Stitching Blogger's Question of the Week: Colour Conversions?

Have you ever done a color conversion? If so, what did you think about your results and would you do it again? If not, would you like to try someday?

I've not done a colour conversion yet. Although I do love what other people have done with "Tempest in a Teacup", I stitched in in plain old salmon tones but other people have had great success with other colour selections.

I stitched this over the weekend. It's a tiny Margaret Sherry Cattitude and I'm going to turn him into a scissor fob for my Cheetah Scissors so I don't lose them.

Carnivorous cat

This is Pam Kellogg's "Daffodil"

Mermaid Queen Progress

Best Beach

Well I guess this makes it official....


This article in Today's Daily Express rates St Ives as the best beach in the UK and I live about 20 minutes drive away from it. How cool is that?

Chef!

Received my Lavender Diamonds Reflections fabric from Silkweaver this morning to start stitching the Stitching Bloggers RR. I'll probably start this on Saturday. I don't have any plans during the day on Saturday, but in the evening I'm playing "Chef", by helping out in my boss's restaurant because they are short-staffed.

I went in there last night as well to be shown the ropes while they were quiet during the week. It was fun actually. Nearly sliced my thumb open chopping up the carrots, (didn't draw blood, fortunately lol), burnt some garlic bread and actually enjoyed cleaning down the kitchen and mopping the floor. I was revelling in domestic bliss! lol

I'm actually looking forward to Saturday night. It will be busier so it should be more interesting. Who'd have thought that working for my Twat of a Boss would give me this opportunity to try out one of my ambitions?

I like the idea of playing at "chef" because I wanted to have a go at this after watching Jamie Oliver's "Fifteen" on Channel 4. I really wish that I'd been given that kind of opportunity when I was younger, but when I was in my teens and early twenties, I couldn't cook at all! It was only when I had my own kitchen that I had the freedom to make a mess without being moaned at by my Mother that I actually started to enjoy cooking, and learned to experiment and actually became not a bad cook in my own right.

By the end of 8 years living living with Sean, I was a far better cook than him - the memory of his plastic roast potatoes still haunts me to this day - while I learned the knack of getting them perfect every time.

Other stash I acquired this week was a small package from Dawn, my Stitching and Stash Buddy! I sent Dawn a chart of the new Mirabilia Mermaid last month and this month she reciprocated by sending me a kit of the new Anchor cat "Solo" [pictured left] which I fell in love with when he was in Cross Stitcher a few months ago, some Silkweaver Reflections Material (which I also love, and I don't seem to stitch on anything else at the moment!) and a couple of Ozark Sampler threads.

Thanks Dawn

Stupid Test

Stitching Blogger's Question of the Week: Obligation Stitching?

What do you do when you have some sort of obligation stitching to do, but don't want to do it?

I usually don't have this problem because when I get a piece of RR fabric to stitch I usually drop all other stitching in favour of it.... but when I don't want to stitch on it... I tend to port it around with me just about everywhere just in case I get the time to add a stitch or too - at lunchtimes at work, or waiting for a bus or sitting on a train. It usually gets done in the end.

41°!

What a scorcher this weekend has been.

Saturday I spent sitting on the beach stitching the Mermaid Queen. This was a lovely hot day and despite my Lanzarote tan, I still got a little red on my back. As I stitched I pondered whether particular bits of stitching call to be stitched in certain places. Food samplers in the Kitchen, floral displays in the garden. Paradise Island on holiday ;-) The Mermaid Queen certainly deserves to be stitched on the beach, you can just imagine her swishing her way out of the blue Cornish waters towards you on the beach.

Sunday it was even hotter.... and I confess I caved in and sat outside eating my Sunday Lunch under a sun umbrella. I could feel the heat even through the shade. I wandered around Penzance and eventually went into the park for a bit of a doze. Came home and carried on my doze all evening and night long. I slept for over 12 hours!! - the heat sure takes it out of you. I was a little worried about Jade in the evening, I thought he was having problems breathing, but I think he was just panting like a dog to stay cool. Silly bugger was laying on the windowsill in the light of the setting sun though.

I also went to see Madagascar on Sunday morning. The Penzance cinema going population obviously hasn't heard of preview showings, because I was the only one in the cinema apart from another couple who arrived late. Madagascar was good, not as good as Shrek, but a fun film to watch anyway. The penguins made me laugh hijacking the boat. As if!!!

Today it was back to work with the hottest temperatures of all. Everytime I got up out of my seat today my skirt was stuck to my butt with sweat! Gross right? This evening, 7:30 and you'd think it would be cooling down right? I've just checked my inside/outside thermometer: 29° in here and an amazing 41° outside still in the shade.

I just put a bottle of cider in the freezer to cool it down. Will it explode?

Mermaid Queen - WIP 7

My seventh WIP shot of the Queen Mermaid

I finally finished her hair! Yay! That was getting me down because it was very difficult to see on the chart where the hair stitches were opposed to the beads. I'm not attaching the beads and the gemstones until the end.

Bag Envy

I want this bag!

It was a real treat to stitch this yesterday lunchtime. I got quite excited to be able to stitch with more Krenik Braid (blue stitches and gold highlight at the corners). I wonder if the Mermaid will do a purse swap with me? I like her bag and wish I had one myself.

What a Root!

Spuds grow....

I found a bag of new potatoes in my cupboard. They'd been in a nice warm dark space for a few weeks and had started to sprout, this was one of the smallest in the bag - it's smaller than my thumb, but I couldn't believe the size of the sprouting root on it.

lol

London Bombings

And so the news was all good this morning before I left for work the olympic revellers and campaigners congratulating themselves that London gets to host the Olympics in 7 years time....
less than an hour later, the news changes to chaotic and spotty news reporting about the London bombings, with explosions on tubes and buses.

I'm so glad that I live hundreds of miles away from the capital now in sunny Cornwall.

Stitching Blogger's Question of the Week: Neater Stitching?

Do you think that you stitch neater on Evenweave than you do on Aida cloth? If so, why?

I much prefer Evenweave to plain boring old Aida. I stitched for the first time on Evenweave during a Christmas Round Robin, I was a little daunted at first, but then took to it like a duck to water.

Overall I think my stitching quality doesn't vary that much between Aida and Evenweave, except where fractionals and other speciality stitches are involved. I hate having to "spear" the centre of the square to try and force a fractional stitch through on aida. Somehow it never quite works out dead center. Now if a project has any fractional stitches - even if it's a kit with aida pre-supplied I will always switch to evenweave out of choice.

Blog Update

Today I've done virtually little stitching. I've been on the computer all day, first of all doing some lessons in Fireworks MX (I've used Fireworks 3 previously, but it's well different) after the lessons I played around and made a really nice logo with Jade's face on it.

Then I got a bee in my bonnet about updating this blog. After a consultation with Angel San - I learned that my web host won't support the MySQL and PHP needed to support more sophisticated blogging programmes so I took another look at redoing my blogger template myself. Thanks to Angel San for a couple of tips.

What do you think?