both. Many of my ear­li­er stitch­ing endeav­ors are owned by peo­ple who aren’t in my life now, such as my first in-laws. Would it be ter­ri­bly tacky to write to them to ask for photos?