Stitching and Reading

This is the quilt square I just finished for a child at Love Quilts I love the dog in this chart! I haven't been doing as much cross-stitching as in the past few years but this one was fun to do.

I also finished Latte Trouble recently. I liked it. The author includes so much information about the coffee industry and whatever other 'theme' is in the individual book. This one centered around the fashion industry.
And I got ten more scrapbook pages done tonight. It goes fairly quickly since I have the photos cropped, trimmed and grouped. The scrapbook is for DD17's graduation party. She wants to be surprised (I made one for DD18 so DD17 knows it is coming) but keeps asking me if she can come sit with me while I am working on it. She did see a couple pages tonight and liked them.

Cross stitching finishes

I completed 2 cross stitch projects this week. The first is a bridal shower gift for a young lady at church. She is registered for multiple colors of Fiesta ware so I thought this colorful bread cloth would look nice on her table. I will add a couple gourmet muffin mixes in the gift box. For her wedding gift, I purchased the muffin top pan from her registry.



The second piece is a square for Love Quilts. This one is for a little girl who loves the EMS Baby Animals.
I am also going to do the pig baby in memory of my Aunt Ruth who collected pig figurines and other knick knacks. Her dad (my grandfather) was a farmer and had pigs and cows. Guess they reminded her of her youth.

God's timing

I love it when things happen that reveal to me God's perfect timing. I moderate a Yahoo group that stitches squares for charities that make quilts for sick children and we often do a stitchalong for a particular theme to help the charity gather a 'stash' of squares for emergencies when a child cannot wait the 9 months or so that it takes to do a complete theme just for that child.
Recently the group decided to do a stitchalong of the EMS Baby Animals and planned to send the squares to some of the charities. The ladies really fell in love with these cute little critters and we had 20 signups in no time.
This week Love Quilts opened a new child (Breonna) who wants a quilt of EMS Babies. So we have a home for all those squares before we even send them. Some will be duplicates of what others stitch but they may have to use duplicates to get the 35 necessary to make the quilt. Any that they cannot use for Breonna's quilt will be stored in the Any Child stash for emergency cases. Only God could have known that the need would be there!
Here is a picture of the chart I am stitching- I am almost halfway done.


And these are my favorites of the ones that our group has already completed - I couldn't choose just one :-) These were stitched by Raynett (TX) and Wilma (WA).

Cross stitch squares

These are 2 more quilt squares that I stitched. I did these on Saturday. They stitch up quickly and once I start one I want to see it finished. They remind me of pencil sketches, so it makes me feel like an artist. (Jill, I know you are doing the skater also but duplicates are okay since these will be donated to Love Quilts for emergency needs.

These are for a stitch-along at Cross Stitching for Charity (CSFC). This is an online Yahoo group that I moderate. We encourage each other as we stitch for various charities that make quilts or pillows for people who are sick. These will probably go to Love Quilts.

The CSFC group has several stitch-alongs going at a time. For this one the participants are all stitching these sports figures that are done with a single color of floss. We are using many different colors so they will be a rainbow of designs when we are done. Someone donated a big stash of floss to the group because she no longer did cross stitching so I sent everyone who signed up to stitch a square a skein of floss.

These are quick stitches but they are challenging because you have to keep the back of the square really neat or the colored thread will peak through the little holes in the cloth. So I decided to scan the backs of my squares too. I know some stitchers who scan the back of all their projects to 'show off' how neatly it was done. With quality stitching, the back should look like a mirror image of the front. How do you think I did on these?