Dish & Disclosure

So, yes, I'm working on Fremme's Blue Lady. The Pistols. I got the urge, suddenly, and every stitcher knows that you can't fight the urge. Sometimes it's a fake urge, though. In case of a fake urge, I think I need to work on the Blue Lady, but as soon as I thread my needle I realise the time isn't right after all. This time, the time was definitely right. Heidi was wondering how far along I am, so I took a pic of me showing the Blue Lady. I'm an average sized female, by the way (apart from the calves, obviously), so you may get some idea of her size.

As you can see, I've slowly started making my way down. This serves two purposes: (a) it allows me to check if I won't run out of fabric once I get to the bottom - no matter how many times I checked, re-checked, counted and re-counted before I started, I'm never completely comfortable until I know exactly where a piece ends; and (b) if you feast your eyes on the total picture of the blue babe in my sidebar, you will see that she is standing on a carpet of flowers, featuring about seven million of these exact same squares:

Working all of this right at the very end, all in one go, will most probably finally wipe that inane smile off my face that I always carry when I work on the Blue Lady.

Shall I tell you a little secret? It's a very embarrassing secret, so I'm not sure that I should tell you, but I'm going to anyway. I'm never going to finish the Blue Lady. Never ever. Because yesterday evening I had this premonition that once I put the final stitch into her, I'll be finished too. This is not a joke, I swear. And just to be on the safe side (my premonitions are eerily accurate most of the time), I just won't finish her. Maybe I'll purposely NOT stitch one of the flowery squares, just so that she will never be really finished.
As I suspected, there weren't that many takers for Spring, Birds and Branches by Fremme, but enough to warrant an official drawing by my adorable little man. And since you were all so enthused about my Polish pottery, I took the opportunity to sneak a piece into the picture :o)

The Drawing...


The opening...
Congratulations, Giovanna! Be a dear and send your snail mail address to amcdevries AT gmail DOT com, and I'll send the birdies on their way to Italy.

Well, that's it from me for today. I hope you're enjoying a wonderful week. It's rather springlike here, and since it's a halfday for Pelle today, I think a long ramble through the woods is in order :o)

Yours bluely, but in a good way,
Annemarie.

Mummy time

Thank you all for your encouraging and sweet comments on my last. My post turned out a lot grumpier than I had planned, so here's a little something about nothing, to cheer you up a bit. Some of you have asked how I handle the mother of all BAPs, the Blue Lady? Well, here's how:

*Colourful, much?*

And my current favourite beverage to go with it. Fresh mint tea.

*Yum*

I sincerely hope your weekend will be as relaxing as mine.

Yours cocooningly,
Annemarie.

Old Birds

Okay, that was a longer absence than I had hoped, but here I am with another finish. I know, I shock myself too. This is one of my all time favourites, which is odd, because when I got the kit I didn’t think I would do ten stitches on it, seeing as it’s all grays and greens and I don’t like stitching with grays and greens. Also, I think the project just screams eighties at high volume, but I don’t care. I love it, and here it is:

A project I like to call The Birds by Edith Hansen for Fremme, stitched with Danish Flower Thread on white linen. Excusez the crappiness of the picture, but the birds are already at the framer’s, so I can’t do better than this at the moment. Believe me when I say it’s beautiful.
If anyone should be interested in the chart, leave a comment, and I’ll send it to you. The chart looks used, but that’s because it actually was used. It’s still in good shape and above all, legible. If there’s more than one taker, I’ll do a draw.

Apart from finishing up The Birds, I’ve been knitting away on my knee sock - and with my size legs, it takes a good while to finish one - and crocheting away on my lovely, delicious, gorgeous, warm and snugly blanket. I’m adding squares as I go along, because if I would have to do all of that at the end, there would not be a blanket. Just a whooole lot of squares. My heartfelt thanks to Glenna the Great, by the way, for solving the conundrum of the squares. 1680 possible colour combinations... Who would have thought? Not me. I got as far as 480, and I thought that was a LOT. You’re a marvel, woman, as well as a heroine AND an inspirational stitcher :o)

I’m also making a weighted vest (or at least, trying to) for Pelle. He’s not been doing so well lately. He misses his Opa dreadfully, and he’s in a new group at his medical daycare centre - a group with ten or eleven children who are even wilder than he is. As some of you may know, Pelle is what everybody so politically correctly calls a 'special child' (as opposed to all the other children in the world, who are not special at all, I suppose. Honest to God, I don't know why I can't just say he's retarded, because that's what he is, and I don't love him any less for it. Nor would it make me feel worse if someone were to say to my face he's retarded, whereas I get really uncomfortable when people call him 'special'). Sorry, I'll get off my soap box now. Anyway, they are testing him for autism, and while I know he’s not a raging autist, so to speak, he certainly has his Rain Man-like qualities (doing sizeable jigsaw puzzles wrong side up and what have you). Anyway, I’ve heard that a weighted vest might help him to focus more on himself and less on his surroundings and to help him calm down a bit. Let’s hope it has some positive effects on him. Meanwhile, I, for my part, have a bit of a hard time coping with it all, too, so I guess that’s why I’m branching out with my crafting activities - just to keep my mind off of things. It’s either that or hit the sauce, and although the second option really appeals to me, I understand it’s generally frowned upon to go that road. Anyway, if you wonder why I’m quiet, or if you don’t like my foray into foreign crafting territory, at least you know what the cause for all this is :o)

Don't forget to tell me if you would like a chance to win the Fremme chart!

Yours wanderingly,
Annemarie.

Blonde and Blonder

Well, hello honeybuns! A new year, a new blog post, as promised.

Truth is, I had to make an appearance in Blogland, because I’ve joined a new stitch-along and the group leader wants us to update at least one a month. No, I'm not a member of the Completely-Insane-15-Starts-In-January-And-Hopefully-15-Finishes-By-December-For-The-Enjoyment-Of-The-Dangerously-Optimistic-Or-Very-Bored-Stitcher like all the rest of you. Doing something like that would absolutely ruin my joy of stitching. Instead, I’ve joined the Totally Useless SAL, which basically means you have to collect all of your orts in a glass jar as you go along and post a picture of said jar every full moon. Of all the SALs in the world, I think (I think) that this one is suffciently useless for me to be able to keep up with the requirements. So I started collecting my orts the day I signed up (roughly one month ago), and here is the first pic:

My designated TUSAL jar at present contains a whole bunch of acorns (remnants of a Fall display that I can’t bear to get rid of), so I stored the orts in an apple sauce jar for now. In this jar, ladies and perhapsly gentlemen, you see the victims of my battle with a new 2011 start and finish:

Believe me, I’m as surprised at this as you are. A start? A stitchy start? And a finish? Of the same start? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

It’s Emma’s Work Pinkeep Drum by Stacy Nash and it’s delish. Stitched on 36 or 40 count unbleached linen (a significantly higher countage than the 28 count called for in the pattern, in any case) and stitched with DMC 830 and 918 and filled with birch chips.

Stitching it was a doddle. Finishing it would have been a doddle if I weren’t so incredibly, incurably blonde. Sewing in circles... very difficult for me.

As promised a couple of months ago, I’ve also started a Scarlet Letter and this is the one I went for in the end:

Mary Hart. *Love*

***

What about the socks? I hear you ask. Well, my second knee sock is about halfway finished, and I’m still really enjoying it, but something besides stitching and knitting has had me pre-occupied for a couple of days. Only a few weeks ago, while I was busy knitting my knee sock, I remember thinking to myself, ‘With all of these crafts I'm already enjoying and all of that time they're taking up, isn’t it fortunate that I will never, ever get the urge to crochet, because I may be forty, but I’m no granny, and crocheting is something grannies do, like my own granny used to do, and she didn’t do it well, and... she wasn’t a very nice granny anyway and... granny... granny... granny square... granny square... granny square blanket...hmmm, that would be nice, actually. Yes. A granny square blanket on my bed would be just the thing for me, wouldn’t it? Nice and warm and snugly, and apparently, crocheting is much faster than knitting. I could have a granny square blanket in two weeks’ time! Why don’t I teach myself how to crochet?!!!’

Okay, maybe the two weeks was a bit optimistic, but look what I’ve accomplished in 5 days!

And here comes the ‘blonde and blonder’ part of today’s post. I hope there are readers among you who are not as dramatically mathematically challenged as I am, because it’s driving me up the wall and I need an answer, so please, please, if you are in any way gifted in the arithmetic/statistics department, HELP ME:

I’m using 8 colours for this blanket. Each square has four rounds, so that’s four colours per square. First question: how many different squares will I be able to make? You see, I really want every single square to be different, except for two - like they used to do in the old days, with regular patchwork quilts? This leads me to my second question: how on earth do I keep track of the colour combos I’ve already used? Is there an Excel sheet or some other computer program that could help me make a list? Please don’t ask me why I just can’t crochet away and who cares if I make a couple of doubles - or trebles, for that matter. What can I say? I’m a dork. And a blonde one at that.

Yours totally uselessly stitching and knitting and chrocheting alongly,

Annemarie.