It's coming. I know it doesn't feel like it but the best season of the year is on the way. I went on a little craft crawl to a couple of my favorite local shops and picked up some Cosmo floss and a few fat quarters for fall finishing projects.
It's been a long time since I got a new piece of pottery. We don't have as many local potters here as we did where we used to live, so our pottery collecting has slowed significantly. However! While looking for something else (isn't that always the way?) I stumbled across this gorgeous little bread baker from an Ohio potter. It makes a very small loaf, just right for two people. Since I'm always on the look-out for small bakeware to feed my tiny baking obsession, I snapped it up. I am absolutely delighted with it and can't wait to try it out when fall baking season rolls around. Happily, it comes with a dozen recipes! (If you're a pottery nut, click on the "pottery" label at the end of this post to see some of my collection.)
Tiger Lily did not miss out on goodies. She has a passion for tissue paper and whenever something arrives in the mail wrapped in it, the tissue paper goes to her.
I pulled this little village from the much larger design Halloween Quaker from Lila's Studio. I just love the contrast of the bright window colors with the black and dark grey. It has a cheerfully spooky look! I used the recommended PTP Murky in 32 ct. linen, and the recommended threads, except for the CC Black Coffee. My skein of Black Coffee was almost entirely black and didn't provide enough contrast with the DMC black, so I used GAST Onyx instead.
There are a couple of other small motifs in this large design that I'd like to pull out and stitch. We'll see how many projects I can squeeze into my Summer of Halloween. Can you believe summer is half over?
Look at my Bluebonnet stitchy tools, y'all! For those who don't know, the Bluebonnet is the state flower of Texas, and let me tell you, if you've never seen a field of Bluebonnets in the springtime, you've missed a treat. I found the scissors here a few weeks ago.
There's a lot of black in the Halloween design I'm currently stitching and I've been having to pick out a lot of Tiger Lily fuzz, so I decided I needed a pair of tweezers just for my needlework. Just any old tweezers wouldn't do, so I went hunting, and by happy accident, found matching Bluebonnet tweezers here! How adorable are these tools?
One of the best things about having a hobby is the toys that go with it. Happy Stitching!
This is Happy Halloween by Silver Creek Samplers, stitched with the recommended threads on 28 ct. Wren from PTP. It's in the 2013 Just Cross Stitch Special Halloween Issue, and it's also available as a separate chart. ***If you stitch this, be on the safe side and get TWO skeins of GAST Wood Trail. I only made a couple of minor changes. I didn't stitch the tips on the kitty's ears and I moved her eyes a bit further apart (three stitches between them instead of one).
I also altered the jack-o-lantern's face just a bit.