New Beads!

In keeping with the 'usual' (being late for everything in my hobbies), they aren't particularly in season. I just go with the flow and make what I like, seasons be damned. :)

Personally, I'm looking at a ton of snow out there so I'm game for some snowman. (I have a snow kitty-man on my deck right now. An inspired bit of snow fun by the hubby from the other day. lol)

The snowman are sold separately from the spotted spacers so you can make your own sets up as needed.

A Valentine's set, of sorts. I have a Christmas colored set like this that people seem to like a lot so I did a similar one in pinks. Because if there is one thing I know it's how much people love pink. Pink, pink, and more pink! (It *is* a fun color. Always happy!)

A couple other things too but I won't bore people. Well, except for this:

I lied a tiny bit when I said last month that I had packed up all my 'extra' beads and was starting over again for the new year with empty bead bowls. I meant to say all the extra beads that weren't the spacers and small beads that I like to hoard make in great quantities. Oh, THOSE. *ahem*

I've had to graduate from my bead bowl to this 'bead tin'. A whole tin! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! I haven't weighed it but it wouldn't shock me if it were around 2lbs.  It's a glorious, happy, massive pile of little beads that are MINE, MINE, MINE.

What can I say? I like spacers. They are a good way to use up all the glass rod shorts on my work table. A good portion of them go out in my shipped packages as little freebies but I make them upwards of six at a time on one mandrel (!!) so I always make more than I actually use. I should probably start scouting out a bigger container now. It's just never enough. Heh. :)

Beads, beads, beads.

 I finished my New Year's cleaning - whew! Feels nice to have a clean start to the year. Purged of all things clutterly and so last year. 

 As part of that I've cleaned out all my 'bead bowls' from last year, strung them up by theme, and put them on Etsy for a steal.

Now I get to start over again from scratch and create new 'piles'. (And there are ALWAYS new piles. It's crazy how fast they start to stack up again!)

New Hobby.

But not for me! For the hubby. :)

Last week we made the (2hr) trip up to Northhampton, Masschusetts to the much-loved and always-awesome WEBS yarn store so he could take a 2 day class in......

WEAVING. Specifically weaving on a Rigid Heddle loom. 

He's always wanted to try it out and the basic class they offer is a good way to figure out if you like it or not. They provide the loom and most materials to take the class and a Rigid Heddle isn't too expensive an investment, as far as looms go, if you decide you want to continue on with it. (Very easy to store as well because it folds in half!)

Northampton is a college-y New England town and we were blessed with the most glorious fall weather while we were up there so I got to spend a lot of time walking around town, enjoying the fall weather and colors while he is in class. The Yarn Harlot was teaching classes all day there at the same time so I even got to bump into her - in the doorway of the restroom at WEBS. Because OF COURSE that is where I would literally bump into her. No nice conversation over yarn for me, just HEY LOOK........bathroom?

I didn't spend too much time in WEBS myself  but the time I did spend there was pretty neat - as far as customer watching. I never get tired of seeing what projects/yarn people are hunting for. :) They had 3-4 registers going, almost the entire time I was there, which is pretty nuts for a YARN STORE, you know? SUCH a busy place! I love it. The Freia yarn above is the only yarn I bought while I was there so I WAS REALLY GOOD, too, as far as that goes!! :)

Anyhoo. I hope he sticks with it...........I have dreams of woven cotton dishcloths and plaid scarves..and lots of stuff for ME *fingers crossed* Wait. No, no, no, I mean I hope he's happy and has fun with it. That's what I meant. *ahem*

This brown scarf is the first thing he worked on at home, made out of, I have to say, TRULY TERRIBLE yarn. Yarn I should have thrown out long ago but the colors are pretty so I never got around to it. (I did a pair of socks in another colorway in this stuff and had to THROW THEM OUT after *one* wearing because the yarn was THAT felty and awful to wear.) It looks great but I'm still throwing major shade and side eye at it because I just know that sucker is going to felt if worn out in wet or snowy weather. :(

Oh well. If it felts, it felts. He needs to do a bunch of basic scarves to work on his tension and stuff anyway. I'm always happy to share my yarn stash, too. Maybe not ALL of my yarn because I have a few favs that are too near-and-dear - but MOST of my yarn is up for grabs at any rate. It is an interesting thing, weaving. I could see me doing it but you can only have so many hobbies so I'll leave this one all to him. :)

I've been busy busy with bead orders lately but I've been TRYING to squeeze out a little time here and there to do a few new things as well. To that end, I've uploaded some new stuff over the last few days:

Fingers are totally frozen now putting this post together. Whew. Need to go do dishes or something to warm them up!! :) :)

Little bit of everything.

I've had a couple people ask if I'm still making beads, because I haven't posted any really on the blog in a while. The answer: DEFINITELY YES. I've been working on a ton of them behind the scenes. (Pictured above is the pile of beads made over the weekend that I had to string and ship out yesterday. Have another pile to make over the next few days too.) Having said that though, I'm not super happy about making them anymore so I don't really feel like blogging about it. My left hand hurts when I make beads, my left shoulder is starting to hurt now........things are breaking down and I'm taking more and more Advil as time goes on to get through a torching session. A repetitive hand motion hour after hour, day after day, for over a decade? It's inevitable, I guess, that your body won't put up with that at some point. (And NOTHING hurts the tendons/joints in my hand like the bead work does.) I'm in limbo at the moment over it What to do, right? I could cut the work back but with the amount of taxes I pay as a self-employed person - income, sales tax, business property taxes, also, accountant to handle taxes, etc. - at some point cutting back is just flat out stupid and a waste of time. I still LIKE the beads so there is that. Heh.

Anyhoo. Moving on. 

I finished my big piece for Halloween! :)

How great is this pumpkin? I should have posted a pic of him in my Cathey post too! I love the way the colors work together, it has great depth. 

And how about this crazy, toothy grin? The reason he is so crazy looking is..........

TOO MANY TREATS. 

I mean - look at all those candy corns in there! He's not crazy - he's high on sugar!

So happy to have this done. It's a Bird of a Feather design that I purchased in 2003, along with the linen that it called for (which isn't made anymore, but there are good substitutes). Any design I have put away WITH the linen it needs always make me sad when it sits and sits and sits, waiting to be finished. (I actually wrote shits and shits at first by accident..........WHAT COULD THAT MEAN? Whoops.) It's a crazy design and probably (definitely) not for everyone but I like the kookiness of it. I did the belly part first to get the worst part of the design over with and the rest of it was pretty simple from then on. 

How would you tackle that belly? I'm always interested in how people approach certain things. I did all the periwinkle FIRST, leaving 'holes' for the other things. So I had to count very very very carefully to make sure the 'holes' were all situated correctly, but it made for easy-peasy candy corn stitching after the fact because then I could just hop from one candy to another, anchoring the thread(s) to the already done periwinkle as I went.

I have to say though, the pattern was pure MISERY to work off of. It was teeny TINY. I had to scan and enlarge it, color a lot of it in with colored pencils and it was still hard to see. (THIS is the piece that had me scrambling for new eyeglasses!) Did not relish that part of it.

Next up is the Lizzie Kate Mystery Christmas sampler (and maybe some ornies!). I really like doing the Halloween one last year so I signed up for this one too. I like the colors as is but some of them seem a little too light as I'm doing the actual pattern. I think I"m going to have to go back and switch out the Parchment, at the very least. My snowflakes with it are totally disappearing into nothingness. :( 

I kinda miss that there are no beads or charms with it too. I've got a TON of Mill Hill beads though so that will be easy enough to add if I want at the end.

Annnnnndddd......I guess that's it for now. Except for a Fitz pic. 

The 'babies' turned 4 months on Sunday. Getting soooooooooooo big!!!

'tis the Season

 I have a blog update or two in me but, for the moment, I'm buried in beads, piles and piles of beads, and internets (and hobbies) time is drastically reduced.

Every morning a big new pile to clean and string. 

(They're so happy looking in a big pile, aren't they???)

I know people always say they would love to work from home and, while it is pretty awesome most of the time, other times you look up and realize you've been so busy that you haven't left the house in 8 days. And then it feels less like a blessing and more like house arrest. LOL (Oh Black Friday, if I had know then you were going to be my last day of freedom I would have lived it up more!!) 

Hoping to be free on 'parole' by Tuesday. Or Wednesday. 

(Please god, by Wednesday. *twitch* GETTING STIR CRAZY NOW.)

I usually take the last two weeks of December off but I'm thinking I might be 'eligible' for three weeks this year. Need to consult with my employer (me) about that! ;)

New new new.

Firstly, I hope everyone had a great Mother's Day. :)

I'm not a mother but I didn't want to feel left out so I made myself a nice home-cooked 'mother's day breakfast'. lol (It was YUMMY too!) And then I was busy for the rest of the afternoon doing lots and lots of housework and food shopping. Hmph. (That part wasn't as fun.) The weather was just PERFECT perfect perfect though and I did manage to enjoy a bit of it out on the deck, doing my nails and chillaxing with a book.

I also finished a new stitchy!

This was the Shepherd's Bush kit that came out a couple months ago. Quick stitch and even quicker to finish. I went digging in my fabric stash and, shockingly, found something that closely matched the chenille trim that came with the kit. (Shocking because I don't have too many fabrics in the purple-mauve-plum tones in my stash.)

Not too cool? The chenille trim didn't fit the piece. 

!@#$!@#!@#$!@#!@#!@#

Disappointing because the kit instructions call for cutting the square to 8 inches and I actually cut it to 6 - so by my reasoning I should have had EXTRA trim, not fallen an inch short of it. Grrrr.

The gap is on the bottom so it's not really noticeable but it's going to bother me knowing...it's...there...mocking....me. I'm going to email them and see if they can send me out another piece. If they don't have any extras, I'll hit up the lovely Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe for some other chenille trim. I'll get 'er done one way or the other. :)

Also new, some new beads are up on the shoppe pages and Etsy:

(Plus others.)

I also spent a little time redoing the front page of my web site. Always good to spruce things up once and again. I get bored with it so I have to think OTHER people get bored with it too. lol

There's more work to be done to it, I think, but I'm done with it for the moment while I think on it. I'm no pro when it comes to html and style sheets and blah blah blah geekspeak so I have to move carefully and slowly and to get where I want to go and my brain is melted after this first go round.

Playing catch up this week.

 

Lost a few days there at the end of last week due to stupid frakkin hay fever. Grrrrr!

There was no way I was going to avoid it though as it hit him hard the week before and then Maggie (the cat) started scratching every second she was awake a few days after that. (She has bad allergies as well.) While I was at the vet getting her a steroid shot to stop her scratching and make her feel better, I started getting sniffly..........and leaky...........and by the end of the night my left eye was swollen, my brains were melted and leaking out everywhere, and I wanted to kill someone............and that was that for the next four days. It's just drop dead sexy when you have to walk around with a tissue jammed up your nose to stop it from running like a faucet, yes? lol

So Sunday was about working working working to catch up on orders and make lots of little beadies.

Yesterday was for doing packages and paperwork and today is for catching up on house cleaning things and...

...deciding which of these new polishes I want to use tonight. Hmm, decisions, decisions! These came in the mail while I was sick, courtesy of a UK company (free shipping to the US!) and look much much MUCH better once on. (They have a holo effect that I'm not going to bother wasting time trying to capture.) The temps have skyrocketed like WOAH (!!!) this week so it won't do to be out and about in the nice sunny weather with less-than-awesome polish! It's kind of crazy to think that I usually have to keep the heat on until May, at least at night.............and here it in the SEVENTIES in *MARCH*. MARCH.

My current cross stitch project is deeply deeply unsatisfying and I think I may to scrap the whole thing, even though I'm more than halfway done with it. :( I just hate the way the colors are playing together and the design wasn't 100% me anyway (it was going to be a gift for someone who WOULD love it) and............it's got to go because it's causing me stress every time I think about finishing. I had to waste a good piece of linen though.........................*sigh*

So pretty..........and so so so evil.

*achoo*

Hope your spring is less sniffly!! :)

My bad.

I think I forgot there for a couple weeks that I have, like, a blog and stuff. And I should, I dunno, like.........USE it or something. lol

I have been keeping myself busy OFFline though! :)

There have been a few new beads posted:

I am making good headway on the long, long, long list of WIP stitching projects I have started or kitted up around the hosue:

An Ewe & Friends Roly-Poly Snowman. 

I had this kitted up for so long that I probably had 75% less wrinkles and gray hair when I first put it together. *cough* Finished it up in FOUR nights. (What the heck was wrong with me that I let it go so long??) I think I want to finish this up as cube. Hmm......

Some Midnight Stitching cutie-pie snowman hearts started last winter. 

I actually finished up a pinker version of the right one last winter but I ended up HATING the fabric it was on (too holey) so I restitched it on a better fabric and did it with a different red too, because I love deep reds. 

A trio of Bent Creek minis. 

(The third one, a wee little house, was downstairs when I was picture taking and if you think I was going to  haul off and go down two flights of stairs to get it in the interests of doing a blog post, well then, you don't know me very well. My sedentary nature knows NO BOUNDS.)

I'm loving my new most-favoritest nail polish (all new polish automatically becomes my most-favoritest, you know that, right?)

He gifted me the OPI from his visit to the hair salon last week and it's the perfect shade of green for this lime-loving gal. (Matches my pocketbook, my iPhone cover, AND my Fire cover! lol) Paired with an iridescent top coat? Totally springalicious! Like a perfect, glittery easter egg. I may be stuck on this combo for a while. (The top coat is clear with an iridescent micro-glitter - not white like it looks like here.)

Trying to get back into reading every day again. Currently on tap:

This one just came out TODAY (or the Kindle version was just released, not sure about hard cover) but I had it pre-ordered and actually started it this morning. I have a friend who has been living in India for a couple years now (husband's job was moved there) so I'm not entirely ignorant of how things work there but I still fully expect to be horrified, frustrated, angry, depressed, interested, saddened and moved by this book.

Enh. Not loving this one. I'm giving it a few more chapters before I give it up entirely. (It's probably not the book - I'm just hit or miss on nonfiction.)

You're either a foodie or you're not and non-foodies can ignore this one. Personally, I love these collections because I love food blogs in general. And I like how most of the essays are short enough that you can pick one off here and there when you only have a little time to read.

Watching a whole of this:

I never got around to watching it when it was on air but it's on Netflix streaming so I'm picking it off, little by little while I'm working, etc. I can't say I LOVE IT but it's entertaining enough.

I just finished up season three last night and it doesn't seem possible that it had enough juice to get through three MORE seasons? Hmph. I'm not sure I'll make it all the way to the end, to be honest. /shrug

Whew! I think I'm all caught up on the goings on of late now. Nothing terribly exciting going on, to be honest. lol It may not be very snowy/stormy out this winter but it's still winter and it's still COLD and, therefore, still a little dreary and blah. Here's to spring and more interesting goings-on! :)

Oh happy happy weekend!

And it's nice and SUPER sunny too, which is ALWAYS a mood booster this time of year. :)

 Hard at work this week on adding little goodies on the site/Etsy for Valentine's and spring. Ahhhh, spring! It won't hit here until May but one gets tired of working on nothing but snowmen after awhile. (Still no snow here though. Haven't had a single flake since Halloween, which is totally crazy! I really don't remember if we've ever had a winter with NO snow before?!?)

Also: finished my 'Christmas' hat this week. Yay!!! Another WIP killed, only one left to tackle now. Nothing like being two three weeks late and stuff with the christmas knits, eh? But it's just for the hubs so he can deal.*snort* 

(He *did* get a pair of mittens and socks that made into his stocking for Xmas so I wasn't TOTALLY off the ball here.)

The pattern is called Snowbird (check Ravelry for links) that I purchased from the Stitches East show in 2010. It's pretty funny looking when you are wearing it, to be honest, but this is the same man who goes around the yard in a humongous rabbit fur hat - complete with ear flaps - when shoveling, etc. so at least nothing DIED for this one. :(

Of course, I find ALL winter hats slightly ridiculous in a vague, make-me-chuckle type of way, so it might just be me.

He wanted to have something he could wear to work so I did it in the color palate of his uniforms/work clothing - though he still can't actually be caught wearing it on work grounds, they're so so so so picky about such things. *sigh*  He'll have to save it for when he is working away from work - if that makes sense - but that comprises 98% of his work day so it's all good. The double layer of wool will be nice and toasty for working outdoors all day. :)

The only change I made was to make the inside brim in the same wool (Cascade Superwash) as the rest of the hat instead of doing it in cotton like the pattern suggested. Hates knitting with cotton. Hates it. *shudder*

I'm getting a little tired of doing nothing but colorwork project after project after project but I still have a pair of colorwork mittens that needs some thumbs so once more into the breach....................After that is done though I'm digging into some serious STITCHING. I WILL FINISH SOME ORNAMENTS THIS YEAR. WILL. I WILL. I WILL.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend!!!!!!!!!

Klunk.

<--Sound of me falling down the rabbit hole. 

Yes, thanks to all of you posting about the super-keen new L*K snowman series (and the guilty know who they are)........

...I, too, now have to stitch this series. 

Oh hello, great-big-new project I have no time for! But aren't the colors bright and fun? :)

So thanks for that, people. lol

Also, 'October' socks............

Fini. 

 

The yarn is an Opal one I dug out from deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep within the stash and I really had no idea anymore what it was supposed to look like. It was a YARN SURPRISE. They have this Fruit Loop thing going on that I'm digging. (And yes, I could have looked it up beforehand on Ravely but where is the fun in that? I assumed I liked it enough at some point to actually buy it.) They are a teeny bit loose in the foot for me but as they are going into the box to possibly be gifted to someone at some point that's not a problem. I really should stick to size 0 needles though when doing 'girl' socks. I'm just not a tight enough knitter for the 1's, I think. :|

Sign ups start today for the Cookie A 2012 Sock Club, btw, for those interested. This year's club, the first year, was fantastic - easily the best 'club' of that kind I've ever joined, as far as sock knitting goes. I've joined clubs before and almost always disliked the yarn/pattern pairings and/or the patterns outright. Cookie does some FANTASTIC patterns though and to get 12 exclusive ones over the course of a year? HEAVEN. And I liked that all of the yarn was solid colored or mostly solid, the better to show the patterns off.**

Also x 2, new Santa posted:

  

Because I never get tired of doing Santas. :)

**Not a paid endorsement, if that's not obvious. I just really loved the club this year. :)

Last week, in a word was... (+ lots of pics)

HOR. RIB. BLE.

The Horrible Sinus Sickness finally caught up with me. Like it does, every_single_fall. Every single one! It was getting kind of late in the season for it so I thought, fingers crossed, I had managed to not attract him this year. Uh, not so much with that. *cough*snot*hack*aches*death*

 (Plus some terribleness with my totally broken girl parts but we won't go there. Let's just say......bad timing. REALLY bad timing on that.)

Did that stop me from being terribly busy with work? Nope. Da beads get made no matter how bad I feel. Such are the 'perks' of working for yourself. You work every single day, no matter how deadified you are. lol

So knitting or anything else fun, not a bit.

Beads? LOTS AND LOTS.

OMG SO MANY NEW THINGS TO SHARE.

Mostly Christmas/holiday stuff. 

A welcome change from all the Halloween stuff I've done the last few months. New color palette, new blank stare characters.

That's not even 1/5th of the new stuff I've churned out lately. The rest can be peeked at here. WHEW! 

And that's not even getting into the special order stuff like...........

SQUIRRELS.

How cute is this squirrel party??

I think I'll go lie down now and rest a bit. *cough*