I am so excited I just got my first Spinning Wheel. It doesn't matter I have no idea how to use her I will learn.

Her name is Sally and she is quite old. Made for an old man for his wife she is showing her age like me but I think she is beautiful.
There is a story to me getting her. For Christmas my husband decided to surprise me with a SLR camera but could not find one in his price range, just as well 2 days before Christmas the battery in our car died so my present was a new battery. Very romantic I know but that is the way we are.
Then a friend gave me the fleece from an Alpaca, what on earth was I going to do with that? Why learn to spin of course so then we went looking for a spinning wheel and found Sally. So a new era starts. I said this year I was only doing things for myself and the family and it looks as if there will be no time for anything else.

Happy New Year to you all
I am  involved with the  and am determined this year to at least achieve some of the monthly deadlines. I have prepared 4x6" blocks so at least I have started the right way. Now I want to start some stitching. For inspirationI have decided to use the TAST stitch list and hopefully I will use all the stitches on the list on my blocks.

I am having a break this year from Round Robins and am going to do stitching for myself and my family. There are a few tutorials I want to do as well as the Project and the Hex Labs from Stitchmap. 
I also want to do some Sane Quilting but that is for another message.

Well two entries in two days this is starting to look like I might make my resolution come true. I have done some more work on Sue's block Arlene kindly suggested the grey and pink blocks looked a little empty.

  So I added some funky flowers in the top grey block and some rain in the pink block. In the other grey block I added some Sturts Desert Peas. They are mainly done in bullion stitch with the leaves in detached chain. I will be mailing this to Sue next year; probably Friday.

I am going to try and blog more often in 2014 so I thought I would start practicing today. This is the block I did for Sue in the Stumpwork RR. The wattle is Acacia Pycnantha the Australian floral emblem.

I did a course with Arlene White and adapted her hydrangeas to my wattle flowers. The leaves are woven stitch. Most wattle have little leaves but this one has long strap like leaves. The fabrics Sue used were beautiful but really challenged me as the colours are not me; this being said I am fairly pleased with the result. I intend to keep on now trying to learn to create more stumpwork embroideries. 

I have been so slack this year no posts since February. I really intend to try harder next year but we will see. I have done two courses with Stitchmap this year. 
The first was the Crazy Quilt Course where we made a pretty sewing kit and the second was Redwork. I was very fortunate to have Shari as my mentor each time.
Here are some photos from the Crazy Quilt

Here is my first needle book I use it for Milliner (my favourite needle) and Crewel needles

The second needle book. I use this one for Tapestry needles

The thread holder contains my special threads - mainly silks and Brazilian threads

The pincushion sits on my worktable and because it is so large it never gets lost

This is the thread holder opened out. It was such fun to do creating this secret garden for my threads

And here is the whole set together.

This course had a lot of stitching as well as design elements in it. I found it really valuable.

The second course was Redwork and here is a photo of my finished set. These are little weights filled with rice for the times you do not want to use pins but still want to hold something steady.

Once again this was a very stitch intensive course but I think the finished product was worth the effort

Sashiko Challange

I took the challenge from my group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stitchmap/  to make a needle book with Sashiko stitching on it.  

This was a fun exercise just to get the juices flowing. I first drew a series of lines in white charcoal pencil on the dark blue fabric,this was supposed to be indigo dyed cotton but the dark blue homespun was all I had. I then stitched the lines in a running stitch in a heavy white thread trying to remember the rules for Sashiko and also trying to keep my stitches even. 

I then made a little flower in the Japanese Kanzashi style with my new Flower Maker from Clover and a pretty button and some beads.

 This is the back of the needlbookI think it turned out ok.

The Diamonds are finished

I signed up last year to swap 3 diamond blocks. At last they are finished and mailed out only 3 days late. That is a record for me. They were such fun to do and I am very happy with the way they turned out.

Here are all three of them together. Of course I have left a much wider frame around them but I pinned it back for the photos.

This is a closeup of the first one I finished with a pretty peacock in the centre block. The photos are not great as I had to use my phone. 

That is a tale in itself, I could not get the pictures to load into my computer so I could send them to my blog so after much swearing and cursing, yes I used the magic @#$% word, I finally worked out how to get the blue-tooth to work between my laptop and my phone. 

Not bad for an Old Gal hay!!!

This is the second one I finished  All the stitching is experimental either I am learning to do a stitch or I want to find out how a combination works. It often means a lot of reverse stitching LOL.

And last but certainly not least is this one more just playing around but I wish the photos came out better.

I have no idea which of my partners got which diamond because what I did was package them up with a little note and sealed the envelope. Then I addressed them, kind of like a lucky dip. I mailed 2 of this morning but I do not yet have my third partner's snail mail address so soon as I know that I will send it off also.

I do hope my partners will like their little diamonds as much as I have enjoyed making them.