Work leads to Stash

I had to go to Atlanta last week for work meetings. Honestly, you don't want to hear about them. I'll just say that on the whole, they were productive and move to what you really want to see and hear about....new stash!

I had to stop by my favorite needlepoint shop In Stitches to pick up a canvas I had ordered and the next in a series of small canvases they had for me. The canvas was the first to be found and brought out. I had ordered this after seeing one in the shop that is similar, only the bunny is pink and sitting. Blue is more my color and I can't wait to figure out how to stitch this one. I'll be saving it for a class sometime later this year.

Isn't it adorable?!?!?!? The gold is a bit sparkly, which is really cool. No idea how I'd finish it were I to ever get it stitched, but I'm sure I have plenty of time to figure it out.

While I was waiting for someone to find my tree canvas I got to looking at the table full of canvases from two, yes TWO trunk shows. I found two Raymond Crawford canvases I really liked. One is a small state canvas for Florida...

Very bright and has lots of potential for sparkly goodness.

I don't have any Thanksgiving canvases, so I decided on Give Thanks and found threads that I liked to be able to start it at some point soon.

I'm going to do some thinking and digging in some stitch books before I do anything. Try to figure out what fun stitches I should use.

Finally I found a cute insert for one of the luggage tags so I went ahead and got that as well.

I'll stitch my initial in the center and then it can be put in the tag that I bought but forgot to take a photo of.

The rest of my stash enhancement consisted of buying some stretcher bars that I needed. And I might have had them order me another canvas that will hopefully be there when I go back to Atlanta next month. All in all a fruitful and fun trip after  a week of work. I mean, I earned it right??

A Weekend Retreat

I went a long way for this one, all of 9 miles from my house to Camp Blanding. Camp Blanding is the FL National Guard training facility, both for Army National Guard and Air Force National Guard. They also do a lot of other types of training for law enforcement. It's located on Kingsley Lake, where as a teen I spent many a summer day at either Stricklands or Kingsley both public access to the lake. It's a beautiful area and the facilities were excellent. You can read more over at DF Jackie's blog where she has some great shots of the lake and the room and a whole lot more about the weekend than I should write at this late date.

I will show you some pretty pictures though to distract you from the fact that I took FOREVER to write this post.

This is what my Linen book looked like before it was all put together and aged. I did have to finish stitching it when I arrived on Friday so I spent most of the day doing that...as well as eating and talking to people, some of whom I hadn't seen in a few years. I'm not normally a "primitives" person, but I love how this piece has turned out.

Next is the finished product...

Front, back and the inside. The pattern called for an inside pocket, but I had the pretty mother of pearl hearts you see here and decided I'd rather sew them into the inside and use it as a project book.


Jackie also wanted to learn some finishing techniques for ornaments. Now, I've got plenty of items that need to be finished, and my plenty I mean too many, so I thought this would be a good idea, a way to get caught up on my finishing. So I got all my finishing together, put it all in separate bags with everything I'd need, plus I packed a box full of some of my ribbons just in case we might need them. And here's what I accomplished.

I finished my needlepoint snow bunny ornament. That is all. Now mind you, I went a little overboard on the finishing and totally "mac daddy'd it out", but still. And to top it all off I ended up stitching the cording on after I got home. Still I love it! I loved stitching this piece and I love how the finishing turned out.

The only other thing I worked on a lot while I was gone was mom & dad's anniversary piece. I'll leave you with a picture of how it looked when we left Sunday afternoon. It is further along now and getting even closer to being done. Based on a number of things mom has said I'm not going to have a party for them after all. She would rather go on a cruise, so we'll do that once she's feeling all better from the mono. I'll just finish this and then give it to them when it's framed and explain why it's late.