Lovely, Lynn! Great colours and very pretty contrasting with your stitching. I haven't been around too much lately, been doing a bit of stitching myself, just a few little things, enough to give my hands some real pain, and I've been out in the yard, picking up garbage and trying to urge the spring on, (Canada. Seems down here on the east coast beside the ocean, we're a bit later starting spring than we were up in the north, on our western side.🤔). So I had started lots of seeds indoors and most took off really well, but it was maybe too early to put them out. I don't know. I turned 69 on Tuesday this week. A time to contemplate. Should have started doing that earlier, I guess. Hope you and your family are doing well. Your fingers must ache, too. ❤❤
Happy birthday Karen. 🎉Spring is slow to start where you are and we are slowly inching our way to winter. It is cooler in the night and early mornings but still quite warm during the day. No humidity though so I am happy about that. What are you growing? My husband is our gardener. I have a killing thumb not a green one. I always wanted to do gardening but I just can’t keep things alive so I leave it to him. I am so happy to hear you have been stitching. What are you working on? Yep I do get sore hands from time to time especially if the material is hard to stitch on. The bag I just slow stitched for Roxy’s Journal of Stitchery was really tough on them. My heirloom quilt panels are pretty good though. Happy spring. 😊
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Well, Lynn, since you asked, this spring I have started a baby quilt for my daughter's friend. She found a bunch of those embroidered outlines of various animals and I patched them together with blue and yellow borders. This is all hand stitching. I was going to back it with a pattern that had little mice carrying hearts, but she told me her friend was deathly terrified of mice, so that was nixed. I used the mice backing to make burp cloths for my nephew 's baby, due in June. Since I expect that might see a lot of laundering, I used my machine, but it too, balked at the heaviness of stitching through all the layers. Nothing fancy on that. I did a little t-shirt in order to perhaps make a pattern, it is in pink, though no one is saying whether pink might be appropriate. It has the teeniest stitches ever! Funny how little baby stuff is so cute. The last thing I was working on was a pic-to-gram, so to speak, of me with my 2 sisters. It captures a bit of our personalities and is just labeled '3 Grammies'. I gave that to my sister, who is my twin, and since I moved out here to the east, has announced that she and her husband will be selling up, (I'm not taking that personally, any more,) and moving out west to Ontario, where all their adult children/families live. She's currently in the beautiful seaside resort town of St Andrew's, and their huge house often houses the total brood without skipping a beat. In my garden, I put some peppers and tomatoes, annuals, and with a little luck some of the perennials will come up too. Since we only rent here, I had to keep reminding myself not to go too crazy. Mostly, I plant for the birds. When we moved here, we had a couple huge willows and a birch. We had all kinds of song birds. After hurricane Fiona scared everyone, they cut down the trees, and last year we hardly had any birds. My favourite are Robin, red-winged black birds, we also sweet gold finches, sparrows, wrens and blue jayes. I hear chickadees and nuthatches, but I seldom catch sight of them. Taking a day to rest my very weary bones. And would love a cookie.
Hi Karen , I hope you had a good rest and a cookie 😊 that’s a lot of sewing. I know from experience the amount of effort that goes into hand stitching a quilt. Babies cloths are very cute. Well done! I haven’t tried sewing t-shirts before or making up patterns. I am not much of a machine sewer, I did some sewing for little ones when mine were little and then again for my grand daughters many years later. I have made some dresses and skirts for myself. My sewing machine and all of my WIP’s are packed away, awaiting our house build, so any machine sewing is not possible at the moment. I haven’t heard of a pic-to-gram before, will have to look that up. Canada is a large land mass too much like Australia is. Does that mean you won’t see each other regularly with your sister moving away? Both my family and my husbands are spread out along the east coast of Australia. So we don’t get to see everyone very often. We have a family reunion coning up in June for my husband’s side. We are all looking forward to it. We moved away from our extended family to be near our kids. Except my middle son who decided he wanted to stay in that area. I miss him and his family very much. Your garden sounds lovely. Good luck with your vegetable and flowers. Such a shame about cutting the trees down. I understand though if they were in danger of causing property damage. Still a shame you haven’t had many birds around. We have been so lucky for the past 8 years, we have been surrounded by trees. Especially so on my son’s property. We have lots of birds but my favourites are the kookaburras and magpies. I quite like our resident bush turkeys as well. Have a lovely day Karen Lynn
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Yes, I don't expect I'll see much of her once she's moved. But since coming east 2 years ago, I've only seen her once. So hardly seems she should give up the chance to be near her family for that. My son called for Mothers Day, yesterday, and tells me he'll be going to Argentina this summer for mountain climbing. They live just east of the Rockies. So, he's getting his wife in shape to go with him. She's already in real good shape, but will probably need training for the oxygen situation. Waiting for that little gold finch to come back. I really scared off. (🐥Will I do?)
I really hate those commercials that say how good they are at holding things in, and they're all modelled by skinny ladies!!! But WOW I've been out in the garden all day and was just making a racket scraping my shoes off, when a gold finch who picked that exact moment to rest at my feeder, was scared off. By me. Grrr. But what a sight.
Yep they sure are, very annoying commercials. Bad luck about the gold finch. Hopefully it will be back. Have a great rest of your day Karen. I’m off to the gym. I’d rather be still in bed nice and warm! Lynn
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 I was trying to remember what else I had been doing, and here at 4 AM, I got it. I had gone back to the vol.1 of the Roxy Stitchery videos, and was going through them as a refresher course. (Something of the old nurse in me, that you make a yearly effort to professionally review stuff.)(Its kind of like cutting a page from the original template in order that you stay true to your plan.) So in order to grow my body of techniques, I have returned to the Vol.1. Anyway, Rachel was doing a form of book that was a continuous base piece, folded accordion style, and I decided to put many of my "test" pieces into a book, finish them up and generally improve my stitching techniques. I had about 12 pages or so to use. It's not finished by any means, but I have sorted them out, sized each one to fit the pages, got my base 1 down and my base 2 down. That was a lot of stitching, but for now, all those pieces are sewn in and the pins removed. I haven't decided if I'll put some wadding between the pages, (which would be on the back sides, of course.) I have a problem with putting my layer 2 on, so that my top layers show up. So that is base 1 is calico, base 2 is collages, and top layers, sometimes just lost-ish. I will use a couple of found pieces for a cover, I think. My favourite threads are single stranded sewing thread, and I have a good collection I can use for colouring in. Your works are very vibrant. And thoroughly coloured in. When you have them all done it will be an amazing piece. The gold finch came back! I was just heading down to bed last evening and looked out the window, and there were 6 or 7 male and female goldfinches fluttering around the feeder. So beautiful.
Regarding the pic-to-gram, that was just the words I used to say I made a picture, in stores of us. It was simply 3 grammies, which looked a bit like my sisters and me. The oldest, me kinda disheveled and frumpy, my twin, Sharon, tall and thin and styling, and our baby sister, Gail, the very practical, minister's wife, time-keeper, gracious servant. We had some characteristics typical to our personalities and underneath ,"3 Grammies". In it, Sharon is waving goodbye. I started it after Gail came for a visit with her grandson and I was here with my grandson and we went to the ocean, there was a lot of laughter as my gs couldn't figure out why Gail kept saying 'grammie this and grammie that'. After all, I am the only Grammie he has ever known. So it was funny to have 2 grammies when til then, he had 1. Then, shortly after that Sharon decided to move west to Ontario, and so I put her in the stitching as waving goodbye. So see, there was a little story going on in the stitchery, that was captured in that snapshot of time. 😄 Lot of words.
My goodness Karen you have been busy stitching. No wonder you had sore hands. All of your projects sound lovely. I love the idea of your pic-to-gram. What a great keepsake. It also sounds like you had a lovely day by the ocean. Grandkids are such a blessing. I still remember when our second granddaughter realised my name wasn’t Nana. It was so funny she was not having any of it for quite a while. They know their world from their experiences and it’s such a wonder for them when they realise that it could be different. So happy the gold finches came back. It’s the simple pleasures isn’t it, that can bring such joy. I’ve got a cockatoo about somewhere this morning. Lots of screeching going on. It only sounds like one thank goodness. They are extremely noisy when there is a bunch of them. Well I’m off to start work. Have a lovely day Karen.
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Thank you Lynn. Here I am awake in the middle of the night again. Just lately that's been happening again. I had thought that with being up and out might help me sleep better. Do you get forget-me-nots where you live? They are a very sweet little flower that here, is usually out in the mid to late spring. If I were stitching it, I would probably use 4 blue French knots and a teeny speck of yellow in the middle. It's not a sub tropical flower, but would be common in embroidery. Often it comes in huge swaths of ground cover. How is your workout going. I think you said your gym was very comfortable for ladies of a certain age and skill level. IF I were to work out, that is the kind of gym I would like. I used to be a bit of a exer-holic. Absolutely manic. When I was a nurse, it just stopped working, maybe the shift work or something...anyway I don't work out at all now, and I have become quite stagnant, like a pond...very, very much like a pond. Haha. I hope you had a good day at work today. Enjoy. Karen
Its so pretty..i love roses and pink and red, green.❤
Thank you. I am really happy how it turned out 😊
Lovely, Lynn! Great colours and very pretty contrasting with your stitching.
I haven't been around too much lately, been doing a bit of stitching myself, just a few little things, enough to give my hands some real pain, and I've been out in the yard, picking up garbage and trying to urge the spring on, (Canada. Seems down here on the east coast beside the ocean, we're a bit later starting spring than we were up in the north, on our western side.🤔). So I had started lots of seeds indoors and most took off really well, but it was maybe too early to put them out. I don't know.
I turned 69 on Tuesday this week. A time to contemplate. Should have started doing that earlier, I guess.
Hope you and your family are doing well. Your fingers must ache, too. ❤❤
Happy birthday Karen. 🎉Spring is slow to start where you are and we are slowly inching our way to winter. It is cooler in the night and early mornings but still quite warm during the day. No humidity though so I am happy about that.
What are you growing? My husband is our gardener. I have a killing thumb not a green one. I always wanted to do gardening but I just can’t keep things alive so I leave it to him.
I am so happy to hear you have been stitching. What are you working on? Yep I do get sore hands from time to time especially if the material is hard to stitch on. The bag I just slow stitched for Roxy’s Journal of Stitchery was really tough on them. My heirloom quilt panels are pretty good though.
Happy spring. 😊
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Well, Lynn, since you asked, this spring I have started a baby quilt for my daughter's friend. She found a bunch of those embroidered outlines of various animals and I patched them together with blue and yellow borders. This is all hand stitching. I was going to back it with a pattern that had little mice carrying hearts, but she told me her friend was deathly terrified of mice, so that was nixed.
I used the mice backing to make burp cloths for my nephew 's baby, due in June. Since I expect that might see a lot of laundering, I used my machine, but it too, balked at the heaviness of stitching through all the layers. Nothing fancy on that. I did a little t-shirt in order to perhaps make a pattern, it is in pink, though no one is saying whether pink might be appropriate. It has the teeniest stitches ever! Funny how little baby stuff is so cute. The last thing I was working on was a pic-to-gram, so to speak, of me with my 2 sisters. It captures a bit of our personalities and is just labeled '3 Grammies'. I gave that to my sister, who is my twin, and since I moved out here to the east, has announced that she and her husband will be selling up, (I'm not taking that personally, any more,) and moving out west to Ontario, where all their adult children/families live. She's currently in the beautiful seaside resort town of St Andrew's, and their huge house often houses the total brood without skipping a beat.
In my garden, I put some peppers and tomatoes, annuals, and with a little luck some of the perennials will come up too. Since we only rent here, I had to keep reminding myself not to go too crazy. Mostly, I plant for the birds. When we moved here, we had a couple huge willows and a birch. We had all kinds of song birds. After hurricane Fiona scared everyone, they cut down the trees, and last year we hardly had any birds. My favourite are Robin, red-winged black birds, we also sweet gold finches, sparrows, wrens and blue jayes. I hear chickadees and nuthatches, but I seldom catch sight of them.
Taking a day to rest my very weary bones. And would love a cookie.
Hi Karen , I hope you had a good rest and a cookie 😊 that’s a lot of sewing. I know from experience the amount of effort that goes into hand stitching a quilt. Babies cloths are very cute. Well done! I haven’t tried sewing t-shirts before or making up patterns. I am not much of a machine sewer, I did some sewing for little ones when mine were little and then again for my grand daughters many years later. I have made some dresses and skirts for myself. My sewing machine and all of my WIP’s are packed away, awaiting our house build, so any machine sewing is not possible at the moment. I haven’t heard of a pic-to-gram before, will have to look that up.
Canada is a large land mass too much like Australia is. Does that mean you won’t see each other regularly with your sister moving away? Both my family and my husbands are spread out along the east coast of Australia. So we don’t get to see everyone very often. We have a family reunion coning up in June for my husband’s side. We are all looking forward to it.
We moved away from our extended family to be near our kids. Except my middle son who decided he wanted to stay in that area. I miss him and his family very much.
Your garden sounds lovely. Good luck with your vegetable and flowers. Such a shame about cutting the trees down. I understand though if they were in danger of causing property damage. Still a shame you haven’t had many birds around. We have been so lucky for the past 8 years, we have been surrounded by trees. Especially so on my son’s property. We have lots of birds but my favourites are the kookaburras and magpies. I quite like our resident bush turkeys as well.
Have a lovely day Karen
Lynn
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Yes, I don't expect I'll see much of her once she's moved. But since coming east 2 years ago, I've only seen her once. So hardly seems she should give up the chance to be near her family for that.
My son called for Mothers Day, yesterday, and tells me he'll be going to Argentina this summer for mountain climbing. They live just east of the Rockies. So, he's getting his wife in shape to go with him. She's already in real good shape, but will probably need training for the oxygen situation.
Waiting for that little gold finch to come back. I really scared off. (🐥Will I do?)
I really hate those commercials that say how good they are at holding things in, and they're all modelled by skinny ladies!!!
But WOW I've been out in the garden all day and was just making a racket scraping my shoes off, when a gold finch who picked that exact moment to rest at my feeder, was scared off. By me. Grrr. But what a sight.
Yep they sure are, very annoying commercials. Bad luck about the gold finch. Hopefully it will be back. Have a great rest of your day Karen. I’m off to the gym. I’d rather be still in bed nice and warm! Lynn
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 I was trying to remember what else I had been doing, and here at 4 AM, I got it. I had gone back to the vol.1 of the Roxy Stitchery videos, and was going through them as a refresher course. (Something of the old nurse in me, that you make a yearly effort to professionally review stuff.)(Its kind of like cutting a page from the original template in order that you stay true to your plan.) So in order to grow my body of techniques, I have returned to the Vol.1. Anyway, Rachel was doing a form of book that was a continuous base piece, folded accordion style, and I decided to put many of my "test" pieces into a book, finish them up and generally improve my stitching techniques. I had about 12 pages or so to use. It's not finished by any means, but I have sorted them out, sized each one to fit the pages, got my base 1 down and my base 2 down. That was a lot of stitching, but for now, all those pieces are sewn in and the pins removed. I haven't decided if I'll put some wadding between the pages, (which would be on the back sides, of course.)
I have a problem with putting my layer 2 on, so that my top layers show up. So that is base 1 is calico, base 2 is collages, and top layers, sometimes just lost-ish. I will use a couple of found pieces for a cover, I think. My favourite threads are single stranded sewing thread, and I have a good collection I can use for colouring in. Your works are very vibrant. And thoroughly coloured in. When you have them all done it will be an amazing piece.
The gold finch came back! I was just heading down to bed last evening and looked out the window, and there were 6 or 7 male and female goldfinches fluttering around the feeder. So beautiful.
Regarding the pic-to-gram, that was just the words I used to say I made a picture, in stores of us. It was simply 3 grammies, which looked a bit like my sisters and me. The oldest, me kinda disheveled and frumpy, my twin, Sharon, tall and thin and styling, and our baby sister, Gail, the very practical, minister's wife, time-keeper, gracious servant. We had some characteristics typical to our personalities and underneath ,"3 Grammies". In it, Sharon is waving goodbye. I started it after Gail came for a visit with her grandson and I was here with my grandson and we went to the ocean, there was a lot of laughter as my gs couldn't figure out why Gail kept saying 'grammie this and grammie that'. After all, I am the only Grammie he has ever known. So it was funny to have 2 grammies when til then, he had 1. Then, shortly after that Sharon decided to move west to Ontario, and so I put her in the stitching as waving goodbye. So see, there was a little story going on in the stitchery, that was captured in that snapshot of time. 😄 Lot of words.
My goodness Karen you have been busy stitching. No wonder you had sore hands. All of your projects sound lovely. I love the idea of your pic-to-gram. What a great keepsake. It also sounds like you had a lovely day by the ocean.
Grandkids are such a blessing. I still remember when our second granddaughter realised my name wasn’t Nana. It was so funny she was not having any of it for quite a while. They know their world from their experiences and it’s such a wonder for them when they realise that it could be different.
So happy the gold finches came back. It’s the simple pleasures isn’t it, that can bring such joy.
I’ve got a cockatoo about somewhere this morning. Lots of screeching going on. It only sounds like one thank goodness. They are extremely noisy when there is a bunch of them.
Well I’m off to start work. Have a lovely day Karen.
@@belladorahandcrafts2484 Thank you Lynn. Here I am awake in the middle of the night again. Just lately that's been happening again. I had thought that with being up and out might help me sleep better.
Do you get forget-me-nots where you live? They are a very sweet little flower that here, is usually out in the mid to late spring. If I were stitching it, I would probably use 4 blue French knots and a teeny speck of yellow in the middle. It's not a sub tropical flower, but would be common in embroidery. Often it comes in huge swaths of ground cover.
How is your workout going. I think you said your gym was very comfortable for ladies of a certain age and skill level. IF I were to work out, that is the kind of gym I would like. I used to be a bit of a exer-holic. Absolutely manic. When I was a nurse, it just stopped working, maybe the shift work or something...anyway I don't work out at all now, and I have become quite stagnant, like a pond...very, very much like a pond. Haha.
I hope you had a good day at work today. Enjoy. Karen