Getting the New Year started!

Happy New Year! 2011 is finally here and I'm hoping it will be a year of stitching and knitting, friendships, good health, family memories and fun for everyone. Our family spent New Year's Eve at a Rock-n-Bowl event at the local bowling alley where the kids are on league with friends of ours earlier in the evening and then went to my in-laws to welcome in 2011. Since we provided all the food, I jokingly named it the "Party on the Tailgate" since we hauled everything down in coolers and storage bags but since the father-in-law has Parkinson's; it was easier for us all to gather down there. We enjoyed crab dip, shrimp cocktail, pigs in a blanket, Amaretto BBQ meatballs (my own secret BBQ sauce I make from scratch), cheese dip, ranch dressing dip, chips and veggies and deserts too. My mother-in-law enjoyed the white Zinfandel that we bought along while the rest of us enjoyed sparkling apple cider. As midnight drew near, the party hats were on, noisemakers were in hand and at the stoke of the clock; noisemakers and confetti blasters were being released on the front porch.

Stitching

Stitching wise, I spent the first day of the year working with Ray on learning to cross stitch and he seems be be catching on relatively fast. We are working on a little owl that I found kitted up at my LNS a few weeks ago. So far Ray has started along the top of his head and the biggest thing has been to make sure he understands to make his X's all in the same direction. Ray was so funny when he would make a mistake because he would just look up at me with his big eyes and say, "Oops Mommy, I made a mistake. Silly me! What do I do now?", so I would tell him to take his thread off the needle and we would pull it out. Here is a picture of my student working diligently on his little piece.

After he tired of working on his lesson, I decided to pull out the first UFO of the year to get started on. Since I only have the fur trim of Santa's outfit on my Lizzie Kate Merry Friends piece; I decided to get started with it. The fur is being done in a thread called Whisper and this is why it became a UFO in the first place. The thread can be very difficult to stitch with and you have to use extremely short pieces of it at a time in order to keep the fuzziness of it intact. Hopefully this piece will be done sometime this week and I can move on to another neglected piece.

Here is the 'Before' picture of the LK Merry Friends piece as it was at the start of the day....

and here is the 'After' picture. A little progress was made so I am feeling pretty good about it. Please note: Merry Friends is in my 6" QSnap with the beautiful cover made by Cowgirl Chris!


Last Thursday, my LNS had held their annual end of year sale and I decided I was unable to resist the temptation of going up there to support them. They hold a fabulous sale every year in order to help reduce their inventory they have to report and in turn the stitchers of the area show up in herds to splurge on the wonderful array of fabrics, threads, charts, kits.... it is a variable stitcher's heaven! I purchased quite a bit of fabric to have on hand and a few Prairie Schooler charts which I hadn't purchased yet, a ornament book and a few miscellaneous notions to boot.

Knitting

Later in the evening, I decided to pull out my scarf and start working on it again. Well, I discovered knitting has it's own version of FROGS that cross stitchers are familiar with and they are just as dastardly! While checking my counts across my needle, I found 2 garters (check), 7 purls (check), 7 knits (check), 8 purls...... WHOA where did the 8th stitch come from!!!! I started backing out row by row and after backing out 4 rows realized I hadn't found the mistake yet. I held up the scarf and started looking at it trying in vain to find the mistake and no such luck. While muttering a few obscenities under my breath, I yanked my needles from the yarn and started unraveling all my hard work. About this time, Becky walked into the room looking like "Cindy-who" and said, "Mom! What happened to your scarf!" which made me feel like the 'Grinch who stole the New Year's scarf". With great restraint on my part, I managed to not start stomping the yarn (I see it is called VILLIAN-ness for a reason) and pouring holy water on it to strike the demons out of it. So I smiled my biggest Mommy smile, picked up the yarn and carefully started rolling it back on the roll while looking for the slimy, green varmint who had so mischievously jumped in and wrapped the extra stitch onto the needles in the first place. So back to the drawing board and I am working on getting back to where I left off.

Until next time..... have fun!