A Month's Worth of Stitching in One Post

Yes, its been a bit quiet here on the blog front, mostly because I haven't really had the time to update things. However, I find myself with 30 minutes before bedtime and a handful of projects that are coming along. 

First up, another block on the Life is Beautiful Quilt, finished sometime in March.

Then I went back to my tiger for a week or so.

Before

Current

Then I pulled out Fall Fairy, which I discovered I hadn't worked on in at least a year. Might be closer to two years actually. Holy Moly.

Before

Current

And this weekend, in between helping out at our Dagorhir event, I was able to squeeze in a fair amount of work on Waiting by Tilton Crafts (retired). I have more than half a page done now!

Before

Current

Lastly, I've spent several fruitless hours attempting to figure out how to use the auto-split feature on my embroidery software to split and embroider large patterns. The result was less than exciting. The problem is alignment. You can see a gap in the center left, where the basting stitching is.

I finally gave up hoping to find tutorials for my specific software and started watching Craftsy class on splitting and aligning designs. I'm happy to say that its been most useful so far. I was able to align a circle after the first lesson and now I'm working on lessons 2 and 3 to properly split and save a design. My software is different than the teacher's so its probably going to take some extra finagling. Overall though, I'm pleased with how things are going.

The RAK's are Flying

Over the Easter weekend, the staff at Heaven and Earth Designs offered a sale on patterns and kits. I watched my Facebook feed fill up with a surprising number of RAK posts as the weekend went on.

Even more surprising was the emails I received notifying me that I had been RAK'd!

Heroes and Heroines by Aimee Stewart

Mini Bravery by Cheri Gerhardt

Mini Wisdom by Cheri Gerhardt

I decided to get in on the fun and used a random number generator to choose a couple people off the RAK list and sent them charts from their wishlist. It's quite enjoyable to see people so excited over a surprise and it really improved the beginning of my week.

On the crafty side of things, I've been working on a few long term projects and also attempting to come to grips with splitting patterns for the embroidery machine, a tedious and frustrating process that has yet to yield a successful stitch. I suppose like anything else, it takes practice. Urban threads has a few already split designs and I may try stitching out one of those to see how the alignment process works. I do have a quilt finish and an embroidered block finish to share as soon as I get a chance to take photos.

My Last Three Weeks In Crafty Projects

Have a lovely weekend!