10th Anniversary Piece

I Will Love You by Annie Beez Folk Art

Stitched 2 over 2 on 25 ct. mystery linen with recommended threads

I finished up my anniversary piece for Mr. SweetPea. (We celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary in April).  As I mentioned before, I went to my LNS about 2 weeks before our anniversary to figure out what I was going to stitch for this milestone.  Because I enjoy waiting till the last minute....

Nothing was really doing it for me, until I spotted this one and remembered I had purchased it a few years ago and it was sitting in my stash.  I think I probably even bought it intending to stitch it for an anniversary.  So I picked up the fabric I needed, going a little larger than the recommended 32 count because I wanted to frame this finish.

For the most part, this was a super easy stitch, except for all those damn little confetti stitch stars.  I love how the look on the front, but they were kind of a pain in the butt to stitch.  I considered using seed beads but decided to stitch as designed.  Eventually I'll get this framed and hung on the wall.  Maybe even before our 20th anniversary.

And if you must have it RIGHT NOW, you can check out Annie's Etsy Shop for an instant download.

Another craft project

When I was looking for ideas for a nautical nursery for Little Dude, I found loads of ideas, including many I could do myself.  I even made hand painted closet dividers.

One of the items I found was this sailboat tissue box cover.  I think it was originally on the Land of Nod, but you can find it at this boutique now.  It is very cute.  It's also $44, which is a bit much.

So I decided to make my own and then promptly got sidetracked by other things.  Little Dude survived with a plain square tissue box in his room.  The idea lingered though, and on a whim one day, I picked up a plain wooden tissue box cover at the craft store (using a coupon, of course) and some unpainted wooden shapes.  Since  the nautical theme remains in Little Dude's room, I chose two sailboats and an anchor for three of the sides, and as a nod to his most favorite thing in the world, a wooden seahorse for the fourth side.  (Little Dude has the Fisher Price Soothe and Glow Seahorse.  His name is Keith and he goes everywhere with him.)

I let Little Dude choose the base paint color, a pretty blue called Calypso.  I gave everything a good sanding and a wipe down - I find you get a much nicer finish on even the inexpensive craft wood if you sand it.

I also use a pre-painting primer, which also helps create a smoother finish.  I learned my lesson about details with the closet dividers and decided to something much simpler for this project.  The tissue box cover got a few coats of the blue, and I painted the wooden shapes a simple plain  white.  Then I used Minwax Polycrylic in a satin finish to seal both the box and the wooden shapes.  I've used this on several wood projects and I really like it.  After it dried for a few days, I used a hot glue gun and some heavy books to attach the wooden shapes to the sides of the tissue box.

 It's a little different than the inspiration one, but I love the brighter blue (it adds a pop of color to Little Dude's room) and I think the simpler design will end up being more versatile.

Who do you stitch for?

I've stitched and framed a number of pieces for other people, and I'm always happy to see them hanging on their walls. I'm very careful about who stitch for and what I stitch for them, as so many hours go into each piece, and the cost of the materials adds up. I want to make sure that the gift fits the recipient, that I pick something meaningful to them, and that it ends up being something they WANT hanging in their home. As you all well know, it ain't easy.

So you'd think I'd have more pieces of my own hanging on our walls. Surprisingly, we don't. The Rocky Point lighthouse my husband stitched and had framed is still floating around, waiting for the perfect spot to hang it. The wedding record my husband and I both stitched? In a drawer, along with a Peas in a Pod piece I stitched and framed for his Valentine's gift one year, also waiting for a home.

Part of the problem is renting for so many years. We never hung a lot of stuff up on the walls, and even though we've been in our house for over two years, we've yet to hang up any of our stitching. Mind you, I have grand plans for several pieces, including some fruits and roosters in the kitchen (it's not as country as it sounds), more birds in the stairwell, some Celtic pieces in the front entry, and some other pieces upstairs. Some of it's stitched, some of it's just ideas in my head. With the exception of the pieces I mentioned aboved, none of it's really come to fruition. Yet. I'm getting there.

So, my point. I have a whole lot of questions.

• Who do you stitch for? Do you stitch more for yourself, or for gifts?
• Do you stitch with a finishing idea in mind, and do you favor one technique more than any other? (For instance, do you mostly stitch ornaments, or are you more of a framed piece person?)
• Do you display your finished pieces in your environment (home, office, etc.)?
• Do you automatically think "stitch" when it comes to a gift, or are you particular about who you will stitch for?
• How do you choose what to stitch for someone else?
  
• Have you ever had a gift rejected, or received in a way that hurt your feelings or surprised you?
• Is there someone you enjoy stitching for, or someone you will never stitch for again?

To Nick with love from Mommy and Daddy

I am very, very proud of this piece, as it's one of the few pieces I've stitched and framed AND hung on a wall in our own home. (More on that in another post). This is something my husband and I both worked on as a gift for our son. I stitched everything but the personalization before he was born, and my husband finished the piece by stitching in the name and the vital details.

Maine Fishing Village Sampler by Seguin Designs
Stitched 2 over 2 on Blue Dynasty Cashel fabric
with various threads
(name partially blurred for privacy)

We picked the piece from about a dozen options I found online. I never get hung up on searching for a specific birth record - I've changed a number of different charts to suit my needs. Of course, limiting yourself to just birth or wedding records can make the search less overwhelming, but you don't always find what you want, especially if you're not going for one of the more popular baby themes. I just look for something appealing that fits the theme, and figure out how to modify it from there, and if you look at the original sampler on the Seguin Designs site, you'll see I did quite a bit of modification.

In this case, my husband picked the Maine sampler because Maine is one of our most favorite places on earth and we hope to take Nick there some day soon. I also like that the piece was relatively simple, easy to modify and embodied some of my favorite "Maine" things including blueberries and lobster buoys. I even changed up the colors on the lobster buoys to add a little more color to the piece and more closely match photos of actual buoys I found online.

I stitched the piece while I was pregnant, and found the repetitive border to be rather soothing to stitch on those night when I was especially tired. When it was all finished, I ordered the frame from http://www.pictureframes.com/ and put my husband to work framing it up. Normally I would have picked a dark wood frame to coordinate with the furniture in the room, but everything else is framed in black, and I like how the black sets off the colors in the piece itself. By the way, if you're looking for framing materials, I HIGHLY recommend PictureFrames.com. They're a great site, their customer service is wonderful, and they have a very cool feature that allows you to upload a picture of what you're framing and play around with frames and mats so you can see what your piece will look like before you commit.

I have some issues with privacy which makes me feel a little uncomfortable sharing details of our private lives sometimes. However, I happen to be ridiculously pleased with how this room turned out, and wanted to share it. Especially since this room started out as what we called "The Princess Room" - pink walls, yellow ceilings, huge swirls, and gigantic flowers and butterflies painted onto the walls. Not really our taste at all, and definitely inappropriate for a boy.
As you can see, we went with a nautical theme, using Nautica William for the bedding, and hanging photographs of lighthouse and other beach / ocean related subjects on the walls. Well, except for the family pictures above the changing table. (Yes, I know it looks like it should be lower, but it's just out of the reach of a grabby little boy.)

One of the things I like best about the photographs on the walls is that most of them come from our own travels. There are photos from our honeymoon in the Outer Banks, from one of our trips to Maine, and also from Maryland and New Jersey.

Friends of ours gifted Nick with photos from their travels as well. Hanging above the chair are two photos from Massachusetts, taken and framed by my friend's very talented fiance, who has traveled all over the world taking photos.

Above the end table are photos of lighthouses and sailboats from another friend's journey to Scotland. (Yes, he did take those photos especially for me.) There is also a larger photo my husband took of a crab on one of our trips to Maine, specifically Bailey Island. You can't tell from the picture because we didn't think to use anything for scale, but the crab wasn't much bigger than a thumbnail.

I love this room. It's one of my favorite rooms in the house, and I love that it's a room that can grow with our son. I'm not a big fan of anything too cartoonish or over the top, so I am absolutely thrilled with how calm and serene this room is.

Non Stitchy Craft Project

It's entirely possible that I have too much time on my hands, and that perhaps I can get a little over the top. I've already admitted to being completely OCD when it comes to organization, so it shouldn't shock any of you that I decided to take on a project shortly before my son was born.

I read all the horror stories about moms finding unworn clothes - tags still on them!! hanging in the closet long after their child had outgrown them and was determined that wasn't going to happen in OUR house. But what to do? What to do? If there was only a simple solution that I could take way too far......

BABY CLOSET DIVIDERS!!

I could have taken the easy way out and purchased some, like these blue ones from Sugar Booger. Or ordered some custom made ones from this Etsy seller, Potatopatch. Viable options, sure. But it was just weeks before my son was born - the perfect time to take on a craft project, because really, as a first time mom with plenty of stuff to do already, it made perfect sense.

So I scoured the internet for tutorials, and found these super cute foam hangers here at Armelle and Spearmint Baby. However, they weren't really my style as I'm not much for the colorful, cartoon-y kid stuff (we'll see how well this goes over with my son in the future). And then I found THESE at Blissfully Domestic and I thought, "I can totally make them!" Naturally, I could not find the thicker wooden doorhangers, and ended up buying the thinner ones at Michael's, but they worked out fine.

My best advice for working with that thin, balsa like wood used for these hangers, and all kinds of boxes and other things in the "wood craft" aisles at the local craft store is "Sandpaper is your friend". A light sand on these pieces before painting goes a long way towards making a much nicer finished products, especially around the edges. I've even sanded the wooden embroidery hoops I've used for making ornaments, and the end result is a smoother, more refined wood nearly free of blemishes and ragged edges. I would also recommend a coat of primer (available with the acrylic paints) on these softer woods as they tend to suck up the paint pretty quickly.

Another thing I learned was to shell out a couple more pennies and buy the better acrylic paint. I used the Joann's brand acrylic paint because I liked the color names (Sailboat and Baby Blue), but will know better next time and will buy the Plaid or other name brand paint because it works much better. I had to use several coats of the Joann's paint to compensate for the streaky coverage.

Knowing that I had limited artistic talent and would not be able to freehand something I'd be happy with, I searched high and low for nautical themed scrapbook paper and stickers that would work with a decoupage technique. I looked everywhere, in every store, including discount outlets like The Christmas Tree Shop and Ollies.

Nothing.

I couldn't find a nautical / boat themed paper for a background, and every sticker was either cartoony or textured or raised or otherwise not at all what I was looking for, which is how the whole painting process came about. So I painted my six dividers - three in one color, three in the other - after sanding and priming of course. And then a genius idea struck - if I could not find stickers or decoupage things I liked, surely I could find CLIPART that would work. And it helps I am a font freak and have hundreds of them on my computer, so the lettering was no problem. Getting it onto the painted wooden hangers? Yeah, that was a problem, until another stroke of genius took hold. I designed the hangers on my computer because I'm good with layout and design (it's just the execution that gives me problems) and in no time, I had six lovely, nautical themed hangers designed on paper, just waiting to be transfered to the wooden ones.

I had originally intended to trace the design onto the hanger using a nail or something as a stylus, creating an impression in the soft wood that could be filled in with paint. Yeah, not so much. Back to the drawing board. Then I remembered pattern transfer paper that I had used in home ec class in high school, so back to the craft store we went. (Mind you, I was 8 months pregnant at the time) Transfer paper in hand, I gave it my best to transfer the designs to the hangers, and this time, it worked out. The filling in with paint, however, did not go as intended, but this is where my brilliant (and artistically talented) husband stepped in and saved the day.

Seeing as how he's much more patient than I am, I turned the project over to him, and he completed the painting, complete with shading and blending of various paint colors. Impressive! He also came up with the idea of some simple outlining that really made things look nice. So may I present....... Little Dude's Closet Dividers!!!

And yes, Little Dude's oh so clever Mommy has his hangers doing double duty. Once we get through the "infant" sized clothes, the reverse sides of the hangers are painted up with toddler sizes. All I need to do is flip them over. He'll be tired of them long before they outgrow their usefulness.

As a final step, which I did not photograph, I tied a wide, dark blue satin ribbon to the top of each hanger so it could be hung in the closet (we have closet organizers instead of the long wooden pole)

Home By the Sea is finished!

Home By The Sea by Designs by Pamela is finally finished!

Home By the Sea - Designs by Pamela
Stitched over 2 on 32 ct. with recommended threads

I started this back in June while on vacation with the family at the shore, and finished it up last week. It's my housewarming gift to myself and my husband for our first home. I knew as soon as I saw it at last year's Online Needlework Show that I had to stitch this piece - it's perfect for us. I did modify the original to include our family name (blurred for privacy) and the year we were married. The year I stitched it (and the year we bought the house) is stitched into the piece itself. I had debated stitching our house number somewhere on the house, but decided against it.

I plan to have my husband frame it similar to the model with the hooks in the frame so we can hang it by the laundry room door in the kitchen (we come in from the garage through the laundry room, so it's the perfect place for keys and such).

And this piece is extra special to me because my six year old niece helped me stitch a little on it while we were down the shore, and again this fall when we were all at my in-laws for a weekend. She can't do the stitching herself, and she had a hard time with the holes on such a high count fabric, but she did a good job pulling the needle and thread through once I got it in the correct hole for her. (Boy, does THAT slow the stitching down, but it's so worth it.) She asked me, "Aunt Jenn, are you EVER going to finish that?" but she's six. She has a short attention span. I can't wait to show her at Christmas that it's all finished up and just waiting to be framed!

Finally, some stitching related content

But no pictures!!

Actually, I've been absent from blogging as much because we were deep in the midst of a house hunt, which, fingers crossed, has been successful. We had our offer accepted on a house and are now working on removing our contingencies, namely acquiring a mortgage, getting a home inspection and a radon test. We're hoping they all go smoothly and we can be in our new house sometime in June. This is our new house:

It's 4 BR, 2.5 bathrooms with central air, a 2 car garage, and a basement. The yard is smaller than we originally wanted, and it's in a development, but I think it's going to be a great house. It's been on the market almost a year, and was priced well above other houses for sale. Finally, the owners relented and came down in price, something our real estate agent was really surprised about. But I really did my research - I was well versed in every house for sale in 2 counties and part of a third, and I knew the offer we made was low but fair. I'm just really glad they accepted it!

And now for the stitching related content...

I finished up most of the stitching on the small version of Acorns and Threads, and decided I didn't want to do the title or the alphabet in the top portion, so I'm currently working out what to change it to. I was thinking about making it a Welcome sign for the front hallway. I originally thought to put in Willkommen (my DH is German), but it doesn't quite fit in the font I'm using and I've already stitched in the border, so I'm not tearing all of that out. I might just look for a different font, or I could stitch the larger version and use the Willkommen for that instead. We'll see.

I've also started a new freebie by Pelin Tezer, called Moire. I'm doing mine in shades of teal green and will finish it as a biscornu. It's a very relaxing pattern to stitch and I think it will be beautiful when it's done.

So that's what I've been up to. I hope everyone is doing well, and now I am going to catch up a little more on my sadly neglected Google Reader!