Wascally Wabbit

 Meet Rascal, the friendly neighborhood bunny rabbit that visits in the morning. We must be on the same schedule, because I see him as I'm leaving for work a few times a week. I personally think he likes eating all the dandelions in my yard and I'm more than happy to let him have them.

Well, I've been trying to get into the Ragnarok groove but I seem to be lacking motivation. I did eventually digitize the Baline Cross and and working on a new surcoat for Jack.

Also working on Waiting by Tilton Crafts here and there. I've ALMOST finished a page.

I suppose I should go clean something, since we have friends coming over tomorrow to stay overnight. Hope you all have a nice weekend.

Where Did the Month Go?

Yes it really has been a month since I've posted o_O

So what's new?

Well, I spent the first week of May in Milwaukee for work training. I had big plans to stitch or crochet my heart out in the evenings. Sadly, the lighting in the hotel room was subpar and it was more trouble that it was worth. I did acquire a couple skeins of fluffy yarn while there, which turned out to be very difficult to crochet because of the twists in the yarn. The solution was a much larger hook and a very simple pattern. Double crochet all the way, with a color change every five rows to keep it interesting.

I've also finished a scarf I started in January, started a matching hat, worked a bit on the C2C rainbow blanket, and completely ignored my Sophie's Universe. I'll post more photos of those projects before too long.

The following couple of weeks after my training were filled with chores catch-up from being gone for a week, Mother's day festivities, gobs and gobs of laundry, a round of spring colds, attempts to get moving on prepping for Ragnarok, and planning and actually cooking a few meals. I even attempted to make a paleo homemade pasta a couple nights ago. It was an abject failure - the dough just didn't want to stick together properly.

I've discovered an Aldi's a couple miles from work and along with it, the joys of purchasing excellent produce at half the cost of my regular store. I even branched out and picked up some dairy, which I'm a bit skeptical about as we've had bad luck with off-brand cheese and sour cream.

In between all that I did manage to work on a couple cross stitch projects.

Waiting by Tilton Crafts has seen a fair amount of love recently.

Before

Current

As has my tiger, who now has the beginning of a nose.

Before

Current

 

So that's about it for now. In addition to Ragnarok, Jack has a work trip coming up to Mackinac Island and I took a couple days off to accompany him. Its entirely possible that I will be getting quite a lot of crafting done in the car trip there and back, an approximately five hour drive. I've never had the pleasure of staying on the island before, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Let me know what you've been up to in the last month - share a link to your blog/instagram page if you'd like!

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!