TUSAL and two finishes!

Firstly here is this month's picture of my ort flask. As you can see it was enjoying the sunshine amongst the spring flowers in the garden.


Last week on the rotation it was the turn of Barnabee's Quest. It's finished! I've started to make this into a bell pull but still have a little way to go before it is finally finished.


This is an out of focus photo of the whole thing.


Having had such fun with The Crazy Carrot, last post, my Mum gave me another Secret Needle Night project to do. I think this one is called 'The Haunted Hideaway on 13th Avenue'. I stitched it as charted but added a glow-in-the-dark ghost in the window and by the fence. The ghost is based on the one from Just Nan's Fraidy Frog. I also gave the cat green glow-in-the dark French knot eyes. I'm probably going to finish this as a cushion cover, but then again can a girl have too many bags?



This week on the rotation it should be The Green Santa. As yet not a stitch has gone into him. Maybe I will be able to report some progress in my next post!

Happy stitching!

TUSAL

Here is this month's picture for the Totally Useless SAL.



The threads are starting to go up the neck of the flask, but there is still plenty of space in the flask itself, maybe I should shake it?

This week's dilemma is what to stitch! Should I carry on with Open House, and hopefully finish it, or do the Santas? Strictly speaking it should be White Nights but we break up for Easter next Thursday so I'm going to do that during the first week of the holidays so that I can stitch on it during the day as well as the evenings to progress Part 5 a bit more.

Valentine's Day and the TUSAL

This year the Valentine's card I stitched for The Other Half was made from a freebie design from The Drawn Thread called Heart Throb. I stitched it, as charted, on 32ct opalescent white linen using the DMC equivalents.


So much for the staging. Here is a close up of the actual work.



Today is also TUSAL day and here is a photo of my flask. The white/yellow orts are from White Nights, the red below is from the Christmas ornament stitched last weekend.



Happy Valentine's Day!

Totally Useless SAL, some decent photos and maths!

Firstly here is my Totally Useless SAL photo for this month. For some reason standing it upside down makes it look less full than it actually is.


My camera came back from repair today, hooray! No more out of focus phone photos. This camera is able to take better close up shots than my previous one so there will be some experimenting along the way. If I manage to take photos half as good as Jane at Miss Jane's Stitching I will be happy.

So these are two in focus shots of my recent finishes.




So far this week progress on White Nights has been slow. At this rate it is going to take a week for each of the buildings in part 5. There are eight of them. This means that I might get on to part 6 by September if I stick to doing White Nights one week a month. So if each subsequent part takes half a year to complete and there are six part left, that will be three years. So estimated completion date 2013. Now that is scarey. Having depressed myself I had better get back to it, one more evening to go. Let's hope I finish the building or I might have to adjust my calculations.

Maybe it's best not to do the maths in the first place.

Happy stitching

Totally Useless SAL at Christmas

Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis will know that I am a member of Yoyo's Totally Useless SAL (TUSAL)and, yes, I have signed up for 2010. Throughout the year I have tried to take pictures of my ort jar, a large volumetric flask rescued from a dark cupboard at the back of a science lab in school, in some unusual positions/places. Well for this month's photo it was obvious. The ort jar could be the star on top of the Christmas tree! But, alas, try though I did, it's too big and too heavy. Rather than risk a smashed flask, which I have to say has been very useful, in that I no longer clog up the Dyson with bits of thread, this month's photo is of the flask beside the tree.


The question now to be answered is do I stick with the same jar for 2010 or try and find another one as interesting in shape? Answers on a postcard please....

Totally Useless SAL

Back to a more conventional picture for this month.

Totally Useless SAL

This weekend I put up my Halloween stitchy display. The ort flask decided that as he now had even more glow in the dark threads inside, from the Horrid Halloween Biscornu, he should be part of the display too. So I bought some Halloween tinsel from Tesco for some extra decoration.

Here is this month's photo

The Totally Useless SAL goes to a retirement party!

On Friday 18 September week the ort flask went to the retirement party of the Leibig Condenser (the glass tube in the photo with the rubber hoses attached). The condenser, after many years service had developed a crack and was now no longer usable. The ort flask was able to meet up with many of his old glassware friends, beakers, boiling tubes and test tubes. The latter were bemoaning the fact that many of their peers were now in the 'broken glassware bin' as a result of being miss handled by over excited pupils. This means that they have rolled off benches onto the floor or have had their bottoms somehow pushed out by excessive stirring! The measuring cylinders (the group on the left of the photo) the ort flask noticed, had not changed, they never did mix at parties but preferred their own company. As they are very quick to point out, unlike the other glassware, they are accurate don't you know!



Sorry for the late posting but I did not pick up on the date correction on Yoyo's blog until today when I checked out the date for next month.

Afternoon Tea for the Totally Useless SAL

'Taking tea is one of the quintessentially English occasions' is a quote from 'The Ritz London Book of afternoon tea' by Helen Simpson. So the ort jar for The Totally Useless SAL had a treat this month, not quite the Ritz as you can see if you check out their website here.

The flask now contains some glow in the dark orts which make it look quite spooky at night.

Regulars to this blog will know that I stitch in the car, on trains and that I usually have a small project that fits into the handbag on me most of the time. So, I now have a 'mobile ort jar', well that's better than calling it an old Parmesan Cheese tub. Not to be out done it also had afternoon tea.


It really has been quite hot here today and I think I need to have a lie down in the relative cool of The Stash Room.

'More tea Vicar?'

Totally Useless SAL

I have been thinking about how to display my ort jar for 'The Totally Useless SAL' this time round. What about this?


This is what it looks like in the usual pose. The white is from the Hardanger Angel.


I also finished the Peachy Biscornu this weekend.

SALs ~ Mary Wigham and Totally Useless!

Here is my Totally Useless SAL photo for June.


The green clump bottom right is from the Frog Biscornu, the bits of blue at the top are from Mary Wigham. There are a few sparkly bits from the July Calendar but you need to look hard to find them!

Here is my progress on Mary Wigham so far.


This week on the rotation it should be White Nights but instead I am going to start the August Calendar form Mill Hill. White Nights returns next week!

Totally Useless SAL ~ May

This is a picture of this month's contribution to the Totally Useless SAL. There is a large clump of blue floss created by the Dutch Delf biscornu. There are also some sparkly additions as Part 2 of White Nights used some metallic thread.

Totally Useless SAL

This is this month's photo for The Totally Useless SAL. This month's additions have mainly been DMC. When I go away for the weekend I take a Floss-A-Way bag to put my orts in, how about that for dedication?

Precious Ramotswe and me ...

... what do we have in common?

On the face of it very little. I am no lady detective and I don't live in Botswana. But, she seems to spend a lot of time driving around in a white van and sitting on the veranda, watching the world go by and this is what I have done this weekend, well sort of.

White van time meant that I was able to complete part 2 of the pin cube SAL from Stitch-Creations.

Sitting on the veranda on Saturday meant that I was able make good progress on the Baby Shamrocks Biscornu. Whilst stitching outside the wind caught one of my orts and blew it away. I promptly dropped everything and ran after it so that the ort's final resting place would be my flask for the Totally Useless SAL rather than decorating some bush or birds nest, sorry birds but you've had plenty of my orts in the past! An evening on the now none existent sofa and a morning on a very hard chair (sofa hit the local recycling place at 9.00 this morning) and the biscornu was finished. This shows the front and back.

And this is the finished item.

So why is the sofa at the tip? The Other Half has, finally, let his house and we are here sorting out the last bits of stuff. As I write this I am sitting in a room furnished with a few boxes, the aforementioned chair and a TV!

At some stage over the weekend I was also able to finish the lilac side of 'When Barnabee Met Bella'.

This week it's back to the St Nicholas Tree Skirt and the 'Pale Blue Santa'. Only time will tell how much I get done as this weekend is the start of 'Steel, Steam and Stars II' . More about this in a future post, no doubt.

Mandalas, SALs (Totally Useless) and Santa

When I got home today there was an email from my Mum and this was the attachment.

The Holland Mandala, finished. Then she tells me the last download arrived on Tuesday! Never mind my melting red pen her needle must be glowing. It looks great.

Today it's the new moon and time for a picture of my ort jar for the Totally Useless SAL. As I was taking it upstairs to photo The Other Half commented that there wasn't much in it! Mmm, I replied that I am very frugal with my orts. Especially as over here, Treasure Braid, hand dyed silk and all the other speciality floss that are used in Chatelaine designs, Waxing Moon Designs etc are VERY expensive. Very little DMC floss in this jar so far!

So here is my contribution to the Totally Useless SAL this month.

At the end of stitching tonight this is how 'The Red Santa' looks.

The picture does not show the metallic embellishments on his coat and I have to say that in the end I frogged all the French Knots except the ones in his eyes as I did not like them. There is quite a lot of couching to do but I am going to leave that until the whole thing is finished. So the next time this hits the rotation it's on to 'The Pale Blue Santa'. A sort of finish for this week or not?

The Totally Useless SAL

I found this SAL on Sitchery Doo's blog. All you have to do is find a glass container, fill it with orts and/or other stitchy left~overs and post a picture every month at about the time the full moon. The SAL lasts until December and, hopefully by then you should end up with some 'art'. What a fun idea! So I went in search of a suitable jar that would also be a bit of fun.

Here it is:

What do you think?

With all the reflections this flask is already quite 'arty'. It is a two litre flask, the type used by mad scientists in chemistry experiments. As I am a science teacher I asked the lab techs at school if they had any glassware that they wanted to get rid of and this is what they came up with. I then had to explain why I wanted it, mmm....

If anyone wants to find out more about The Totally Useless SAL click here.