It may sound strange but 70 little squares, 31 numbers and 31 motifs take a while to stitch. Quite a while to be precies. How long I don’t know yet, I just know that by stitching one outline border every day, won’t make me reach my deadline. I need to somehow speed up the process otherwise I won’t have my little pillows ready by September. They are great fun to stitch, especially the motifs. The snowman for day 6 was a lot of fun.  The wreath for day 5 was a bit tricky, with the changes of color and the 3/4 stitches.

As you can see I haven’t made that much progress since my last post about this project, but I’m getting there.

Every year around July 4th, I’m getting a bit anxious. I see all this beautiful patriotic stitching, beautifully decked tables, lots of red white and blue and I tell myself that next year I need to have a 4th of July stitched piece as well. Luckily, that doesn’t last long as my stitching list is long enough as it is, but the feeling lingers.

So this year, I decided to join the festivities and make myself a 4th of July breakfast. Here’s my contribution to red, white and blue.

Miss Murphy moped around and said that technically speaking it wasn’t red, white and blue, but red, vanilla and blue. I told her if she wanted to get her canned cat food (a bit treat to her) she’d better shut up .

And since I don’t have much stitching to show, here are two pics of the shop’s windows.

and the other side

I had to take these at an angle, otherwise the only thing you’d see would be yours truly in the windows.

OK, I guess by now y’all understand that I am pretty crazy about this book. IMHO it is the best book out there and if you don’t have it yet, go out and buy it. Seriously, I cannot imagine that you’d regreat it.

To show you that you don’t have to have 20/20 vision (at least for nearby stuff) and that you can use the designs in this book on normal count linens too, here’s a bookmark I stitched for the son of my dear friend. He graduated from high school and I am so proud of him. He’s an avid reader and had requested a stitched bookmark before.

This is done on 28 count linen banding with Belle Soie Ocean Tide (one strand). I stitched this on the train to The Hague and back and got the front all done. Putting the bookmark together was actually quite easy due to the banding. One of these days I will make a short tutorial about how to do this. I think this design can be stitched for anybody, you can adjust the color of the thread and just go.

I am still wondering if I will stitch this again and then keep the bookmark for myself LOL. Maybe in another life.

Thank you for all your comments on Rosina Luger. She’s a pleasure to work on, but with some stitching deadlines coming up for the workshops, I’m not sure when she’ll be back in my stitching rotation. I will try to get part 10 done this month.

I found some time last week to pick up Rosina Luger again. Funny thing about this project is, that it’s not the first I want to pick up when I have stitching time, but once I’m working on it, I have a hard time putting it down. This part is not as labour intensive as part 8. Which is great, I would love to have at least 6-8 more parts done by the end of the summer. It takes me roughly 2-3 evenings of 2 hours stitchting to get one part done. There’s a lot of railroading involved, but working with the silks is great.

Part 8 and 9 together and below a close-up of part 9.

Though you can’t see it clearly, the green squares have a light and dark color. Onto part 10, that would mark the 25% line of this project.

Last week our Countdown to Christmas group met again and everybody had made quite a bit of progress with this interesting piece. I have to admit, stitching the gridlines for the calendar was a bit boring at times. But now that it’s done, I can concentrate on the fun part. Stitching 70 little blocks, backstitch around each one of them and then adding either numbers or motifs.

What I absolutely love about this piece is that you are able to change some motifs you might not like, change the upper part of the gridlines if you feel like it or use the motifs for small ornaments. Aka, the designer has managed once again to deliver a very versatile design.

Here’s my progress so far. As you can see, I am trying hard to work on the little boxes before I fill them in. The numbers are easy peasy to do and give such a sense of accomplishment. I am still playing around with my threads. The numbers are done in 1089 Threadworx, I think this is my all time favorite Christmas red thread. I will get a different color for the Pine thread as it is too close to the Blue Spruce one. Haven’t decided yet which color that will be.

I hope that I will be able to stitch one box every day, so that by the end of the summer my little boxes are all done and ready to put together.

I am by no means a kitchen queen, not even a princess for that matter. For me, preparing meals has to be quick and easy. There’s just not enough time in my schedule to spend hours in the kitchen. I do try to eat as healthy as I can though, meaning lots of veggies, not to many carbs and I limit the amount of meat.

During the summer though, I am more inclined to experiment with recipes and see which ones I like. One day I hope to do menu planning for the whole week, but I’m not at that point yet. Anyway, I disgress, today’s recipe is all about broccoli. If you don’t like this veggie, you might want to skip this post alltogether LOL.

Here are the ingredients:

2 heads of broccoli
1 large cooked potato (or several small ones in a can)
125 gr ham
cream

Oops, almost forgot:

Now remember, I am no cheff, not even an accomplished hobby cook, so this recipe is just how it works for me.

1. Cook the broccoli for about 5-6 minutes.
2. Boil water and use 3/4 liter for the soup.
3. Add beef cube to water (according to taste, I used 2).
4. Add broccoli and potato to stock and use your blender or hand mixer to complete liquify the substance.
5. Add cream to soup (I used 4 tablespoons), stir well.
6. Add ham.

Your soup will look hopefully something like this. If it doesn’t, please don’t email me, I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what went wrong .

The soup is a thick substance, which I love to eat with a bread roll with pesto and some grated cheese (just grill for a few minutes). I can eat 3 times from this amount, but that will of course depend on the amount of broccoli and water you used.

I have put one part in the freezer and have no idea whether that will work or not. I’ll keep you updated. Since it is sooooooo green, I was wondering if you called it Harry Potter soup (or one of those disgusting sounding names they have for food in the books) if kids would eat it. After all, it doesn’t really resemble broccoli anymore.

Bon appetit!

When shopping at the Nashville market we came across a new heart chart from Sekas & Co called Tea Lover’s Heart. As I knew a friend had a celebration coming up and as said friend loves tea cups and tea pots as well as quilting, I knew this was the perfect gift for her.

Now these charts call for 20ct fabrics and personally I am not too fond of those fabrics. So I converted the colors to silks and stitched the whole thing on 40ct Light Examplar Linen from Lakeside Linen. I used Soie d’Alger and Gloriana for the silks as well as some petite beads. Of course I didn’t have a lot of time stitching this and hwat usually happens is that when I’m short on time, I make a mistake and it will take even more time. Sounds familiar? Anyway, I had to take out the whole upper part of the design and restitch it, but managed to get it done in time.

Here’s the close-up picture of the heart unframed.

And here it is matted and framed.

I have a general dislike of stitching the same item twice, but in this case……..

We ordered it at the tradeshow in Paris and it is one of my all time favorite stitching books. There are so many designs in this book, all done in one color and they don’t take forever to stitch. They are perfect for a little gift, card or a tiny frame.

Anyway, when we got our Kingston fabric in, I thought we really needed to have a model stitched on this fabric and what better design than one of the 50 in this book? So I looked for one that had a house on it (I have this obsession with houses on cross stitch designs) and off I went. Now let me explain something about the Kingston fabric. The labels says it is a 50 count fabric (20 threads/cm). Well, it is more a 54/55 count fabric (22/23 threads/cm) than 50 count. Meaning it is a wee bit of a challenge. But over the course of several weeks I did manage to finish my little sampler.

I used Soie Surfine 2109 for it and love how it looks on the fabric. As I haven’t decided yet how I will finish it, I haven’t cut the stitched piece for the fabric yet. I am really tempted to stitch 6-7 of these tiny designs and frame them together with one mat. Though they may look adorable in a really tiny frame too. Decisions, decisions.

For those of you who are questioning my sanity about stitching on 54 count linen, I have two more projects on this same piece of linen. One I have shown before (click here), the other is a new start. Yes, I know, I shouldn’t start a new project on this linen, if I hadn’t finished the first one. However….. one of my threads were missing so I couldn’t progress on my wee hares and of course couldn’t wait to start another wee sampler. But that’s

I am rather behind with this stunning project, but my excuse is that I want to take it slow so that I can enjoy it longer . I finished part 8 a while ago, it seemed to take forever with the gold thread filling of the background, but the result is so beautiful that I am actually contemplating on using that same background filling for another project.

If you still would like to join, just email me (info at dehandwerkboetiek dot nl) it is still possible to join. There are 40 parts, so it will definitely take me a while to work on this. I haven’t been able to stitch on it during the last 3 or 4 weeks, so hopefully I can take it up again soon.

And because she was keeping me such good company here’s a pic of Miss Murphy sound asleep with her nose almost on the couch.

I am rather excited to tell you that I finally updated my UBU weblog (Ultimate Cross Stitch Challenge in Dutch). I finished the 5th design a while ago, but didn’t take a picture. That’s taken care of now and if you hop over you can see what I added.

UBU weblog

And guess what? It’s another Prairie Schooler design LOL>