Completions for 2001

I had hoped to fill this page with as much as the 2000 page, but I didn't quite make it. I'll blame the fact that I was working some of the year for the shortage. =)

"Home is Where You Hang Your Heart" from "101 Golden Thoughts" designed by Holly DeFount for Leisure Arts

My husband chose this design after I chickened out of a much more complicated photograph chart. Incredibly simple and quick, I stitched this one in about 6 hours while watching my kids and a couple of movies. :)

"Love One Another" from the February 2001 issue of The Cross Stitcher, designed by Pam Kellogg

The first of a series of three hearts, this one took me about 5 months to complete because I kept putting it down and not stitching for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. It's a reasonably easy pattern to stitch, as there are only full stitches and three of the quarter stitches in the lettering. Where it gets difficult is the intricate backstitching. It's very difficult to keep track of what you've already backstitched while looking at the design. If you have the ability to see something in reverse, so to speak, you might do as I did, and choose to follow the first half of the heart rather than the book while backstitching the second half. I have every intention of finishing the series, but probably not for a while yet. I need a break from all those detailed flowers. :)

"Our Little Blessing" from "Born This Day" designed by Joan Elliot for Design Works Crafts Inc. and published by Leisure Arts

An adorable birth sampler I did for a coworker. She owns Manx cats, so I left the tail out of the picture for her. I'm happy to say she absolutely loved it. I can't wait to see what she does with it. Very easy and quick to stitch, this project took me about a month, including a week of not being able to work on it for lack of the necessary colors. I will say this, though... I am no longer afraid of french knots! :) Please forgive the lousy color on the scan; the actual picture isn't really that green, but very pretty.

"Bounce" from Caron International

Well, it's not cross stitch, but it is something I did this year for my kids. :) It only took me about 3 weeks and I had a lot more trouble keeping my kids and kittens from stealing the yarn than I did working the rug. LOL! I'm happy with it, but it's nearly impossible to mess up a latchhook rug, so I guess I should be happy with it. We haven't decided where to put it yet, and I still have to stitch the edges down and get the binding for the back of it, but at least I finally got a picture of it to post here. :)

S20 - Toy Story 2 - "Buzz Lightyear"
A kit by Designer Stitches

He's finally finished! I really lost my motivation to stitch while doing this kit and it took me a good month to finish him. Now don't get me wrong; this is a VERY easy kit to stitch with more than enough quality DMC threads supplied. I just fell into the trap of sitting down with the stitching and the TV remote and somehow managing to watch two or three movies, fix meals, straighten up, etc etc without once picking up the project. My son is absolutely thrilled that I'm finished with him and has already decided on which side of Woody he's going to hang. Now about that framing...

"A True Friend" from "50 Friendship Favorites" by Leisure Arts

A quick gift I put onto a little towel for a friend before she headed for the other side of the Atlantic. Real simple, real quick, and real true.

Baby Sampler from "Pooh: Baby Collection" from Leisure Arts

I couldn't have cut it any closer to the New Year mark if I'd used a stopwatch. :) I was determined to finish this sampler before 2002 and I managed to do it about ten minutes before we rushed out the door to go to a New Year's Eve party. Of course, it's not completely finished as the baby this was stitched for hasn't yet arrived. Four months is a long time to think about, change, think about, and change the name, so I'm going to wait until he's here to stitch that information in. LOL!








(Originally typed up in 2002)
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Whenever possible, I will create a link for the project title and designer in case anyone wishes to add anything to their stash.  Most times, an active link will direct you to 1-2-3 Stitch!'s online store as I've never had a bad customer service experience with this company and I tend to be loyal to a fault.  If the item is no longer for sale through Joanne, I will do my best to find another active seller, but please be forgiving if something goes out of print and my links lead you on a wild goose chase before I'm aware of their shenanigans.

Completions for 2000

These are the projects that kept me busy all year long for the duration of 2000.  They were a lot of work, but even more fun. :)

Birth Sampler from "Just for Baby" designed by Terrie Lee Steinmeyer

This is the birth sampler I started in the late spring of 1998. I learned I was pregnant with my second child, but since I didn't know if I was having a boy or a girl yet, I decided I should do a sampler for my then 1 1/2 year old son first. I worked on it night and day for about three days, got restless, and set it down. I picked it up again in February of 2000, so I managed to finish my son's sampler in time for my daughter's first birthday. (Pretty pathetic, huh?)

Birth Sampler from "Just for Baby" designed by Terrie Lee Steinmeyer

My daughter's sampler took me just over a month to finish. I was finally in the "stitching groove" and that's all I did with my free time. These two projects are now hanging in our living room for the whole world to see. (Or at least the fraction of the world that comes into our living room.)

"Experience" from Stoney Creek's "Kitty Litter"

One I stitched as a gag for my younger sister, this project was done quickly and I had a lot of fun putting it together. I need to stitch a few more of this collection, as they are all beginning to apply now that I've got a daughter of my own well on her way to becoming a teenager... *shudder*

S21 - Toy Story 2 - "Woody"
A kit by Designer Stitches

My son is really into the Toy Story movies and is just crazy about Woody, Buzz, and Jessie. I finished Woody in about two and a half weeks. Now to get going on the rest of the characters...

A welcome sampler put together with designs from "The Baby Collection" and "Pooh and Friends" by Leisure Arts

This was a Christmas gift for my sister-in-law. I couldn't find an actual welcome sampler that used the Pooh characters, so I sat down with the books I have and picked out the patterns I liked. I spent about three hours charting out where they would go and what the lettering would be, and by the time I was sure what I wanted to do, I was also sure I never wanted to look at another cross stitch pattern for the rest of my life. I was also ready to dump everything I owned that had anything whatsoever to do with stitching out of the nearest window. Once I started working on it, however, I had a blast with it, and was able to finish it in about three weeks.

"Raphael's Angels" from Leisure Arts with lettering from "21 More Backstitch Alphabets" designed by Holly DeFount

A Christmas gift for my husband's stepsister, this was my first attempt with linen and was very slow going. It took me a month to finish the angels and then I realized I had misjudged the amount of fabric I had to stitch on. I ended up having to skip the sky, and instead stitched in "Welcome".

"Cat and Rose" from "Cats Galore" by Leisure Arts

This was a birthday present for my Mother. I worked on this one in my free time while the kids were up and about (the times that I couldn't work on the Tiger). It's a quick project and really easy, so it took only a week and half to finish at a rate of maybe 30 minutes every other day.

"Tiger" by Ross Originals

My parents' Christmas present, this one is very easy to stitch (it uses ONLY full cross stitches), but it's time consuming because of the constant need to change thread colors. I put the first stitch into the fabric and stitched for about 30 minutes, realized I'd already miscounted, frogged all of my work, started over and stitched another 30 minutes, discovered I'd made the SAME error, frogged (and grumbled) again, and finally spent the next 45 minutes meticulously counting each and every line of stitches three times before moving onto the next. Of course, it didn't help to have my friend going into convulsions of laughter with every gripe I made. (It DID help when I heard the sound of cursing, followed by that familiar ripping coming from her project instead of mine. Laugh at me will you? Muwhahahahahaha!) It took me 78 days to complete this project.

"Our Mother" from Homestead Designs

This wonderful poem was my Mother-in-Law's Christmas gift and took me about a month to finish with me working on it when I couldn't work on the Tiger. It took me longer to get around to stitching the edges down and washing it than it did to actually stitch the poem. *sheepish grin* The design is dated 1986 and I believe it is out of print.

"Get Over It' from "Cattitudes: The Fourth Litter" by Jeanette Crews Designs, Inc

My final Christmas gift for this year, this one was for my kid sister who is now a freshman in college and, from what I can understand from our phone conversations, needs to hang it in her dorm for everyone to see. :) Tell me that doesn't have typical cat written all over it.












(Originally typed up in 2001)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whenever possible, I will create a link for the project title and designer in case anyone wishes to add anything to their stash.  Most times, an active link will direct you to 1-2-3 Stitch!'s online store as I've never had a bad customer service experience with this company and I tend to be loyal to a fault.  If the item is no longer for sale through Joanne, I will do my best to find another active seller, but please be forgiving if something goes out of print and my links lead you on a wild goose chase before I'm aware of their shenanigans.

Helloooo everyone!

Nothing special going on here. I just needed a place where I could consolidate all of my cross stitching into a virtual scrapbook of sorts.

While my original blog isn't going anywhere and seems pretty secure in its future of neglect with hit and miss updates once every other blue moon, my intention with this blog is to finally create that virtual stitching journal I've been promising myself forever.

First order of business is to essentially copy and paste all of my stitching pages from my long defunct SapphireDreams site to here.  I haven't completely mapped that out in my head yet, but I have a general idea of what I hope to set up in the near future.

After that I'll add the projects I completed this year for the various exchanges I was privileged to be accepted into.  Fair warning to my exchange partners: this means there will be pictures of the lovely gifts you bestowed upon me, too!

Last, and most certainly not least, I intend to add posts/pages detailing the "work in progress" journeys of my stitching.  I really have no idea how that's going to work in the BlogSpot world since I plan to update existing posts rather than create new ones each time, but who better to buy a ticket for the driver's seat of what promises to be a spectacular train wreck than little ole me?

Something that is going to slow my digital progress down quite a bit is my first steps into the scrapbooking world, which I may or may not reveal to the rest of the world.  I haven't decided how much I wish to humiliate myself yet.  I inherited my mother's treasure trove (enough to quite literally fill an entire room!) of scrapbooking materials and since I never got around to fulfilling her wish of seeing me learn to love this hobby the way she did while she was alive, I might as well experiment with it to create an old-fashioned, hard copy, smished out tree guts, hold in your hands, paper pages, photo journal of my cross stitching throughout the years.

I have no delusions of measuring up to my mother's unbelievable talent in scrapbooking, but my daughter Sarah has more than enough potential and interest so I'll be conscripting her to help me. Heather and Hunter will be helping to create their own scrapbooks as well, so eventually our home will be filled with albums chronicling all three of their creative legacies.

I only wish I'd matured sooner and realized how important this truly is before Sarah had grown to nearly 16.

Anyway...  Wish me luck!  This should be interesting.