Stash Update and Summer Plans

Happy summer, y'all! Stumbled across a couple of sales and found some great goodies!

Top to bottom: R&R Iced Cappuccino, Rosemary (don't know the manufacturer), and Wichelt's Natural Brown Undyed, which is my go-to neutral. I was thrilled to find a scrap of the Rosemary. It's one of my very favorite greens (slightly obsessed with green fabric, for my new readers) and naturally it's been discontinued for years. Every once in a great while, somebody digs out a scrap from their stash and puts it up for sale, and I snap it up. It's like Christmas. It's a bit more green than this picture.

With Thy Needle and Thread goodies from the sale...

Plum Street Samplers Christmas Tea on sale. I considered buying this and stitching it up for my Christmas Open House last year (click on the Open House 2018 tab at the top of the page for tea madness!) but I was too pressed for time. 

The longhorn pin pillow is for my Texas smalls collection that you can see in my last post. The alphabet sampler is destined for a color conversion. I've never done an alphabet sampler but something about this one struck me. I just like it. So now it lives here.

And speaking of things I've never stitched before, this is my first Long Dog Samplers design. If you're a regular reader, you'll know this is gonna be in color! Prepare for a story: We have our library downstairs in this new house, and there's a wall that desperately needs needlework on it. I've got two pieces chosen for it, but I needed a third. The other two pieces are Twelve Days of Christmas and Antique Beasts and Birds. Both are my own color conversions I stitched on the Natural Brown Undyed linen I mentioned above, with Caron Wildflowers. I thought it would be cool to do a third piece on the same fabric, using the same threads, so I went looking for a design and found this one. I have a color scheme in mind, but y'all know what it's like trying to get the right colors online without being able to see them in person. It may take me a while to get what I want, but I hope to start on it this summer.

So in addition to (hopefully) starting Carrelage, catching up on the Christmas Ornament SAL, working on my Christmas Open House 2019 (!!!), finishing, and framing, I'm thinking of doing some vintage cooking and sharing the results. I've got a treasured collection of vintage cookbooks dating back to 1879 that I love to read like most people read a novel. The other day, I was pondering what kind of mischief I could get into this summer, and it occurred to me that I read these cookbooks as history books but have never tried any of the recipes. Then I thought, "Hey! That would be kinda fun for the ol' blog!" Some recipes adapt well to modern methods and ingredients, and some don't, so I'll have to choose carefully, but I think it would be neat to try a few and share them here.

As if all that wasn't enough, I also have my eye on a set of felt Christmas ornaments that I might make for my (pink!) sewing room Christmas tree. But we'll see. There's a saying in the military that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is 1,000% true. All of my lovely summer plans may be derailed by who-knows-what, but at least for now, I'm enjoying being able to make plans that don't involve moving. 

I hope y'all have a nice summer planned, and don't forget, you're warmly invited to drop in any time and see what I'm up to. Fingers crossed, I'll have a lot to share.