Stitching & Craft Room (Lots of pics)

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Hope the sun is shining is your neck of the woods.  It is here today, but it's getting rather brisk.  I heard that we may actually see some snow (hopefully very little) this week!  Probably snow flurries, but heck, snow is snow, right?

Since a couple people guessed the name of the sampler I started, I can reveal it now.  I was going to wait and see if someone could identify it before I posted the name (Cari and Siobhan guessed it right, so a little surprise could end up in the mail soon!!!). 

This is the progress I've made this week:

Adam Alone

Sheepish Designs - Second Examplary

DMC Threads

WDW Parchment 35 ct. linen

I seem to have been struck by the Adam and Eve craze that's going around and I'm bound and determined to get that A&E wall filled.  I am so loving this piece.  The colors are brighter than I anticipated, but there is a lot going on with this.  Queen Stitches (those things actually used to make me tear out my hair), over one (which still does make me want to pull out my hair), and Florentine Stitch!   I have to admit though that after I snapped this picture, and then sat down again to stitch some more, I realized that I was off a thread on the dark blue portion of the Florentine Stitch, which proved to be something that I couldn't fudge without it looking hopelessly lopsided.  So I had to frog it out almost to the center.  GRRRR!!!  I was not happy!   So far it's holding my attention enough that I haven't given in to the urge to slap another piece on some scroll rods.  But I have to admit that doing that Florentine Stitch made me start yearning for a needlepoint piece that I have upstairs that I've barely started.  So don't be surprised if you see that pop up in the near future.  Since I've put Ann down I feel like having a stitch free-for-all!

I was pleased as anything to win one of Missy'sThirteen Days of Halloween.  I thought this was such a fun giveaway:

Isn't that a great package?  I love, love, love the crypt with the scissors (since we all know that I've become a scissors whore).  But I'm keeping these babies in the crypt and displaying them all year!  Thanks Missy!

And finally, I've gotten my craft room into some semblance of order.  It's not finished by a long shot, but here's a short tour.  Ignore pieces you see on the floor - I still have painting to do on them.  This room is a little wonky because it has 7 walls and three doorways.  Makes it a little hard to arrange things.

My craft table made by my wonderful FIL.  He did such a fantastic job and I'm just tickled pink over it.  The shelves on the sides are removable so I can arrange them as I please.  I found the little shelf on the table a while ago in a thrift shop and thought that it was perfect for displaying some of my pincushions (I still haven't found the rest of them). 

My daughter added her decorative touches with the wreath on the door.  I'll leave it up for a while, but it's covering my DMC thread sign.

 

To the left of that table is a very long wall where my sewing machine sits.  I didn't want to run rampant through the house and rip samplers off the walls, so this wall is going to be filled with different things.  In the meantime, this arrangement will have to do.  I still have some small cupboards and things to paint that will go on this wall.  And samplers when I can get them stitched.

At the end of the wall is my walk-in closet and a slight alcove-type of thing.  On the right is the closet - on the left is the entrance to the bathroom.  Convenient set up!  The people who previously owned the house had a ton of kids and built two bedrooms in the basement with a Jack and Jill bath and small walk in closets.  All I need is a refrigerator in this room and I could camp out for a long time!!

The closet definitely does need some help.  I basically moved everything from the other room to this one and didn't go through it:

Pretty bad, huh?  Obviously, I need to do some work in here and obviously I need to really sort through this stuff.  I dream of having a cleaning woman, cook and chauffeur so that all I'd have to worry about every day is playing with my stuff (yeah, what was I sniffing this morning - LOL!).   Anyway, the pizza boxes hold cut- up quilts that I have every intention of sewing one of these days.

More pizza boxes, and bins holding kits, fabric and needlepoint pieces.  I definitely need to sort all this out.  Especially now that I've embarrassed myself with my slovenly closet habits.

Another shot - the closet doesn't seem so messy from this view (or maybe it does!).  You can see a couple pieces I still haven't put up on the floor waiting for paint jobs.

Another wall and an empty bookcase.  The shelving piece I found at a shop in my travels recently.

And then my favorite place! 

The stitchy area!  The chair and ottoman are from our old house and I'm glad we kept it because it's perfect to stitch in.  Actually, I stitched in this chair before we moved.  The table is just a folding table I covered with a quilt for the time being (actually it made a great paper-piecing table when I was doing a lot of quilting).  I'm still trying to find something suitable.  The bookcase I just bought this weekend and I couldn't be more pleased with it.  I looked high and low for something that was bigger than usual because I have a lot of books (still in boxes at press time).  I saw it in a shop recently and the owner was going to distress it all up.  She said that her brother made it and it had been sitting on the floor for a while so to move it she was going to make it look old and get rid of it.  Well, she did get rid of it - right into the back of my van (it was a push to get it in there).  It's solid oak!  I can't imagine distressing this!  And because she wanted to get rid of it, I got a fantastic deal on it!  I can't wait to get all my books on it.

So that's the tour!  Still definitely a work in progress.  And that's about all that's going on this week.  DD's basketball team had a real nail biter of a game last night with a team that they had lost to earlier in the season by one point.  Well, they lost by a point again, even with double overtime.  If you wanted to see a very long, sad face last night, it definitely would have been my daughter's!! 

Thanks so much for stopping by and thanks even more for the wonderful comments you leave.  Have a wonderful week and make a lot of X's.