Bumble bee wallet

The wallet I made Luke for Christmas didn't hold up all that well, and was a little bigger than he'd like, anyway, so I hand sewed/embroidered him a new one that's sturdier, and a better size. I asked him what sort of thing he'd want on a new wallet, and I'm happy with what he chose and how it turned out:




It's sewn on the cotton from one of those old fashioned flour sacks (online I found a lot of other cute things that people did with these old feed sacks, from chairs, to purses, to dresses).

peacocks are the new owl.

Did a little embroidery at Whitney's house during the last movie marathon (three buddy cop movies- Nighthawks, Freebie and the Bean, and In the Heat of the Night). I really like it, a peacock patch that I'll give to my sister, I think.

quaking aspen

My best gal pal, Whitney, started an etsy shop where she has a lot of itty bitty cross stitches for sale: Adam and Steve, an old couple, some french sailors with their cat, and some non-gay-themed ones, like this mushroom that I love:



She's going to let me join her in her little shop, and we'll have some of my embroidery (framed and as brooches) and some cross stitch/embroidery collaborations.


This little quaking aspen embroidery (photo taken at a weird angle to avoid most of the glare) was supposed to be included, but once I was finished, I couldn't give it up. After having it for a couple weeks I felt like I was ready to sell it, but now Luke's become attached. I guess I'll just have to make another.


The branches an outline of the tree were done in couching. It's a simple stitch, but it uses two needles, so the whole time I was doing it I kept thinking of it as "Extreme Embroidery!!!!"

Poor Man's Christmas

One thing about being totally broke is that you've got to be creative with the Christmas gifts you give (because I think two years in a row is the most you can go without giving presents to your best friends, and I'd already used those up).

One that I had a hard time giving away was a little wallet that I made for my husband Luke. It was on an oatmeal muslin (the lady cutting at the fabric store kept calling it 'muslim'), and embroidered with a simple little fern and fiddlehead:


For my sister-in-law, Jenny, I made an apron with a frilly ruffle:

For Eber, a satchel; for Drew a kelly green wallet with embroidered feather; and for Whitney a vegetarian cook book, and recipe box with twenty or so of my favorite recipes.

Oh, and for Ariel, the weird moon shoes she gave me last year:

Most of my hobbying lately has been cooking with Luke. We've been going to one dinner party/potluck after another (can you call it a dinner 'party' when there are just four of us?) and trying to cook good meals for just the two of us.

Luke and I also inoculated a log with mycelium- I found a good log on the side of the road and brought it home to drill with holes and fill with spawn (live fungus mixed with sawdust and grains, grown on a small wooden dowel), in hopes that we can grow some oyster mushrooms. Hopefully, we'll have something like this by the end of next summer:
We did it a little too late in the season, but we have a lot of spawn left so whether it works or not we can do some again next spring, summer and fall.

And lastly, lookit!

Luke's brother and his wife are having a baby in a couple weeks. I don't know any babies, so this little girl (London) is going to get a bunch of presents from me because I want to make teeny tiny things. These little booties will probably only fit the kid for a couple weeks to a month (and if they have a big baby, they might not fit at all), but I'm really happy with them. Now I just need to buy a two little buttons for the ankle straps, and they'll be done!

embroidered brooches

I've been making brooches for other people, and then liking them so much when they're done that I wish I could keep them for myself:

some non-descript flowers

acorn:

shasta daisies:

It's good embroidery practice- I finally mastered bullion stitches while making this rose:
I made a coneflower one, too, but my sister stole it (to be fair, I steal things from her all the time).

Next hobbies I'll try: brewing mead and making buttons.

spider aster brooch

Here's another little brooch I embroidered, inspired by the asters in my front yard:

Sunflowers

I guess I'm really bad about posting every day. We don't have the internet at our house (we got rid of it during the summer because I wasn't in classes and it seemed like a good way to save a little money), and going to school or the coffee shop hasn't sounded fun.

I've been really obsessed about sunflowers lately, because we have monster ones growing outside our front door. I like leaving the house every day, because it's so nice to be surrounded by fifteen feet of flowers. I like the traditional bright yellow ones a lot, but mostly I love the chianti variety. When they first bloom they're brown, and then in a couple days fade to a pretty red.


This week I made a sunflower brooch, and idea I got from tiny happy, one of my favorite blogs (a tutorial here). I like the way it turned out. Here's a close-up of my boob:

Failures

Haven't had the best results in the crafting world lately: a tank top I tried to sew, thinking bias tape wouldn't really be necessary (and of course it was); a summer dress that, no matter how much I tried to fix it, always looked like it was maternity; and skinny little zinnias I've been growing in my windowsill that just keep getting taller and taller, but never fill out or get adult leaves (my mom laughed when she saw them).

One of the more disappointing failures were the Maitake mushrooms I was trying to grow. From the start, they took much longer than they were supposed to, and even though they went through every expected phase, they took so long that they started getting moldy before ever totally maturing. We saved a handful of almost-mushrooms, and we'll see how they taste.

Some Maitake well on their way to being ready to harvest.

I've also failed to follow through on a lot of the embroidery I've started lately. One was a Ukranian-inspired flower embroidery for my mom for mother's day. The other, an anatomical heart for my dear friend Drew's birthday. Both have been sitting around my house, untouched for the past week and a half.


Not everything has failed lately. The garden is starting to do well, we made some pretty yummy salmon for mine and my brother's birthday dinner, and our house has been full of pretty bouquets of lunaria, iris, muscari, and penstemon. So I'm still optimistic that I can crank out some things that I actually like.

Daffodils

This week I stole these:

And embroidered these:

Foxglove

Last week I embroidered some Foxglove. The lighting's not great, so they look more red and less purply than they are. They turned out well, I think. Something I've discovered about embroidery is that I love doing it, but don't know what to do with it. I don't want all my stuff covered in embroidery- I'm not 6/60! I haven't had the motivation to use my sewing machine the last few weeks, either, so that limits my possibilities even more. But man, do I love stitching!

Forsythia

My mom and I used to drive around our local neighborhoods at the beginning of spring, looking for forsythia. She would get upset when people would trim the bushes down into neat little hedges because, "They're supposed to be free and wild!" This year, my husband and I went out walking with our clippers for some late-night forsythia-stealing. One branch from the neighbors across the street, two from down the street, and pretty soon we had a nice bouquet to put in our bedroom.
This week I embroidered this little forsythia bush on white cotton knit (which was a nice material to work with). I haven't decided what to use it for yet, probably a little clutch wallet or pencil case.

Cottage garden embroidery

I embroidered Whitney a little needle book, and I liked it so much I almost kept it.

The front has purple holyhocks:

and the back has allium:















I think my next embroidery project will be something for my house. I found a cute frame at the thrift store that is made from hemp, but looks wooden. I think it would look very sweet to have a little embroidered garden inside.

My new favorite hobby

I'm learning how to do embroidery. My first project to finish was this little cd case for Scott's huge cd exchange. He assigned everyone who wanted to participate a number, and then used a random number generator to assign us a person who we were supposed to send a mix cd. Of great coincidence, of all those people (I think there were a hundred of us, most of them strangers), I was assigned to send to Rylan, one of my best friends for years and the one person who likes boring, sad music as much as I do. I was happy to make him a cd and this little case to mail it in. Embroidered on the front of the olive green case is a yellow leaf with chain-stitched stem. On the back, a little snail: