Learning My Alphabet and What's a Little Spilled Tea?

Happy Thursday everyone!!  It has just been one of the weeks.  Stitching, quilting, cleaning up spilled tea (ahem, Terri!).  This week has really run the gamet, but yet it's been pretty productive.


This week in the stitching arena, I've had a bit of startitis.  Ever have those times when you just don't know what to stitch, so you dig around and make a huge mess?  Well, that was my week.  After finishing the Yellow House Sampler, I couldn't decide if I should stitch on a WIP or go for something new.  Well, I opted for the something new.  For all the stash diving, I picked a couple, but definitely not the most exciting pieces.  A note here - I did pull out a WIP - AAWFAA and took it to Guild, but as luck would have it - or maybe it was a lucky thing - I pulled the wrong project bag and didn't have the right threads.  Probably a lucky thing when you read the story of the Sampler Guild a little further down. Anyway, this is what I did work on this week:

And this one:

Pretty boring!!!  I'm almost done with the top piece, so I'll just wait until I'm done with it before I reveal the whole picture.  But don't you think that if you had startitis, you'd pick up something a little more fun than alphabets?  My DH still wonders if I'm losing some memory faculty in my advancing years and need to refresh myself by stitching things with alphabets!!!  But these are fairly small pieces and will be a welcome relief from the BAPs I seem to always pick out!


Now, a little bit about spilled tea with an update on the life of The Yellow House Sampler.  

You can read all about it on Terri's blog, but there was a slight mishap with my poor sampler.  We had Show & Tell at Guild this weekend and I took my Yellow House Sampler to show.  Well, we are Sweet  Tea Lovin' Girls, and of course, those were up front and center on the table along with my dear, sweet sampler.  Well, I won't go into all the details, but poor Yellow House got a bath in iced tea!  And poor Terri just about had a heart attack (have you recovered yet Terri?)!  Me?  Well, I don't know if I was in shock, or what, but I just kind of sat there looking at it trying to figure out the ramifications of the sampler getting a tea bath.  But the reasonable side of my brain probably thought that everyone is trying out the tea dyeing thing, so what the heck!  Well, probably I was more in shock!   LOL  But no harm, no foul - everything is fine and it looks the same as it did before.  I think we did more damage interrupting the meeting (which makes me laugh every time I think about it) than was done to my sampler.  I think that poor Terri thought it was ruined, but you know, these samplers a lot of times look like they've been water damaged, stained, run over by cars, etc., with all the various shading of the fabrics, so if there was some tea stain, let's just go for it!  I'm still thanking my lucky stars though that I didn't use overdyed threads!!!   (Note to self: buy Terri a non-spill, insulated sippy cup for next meeting).


On the quilt front, I've made great progress on my quilt (about time, don't ya think?):

But it's not quite done yet.  There is a pieced border and I'm not sure that I like it with the border.  What do you think?

I don't know - I like the simplicity of just having the thin black edge, but yet at the same time....hmmm, I'm still not sure.  Oh, if you blow these up, please ignore all the threads.  I have this weird thing with loving to sit with the finished top and spend an evening clipping all the threads that I didn't clip because when I sew, I sew fast!!  And plus, I just love playing with the quilt top - touching it, spreading it over me while I work - I know, I'm weird!


Another sweet (no, not sweet tea) thing that happened in the past week was that dear Melody sent me a wonderful package in the mail in anticipation of my upcoming rug hooking class.  Wow, I just realized that I'm going to be hooker and a whore (scissors) - I know they're the same, but I can officially be called both.  Hmmmm, that doesn't sound too nice!  Anyway, Melody sent me the nicest package:

 

She was such a sweetheart and send me a small canvas and the wools to try my hand at hooking!  Isn't this the greatest?  She also send a maple hook in a French General drawstring pouch!!!  I am going to always remember her wonderful act of kindness every time I look at the rug and that FG bag (just love, love the FG things).  I have only played around with this for all of about two minutes (every time I settle my hiney in the chair to watch the video, I get booted off by the kids), but I'll definitely post more progress after this weekend!  Thank goodness for videos on YouTube because DD is sick today and I couldn't make my first hooking class (last week's class was cancelled due the snow we had up here - yeah, doesn't snow all winter and BAM, it does on the day of class)!  AUGHHHH!  But I will make up for it at the end.  I just can't wait to get started really learning about this craft!

That's just about all the excitement for me this week.  I think that's enough!  Thanks for all the wonderful comments you left on my last post and just a word of advice here - if you see Terri, guard your stitching!!!  If she wants tea, find a table in the corner for her!  LOL  Only kidding, Terri!!  Have a great weekend everyone!