Better Late Than Never

With all the visits to Doctors offices, Oncologist visits, hospitals, and emergency rooms last year, I had plenty of time to sit and do handwork. A lot of time to sit, and sit, and sit. I had decided to embroider our daughters all dish towels for Christmas. With 4 girls who all love coffee it was a fun and easy choice to make for the designs. I then chose colors to suit each daughter and one daughter-in-law-to-be.

After 12 dish towels I was tired of embroidery so I decided to teach myself to knit. I watched a YouTube video on making a dishcloth, had my daughter Jenny bring over the right size knitting needles, and she had some of the correct yarn, and I was on my way! There are so many wonderful cotton yarns out there so it was easy to find fun colors for each daughter. After 20 dish cloths I decided I'd made enough dish cloths and moved on to yoyos. But more on those later.

I then decided that aprons for each girl would be fun and perhaps some more towels, both done on the embroidery machine.

Well, with all the stress of the year of Cancer ( hubby is doing great, by the way!) and preparations for Christmas I realized I never got one single picture of all my work. Not one! Shortly after the discovery, I asked my daughter Shelly if she would get pictures for me. She finally got time to take the pictures...better late than never.

Here are Shelly's five dishcloths. She likes green and I love yellow.

These are the hand embroidered dish towels and the folded up apron that I did on the machine. The colors are brighter than they appear. Again. I had a blast picking colors for each girl. Jesse's apron had a red and black cup for her latte mug and matching colors for the rest of the gifts.

These are two of the recipe towels I did on the embroidery machine after I finished all the aprons.  I chose different recipes for each daughter too.

I truly had a blast making these for my girls. and they all had fun opening them. I wonder what I should get started on for this year!

Dyeing Wool for Woolin Rouge

When no one hears from me for a long time it is because of one of three reasons. I am either totally preoccupied with family, things such as illness or crazy lives, or my Fibromyalgia is really bad, or I'm really into something I love. As usual, it's been a little of all three, but the things I have been doing that I love involve wool.

 

Creating colors of wool for Woolin Rouge has been one of those things occupying so much of my time and I LOVE it.

 

I'm trying to come up with my own palette of wool that is specifically Woolin Rouge. Thankfully I have always understood color, hues, tints, and value so that helps.

When I have spent the day dyeing wool I feel like I've had a day at the spa.

 

 

One of the other things I've been doing to relax is hooking another rug. Joan Strausbaugh's Big Black Dog. I talked about it in my June 22, 2012 post.  I took a little artistic license and changed it just a tiny bit to look like my son's dog Buck. So far I have had a blast working on it. Thankfully it seems to be going much faster than the last two.

Back to the Studio to create some more wonderful wool!
P.S. It's really just my unfinished basement but I feel more special when I call it a Studio.