Score!

I can't even begin to tell you how much I love yard sales.

The things you can find, both useful and not, quality and cheap, new and old, there are all sorts of items! I especially love when they're big with a variety of stuff, even boxes you need to dig through-- those are the hidden treasure finds!

A trip into town yielded a yard sale on a Monday (?!) which was quite large, inside of three storage spaces. I happened to be solo, which meant no children begging for toys-- of which there were plenty of, and I was able to quietly hunt. The only downside was I had only $2 cash in my pockets, oh, let's hope I find something that doesn't cost too much! And I did! An old shoebox full of embroidery thread! For exactly $2-- what luck!

(Sorry for the blurry photo) Once home, I went through the box and arranged by color and brand of thread. Most of them were J & P Coats, a few DMCs, some Peri-Lusta Filo, a couple of Bucilla, and A.T.CO'S Silkine Red Star brand.

I love the label of the Red Star Brand. I have never seen this brand before.

Digging further, I found this old Bucilla embroidery pattern of a basket of flowers and on the back..

..instructions on how to do some of the stitches.

Love this old A & P needle book.

Can you see the spider web pattern on the foil? Love!

My best guess at the age of this stuff is from the 50's, as dated evidence of a newspaper ticket showed up. Can anyone remember when the daily paper cost 5 cents and the Sunday paper was 15 cents? 45 cents a week?? I pay $2.50 for a Sunday paper now!

The thing I found most fascinating, was threaded needles left in nearly every color thread.

 

This was obviously someone's working project that was never completed. I love this idea of leaving the thread on the needle and sticking it in the label of the thread, then using another needle with another color. That seems so much easier than pulling the thread out of your one needle and re-threading with new thread, often losing the other color or it gets tangled. This would be so convenient, especially with a project that causes you to change colors often and not having to re-thread  every time. Plus, the needle keeps the label from falling off the thread. I think I'll adopt this practice for my own!

No wonder there were several packets of needles that were nearly empty!

Don't you wish you could still pay 19 cents for 12 needles or 30 cents for 16??

~

Wishful Thinking / Pet Peeve

There's been a lot of crafting around these parts lately. By me, and the girls.  Not so much Peter-- unless you count eating play-doh. I'm happy the girls are picking up the crafting bug-- it's something I remember Mom trying to get me to do when I was their age and it never stuck with me. Now I start doing it when I am a busy mother of 4 trying to do everything else that needs to be done around here. Why didn't I do it back when I had all the time in the world??  I must like a challenge!

I get a lot of my supplies from yard sales and thrift shops, or there's a good sale at the fabric store with half-off coupons. I'm lucky Andrew indulges me my crafting and encourages me when I get on a sewing binge. I try to return the favor and not break the bank on crafty purchases-- like I can afford a whole lot anyway.

Today for home school, the girls all wanted to sew and make dolls. So it turned into Home Ec class and the topic was embroidering doll features, sewing bodies on mama's sewing machine, turning inside out, stuffing and yarn hair. Finished 1 doll; halfway through a second; still need to assemble a third. Doll dresses are slated for tomorrow.  My patience ran out when, first, I was feeling like I needed to be mama octopus and help 3 girls all crying for help at the same time and Peter constantly screeching that ear-piercing scream while knocking down his blocks, and then Gretchen getting pickier and picker about the yarn hair or the eyes or the heart and how it wasn't looking like Evelyn's. I slammed my hand on the table, grabbed all the fabric, yard, thread, hoops and put it up. Went to the bedroom to get 5 minutes of peace and quiet.

I hope tomorrow will go smoother, brand new day and all that.

 With the girls jumping on the crafting bandwagon, I'm finding myself short on supplies to share. I hate that I have to run 45 minutes into the next big town for the closest store that sells fabric and supplies. It's been my mantra since the day we moved here. Why is the closest craft store 45 minutes away?! In six years, I still have not discovered any sort of crafting store around here and I know there are quilters in this area and lots of the town fairs are full of people hawking hand made stuff, so there are other crafty people here. I can't believe that they all go 45 minutes to the next big town for supplies??  Or else they have money and order online, which I wish I could do but online stuff is expensive and I like to see/touch what I'm buying first.

It would be nice to open up a shop of my own. Couldn't afford to lease out a store space, much less purchase all the stock. Plus, start up costs, liability insurance and all that expensive stuff. A woman I knew liked to quilt and she found it cheaper to order her fabrics whole-sale, by-the-bolt, but then she had too much fabric, so she opened a fabric store in her basement and, by-appointment-only, sold her surplus fabric. She had a nice shop, but way overpriced. I ended up just buying a  teeny small bit, feeling obligated, because I made an appointment and I was taking up her time, after all. I think about that set-up a lot these days-- how nice to have a store in my basement, to run down and pluck what I need off the shelf. Have a sign out by the road on days I'm open to the public or by appointment. No overhead costs, no lease to pay, just a bit of advertising and finding crafting supplies to stock the shop and sell. Is it worth it? Would I be offering a desired product? Would it succeed? Can I fill a need? Profit would be nice, but even better would be the convenience of a shop closer than 45 minutes. It's all a nice idea, maybe just a fantasy, since we're really tight on money and starting a business in this economy? hmph! 

I'll have to make do and look for an old teddy bear no one loves and cut it open for it's stuffing. I don't have enough stuffing for the dolls the girls are making. Can't afford a trip into town just for stuffing, and while I'm there, I'll be drooling over all the other stuff I'd really like to bring home with me. What I really just want to do is take the whole store, strap it onto the roof of my van and park it in my back yard.

WIP: Blue Flowers Embroidery

A great embroidery blog called Feeling Stitchy hosted a stitch-along in August that I just had to jump onto the bandwagon for. The project was to pick a fabric with a pattern and then embellish it with thread. I'd seen other examples and wanted to try it, too. I found this great vintage linen towel at a yard sale and I knew it'd be perfect for the stitch-along. The stitch-along is over now, and I'm not done with it yet, but I wanted to show my work-in-progress.

 The vintage linen.  It took some courage to actually sew into it. I was brought up to keep things in their original condition and I am slowly learning that it's OK to personalize something the way you want it. If it's yours, and you aren't 100 percent pleased with something, then shouldn't you be able to make changes to make it better?

 The embroidery thread all picked out and matched to the linen.

My work so far..

Adding the thread adds a dimension to it and I think makes it look more interesting. I found a great oval frame for it from the thrift shop and I've marked the area I'll sew to fit inside the frame. Looking forward to finishing this and seeing it in the frame. I already have just the spot for it in my bedroom.

King and Queen of Hearts

In 2009, the Post Office issued their yearly "LOVE" stamp around Valentine's and this particular year was an image of the King and Queen of Hearts.  I fell in love with the stamp and couldn't help but think it was a good candidate for an embroidery project. The stamps are long gone, but I held onto the image from the stamp booklet and more than two years later, I blew up the image on my printer, traced it onto vintage linen, and then in less than a week, completed it!

It measures 9 x 5 inches.

(click photo to enlarge image)

The original image had only a few colors and I've used my own color choices, but kind of stayed true to the original, since I like it so much. I left off the stamp amount as well.

After framing, I entered this into the County Fair and won 2nd place. I'm a teeny bit disappointed it didn't win a blue ribbon. I don't know what the judging criteria was, but there were no other embroidery projects at the Fair, except for my daughter's projects and they were in the Junior division.  Most sewing projects were in quilting form, a couple of dolls, and some clothing. Oh well, it's a Blue Ribbon winner in my eyes and is now holding a place of honor above our bed.

Evelyn Is Eight!

Where did the time go? On June 5th, this girl turned 8!

How is it that my baby is now 8 years old?

It's hard to believe that this beautiful little girl was once in my belly

and now she is on her way to being a lovely young lady.
***

~8 Things About Evelyn~

1. She has lost 8 baby teeth so far.
2. She loves to play with her Barbie dolls.
3. She doesn't need me for a lot of things anymore, but she always says she needs me.
4. She wants me to pierce her ears. I did it for my friends but poking a hole in your own child's ear is something different. Brave girl, she sat patiently still while I fumbled with a needle, tears escaping from her clenched eyes and all she has to show for it is a tiny hole in her ear with no earring. We are taking her to a piercer at the end of the week.
5. She has a teeny bit of a mean streak and gets sent to her room when we catch her being mean to one of her siblings.
6. She loves to swing as high as she can and catch the leaves with her feet.
7. She has an adventurer in her and if we let her, she would explore the woods around us and we probably would not see her until dark.
8. She delights in meeting other 'Evelyns', even when the majority of them are old ladies.

~~~

I made her this '8' shirt.

Remind me not to start a secret embroidery project 2 days before it's due to be given.

I'd never done this before and I stayed up until 3 am to finish it so she could wear it on her birthday.


I think I did pretty good.
~~~

Happy Birthday my dear Evelyn,

May you celebrate many many more!

We love you!

~

Show and Tell

Look what I made:

My sister sent me a link to this website after I posted about Evelyn's embroidery. There's some lovely stuff on there and it inspired me to make this. I like to draw flowers and I have a drawing book full of them... so I thought I'd take some of those flowers and try this. I've never done free-hand stitching like this before, so I think it's pretty good for my first time. I know it's not perfect, but I like it and that's what counts. I used DMC thread on muslin fabric.

The younger girls are quite envious of Evelyn's framed girl/cat and boy/dog pictures above her bed and have been asking for something to hang above their beds. I think I'll make another one with different flowers and hang them above Gretchen and Sylvia's beds. It's going to be a surprise for them and I'm pretty sure they'll like it. They have been constantly checking my work as I go and offering me plenty of "oohs" and "ahhs".

I have enjoyed doing this and I find bits of time to do it while I am waiting for the water to boil, or the computer to boot up, or while giving Peter a bath. I am already looking forward to starting the next one and I have ideas bubbling to the surface for another picture. I may have created an embroidery monster in me!