How did I not know about this fiber?!

I started working on Nora Corbett's The Moss Collector before a model came in last week, and it calls for four cards of Rainbow Gallery Petite Silk Lame' Braid--holy cow, is this stuff wonderful to work with! It is basically RG's silk thread with a metallic fiber woven into it, so it feels nice to work with, doesn't fray in the needle and gives a soft, shimmery effect. Here is how it looks on the card:

It's hard to capture the shimmer in a still picture; the white and very light pink here are the braid:

I like it so much that I signed up for the Monthly Bits Club at Stitching Bits & Bobs, so I'll get eight cards of this each month for as long as I stay signed up. I can definitely see using this for conversions in the future!

This is as far as I got on Moss Collector before I had to put her away, stitched on Polstitches Crushed Apple 32ct Lugana:

Luckily, the model I'm working on is another fairly small one, and I'm hoping to be done with it in another couple of weeks so I can get back to Miss Moss.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Blossom has bloomed

Yesterday I put the last beads on The Blossom Collector, and even though I'm not a big fan of pink, I think she's beautiful:

She has such a sweet face:

I ended up using the red and root beer beads that were called for in her dress, but played around with four other colors for her "swirls". I decided if she was collecting blossoms, she would be picking lots of colors!

I have a model coming in later this week, so that will be my main focus until it's finished. However, I have made a small start on The Moss Collector, so hopefully I can squeeze some time in on her once in a while.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Find a penny, pick it up...

...later on you'll find a duck? Yep, that is exactly the kind of luck I have.

I've been trying to get back into a walking routine for the past few days, and today I happened to see a penny in my path. Never one to pass up free money, I pick it up, even though it was tails-side up. Apparently, that whole face-up-to-be-lucky part is true, because about a mile later I ended up not with luck, but with a duck...ling. And it wasn't even that nice of a penny, as it's all dinged up:

A mile later I'm walking by a house and an older gentleman who I've exchanged greetings with in the past asks me to come help him catch a baby duck. It's a sad fact of the times we live in, but the first thing that pops into my head is that he's trying to lure me into some kind of trap! But we're outside on a fairly busy road and I'm pretty sure I can outrun him, so I follow him to the side of the house and sure enough, there's a duckling hiding in the shrubs. His Doberman had chased the mom away, and the duckling's peeps were drawing his cats to it, so not a good situation.

He finally manages to catch the baby, and then hands it to me, making it my problem! We wait a while to see if the mom comes back, but she doesn't, so now I hold this little life in my hands. Nothing to do but walk the last mile home with him/her cradled to my chest.

I put her (I'll call it a "her" just to make it easier) in, kind of ironically, one of my cat carriers while I call my vet. My cats, who usually run at the sight of the carriers, are fascinated by her peeps; they probably thought I'd brought them another toy!

Luckily, my vet told me about an avian rescue group about 20 miles from my house, so off we went:

Our timing was good, because the woman who runs the place said they were going to be busy this afternoon performing surgery on a peregrine falcon. She also said that they already had a solo duckling, so this little baby would have company right away. Here she is getting ready to enter her new (hopefully temporary) home:

So, it turns out that "lucky" penny cost me about $3 in gas and a $20 donation; but hey, I'm only out $22.99!

Sorry for the non-stitchy post, but I just had to share this little cutie. More stitching to come next week!

Edited to add a happy ending: the rehab center called just now and said that they were able to foster the baby into a wild duck family, so she is now back in the world with a new mom and eight siblings. I'm so happy!

Back to Blossom

Fittingly enough for spring in Wisconsin (finally, maybe...), I'm back to work on Nora Corbett's Blossom Collector. She just needs her legs, some more "swirls" and a bunch of bugle beads:

As charted there are two colors of bugle beads, red and root beer; I really love the red, but not so much the root beer. So, just in time for the finish, I received an order from 123Stitch today with four different colors of beads that I can play around with:

I'm hoping to have her finished up by the end of this coming weekend, so stay tuned to see which colors win out.

Today I also received a package from Polstitches, with two of the new Bothy Threads kits:

I really like that when you order these from Polstitches you can get fabric other than Aida. I got opal Lugana in both of these, though they mistakenly put non-opal in the Fairy Glade kit. Fortunately, as soon as I told them about it, they told me to keep this piece and they would put another piece in the mail right away; great customer service! Aren't the dandelions in Fairy Glade just adorable?

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!