To Everything A Season

This week brought back memories of college in Washington, D.C.. I was not doing too much partying and not enough studying. Rather whenever I stepped out of an air-conditioned room it felt like I was walking through hot soup. Just nasty yucky heat. Thankfully, on the way home from walking my daughter to school in the mornings I passed three (sometimes four) lawn sprinklers. I had no shame in waiting for the sprinkler to make its turn around so I could feel that nice, cool mist for a second or two.

Too hot to keep up with all of my housework, I was able to finish my second stitching project. Another Learn-a-Craft kit from Dimensions (72665 Seasons of Color) this one was at least made for adults. Let's hear it for progress!

I am really getting the hang of this, my main problem being getting distracted and not counting correctly. A couple of times on this project I was off a couple of spaces but each time I was either able to do good damage control or just leave it be because you would never be able to tell.

The first major issue I had with this project was running out of one of the thread colors (the kit had provided all the floss needed, in theory but not in practice). Labeled pink on the chart, it was more of a rose color and I ran about 20 stitches short. With no needlepoint stores in my general vicinity I was stuck with the generic variety packs of embroidery floss offered at the craft store. I chose the color that seemed the closest and filled in the missing stitches. Meh. Here you can see the result:

See where the thread is coming out there? That's where I began to pull it out when I decided that it was nowhere near a close enough match. It is harder to tell in the picture but it was much more of a true cotton-candy pink then the rose pink you can see above that line of magenta. I could have just called Dimensions customer service like they advised in the instructions. They probably would have just sent me a couple lengths of the correct floss. That would have been too easy though. I was putting together an order from 123stitch.com so I looked through the DMC colors and found the floss I thought might work. It ended up being a little too dark but I decided at that point to accept and move on. After all, a couple little mistakes should be expected on only my second try at this.

So basically the pattern consisted of four flowers or leaves, with each representing a season. A few words of back stitches "To Everything A Season" and one (woot!) French knot to dot the I. It was never really a piece that excited me, just not my taste. I am pretty proud of it nonetheless.

When I completed all the stitching I decided to actually "finish" this project. Instead of simply recentering the piece in the hoop and trimming the excess fabric to make a little wall hanging I decided to attach it to a canvas bag I bought for 99 cents at the aforementioned craft store. After a couple of aborted attempts using a variety of stitches, I kind of had a tantrum and quickly back stitched a circle "framing" the piece. Of course, it looked a million times better than all the other tries. A couple tiny segments kind of frayed a little so I threw in a couple random cross stitches to tie them down. Looks kinda cute.

For now, I am going to use this as my project bag. I am building up supplies and stuff faster than I can organize it. At least with this I put the supplies I actually need at the moment in the bag and keep myself a little more sane. I have already started my third project, just a little end of the year gift for my daughter's teacher. Stay tuned...