Sunday, July 7, 2019

I didn't make the deadline, however, I did finish...

"Suffrage Act" from Little House Needleworks is now history as I completed it early this morning.  It certainly took longer than I had hoped and I ran into a glitch or two, of my own making, but now my patriotic stitching is complete for July so I shall now move on to other things.  I'm thinking August should be about beach, ocean, mermaids, but then I've got everything ready to do the stand up Santa so I'm torn, to say nothing of working on my challenge piece and Blackberry's snowman.  Oh, mercy, I'm not sure in which direction I should to go.  But today it's about the finish work to be done on Suffrage Act and cleaning up and putting away fibers, etc. that are all over the place.  I suppose I should tell you my glitches on the piece, don't want you thinking it was a problem with the piece, chart or anything else which was somebody else's fault.  No, I'm afraid everything that went south was my fault (hurts to even adfmit it).  First, I had a fresh skein of each floss but after starting it I was afraid I would need more of the CC Cherry Cobbler and Black Coffee.  However, apparently Cherry Cobbler has been on backorder for a while so we didn't even have any in the shop (I had the one skein of each in my stash).  I thought perhaps if I actually stitched with half cross I could manage to eek out what I had, however, as I stitched the lettering I knew it wouldn't last so I started searching for matches in Weeks Dye Works. (I'm a stitcher who works from right to left so that the back of my pieces are fully covered with floss.  It gives it a little padding and puffs out the stitching, but it uses twice the amount of floss.)  I did find a good match for Cherry Cobbler with WDW and used it for the brick work at the bottom of the piece, but Black Coffee was another thing and since I had stitched the first word before I came to the conclusion that I'd have to use another skein, I had to have Black Coffee.  I went in to do office work on Friday and there were 12 skeins of Black Coffee, but still not Cherry Cobbler.  So Friday night and Saturday my mission was to complete the project, which I did.  Incidently I had 3 strands of the Black Coffee left from the last 18" cut I had, so the one skein was enough.  Now I got out the frame which I had ordered and was delivered to me the same day, and it turned out to be a little big.  Needless to say I was cursing West Side Frames until I went back and looked at the test I sent them with the measurements and after measuring it found that they had cut to the dimensions I had given them (I hate when that happens) so I ended up cursing out myself.  So today it's all about figuring out how to salvage this.  While West Side Frames offered to cut a new size for me, I'm determined to make lemonade out of this lemon.  I love the frame as it is perfect for patriotic pieces.
I tried a couple of different matting options and decided the hell with it, using the frame as is and I still love the piece.  Now I'm ready to move on to August stitching, whatever that may be.  We had a fabulous 4th here.  Sara loves to do a 4th of July dinner for all the employees and she did a fabulous job, fried chicken, potato salad, broccoli/cauliflower salad, and rum cake for desert (not sure that was typical picnic food but it was typical of Sara and it was delicious)...I hope you and your family had a great celebration and you were able to stitch a little bit before returning to work.   Have a great week, and I'll be talking to you.

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