Nora's Christmas Stocking

Around nine years ago Nora Corbett designed a little stocking ornament for a charity stitching group on Facebook. I joined the group and saved the chart but never stitched it, and actually didn't even know what it would look like when it was done. Someone asked about obscure Mirabilia/Nora Corbett charts recently, and it reminded me of the stocking ornament, so I decided to pull it out and stitch it. I was thinking it would take a couple of days, but for a small design it's fairly intricate and it ended up taking about five days (though I haven't had a lot of stitching time lately). It's a cute little design, and I'm hoping I'll get the urge to make it into an ornament in the near future:

The fabric is an old remnant that I no longer know the name of, but it looks like it's 32ct opal Lugana. I messaged Nora about the chart and she had me send it to Wichelt so that it can be offered as a freebie in the near future, so keep an eye on the Mirabilia site if you'd like to stitch this.

I sent my Queen City Retreat piece to SewMuch2Luv on Etsy, and just received a photo with a rough idea of what the finish will look like:

I'm really looking forward to seeing the actual finish. If anyone is interested, the retreat design has been posted and can be found here. The Queen City Stitch Retreat has their own site now, and they announced that the guest for next year is Autumn Lane Stitchery. The plan right now is to have another Mirabilia retreat in 2025, so hopefully that will happen.

Three Nora Corbett models arrived while I was in North Carolina, so I've been working on the first one for just over a month now. Stitching time will continue to be a bit limited with Thanksgiving this week, and then starting some Christmas decorating, but I'm hoping to have a finish within a couple of weeks. 

I'm not sure why but this past weekend I had a sudden urge to pull out Nora's Needle Fairy and put a few stitches in. I haven't touched her since 2013, but after Saturday she finally has some arms:

She's the third in a series of six Stitching Fairies, and probably my least favorite of the six. I've completed Floss Fairy and Pincushion Fairy (my favorite of the six):

The remaining three are Linen, Bead and Thimble Fairies. I'm going to try to work on Needle Fairy one or two days a week, just a length or two of floss at a time and see if I can get some decent progress on her.

Hope those who celebrate it have a wonderful Thanksgiving this Thursday!

Absolutely amazing retreat!

I flew out to Charleston, NC at the beginning of the month for a Mirabilia retreat, and I am so glad I did as it was so much fun! This was the first retreat that the hosts, Maggi and Amy, have ever put on, but you wouldn't know it from how well it was put together. I definitely hope to attend more of their retreats, even ones with a different guest designer.

The hotel was in an area billed as a "walking community", so there were a large variety of shops and restaurants within walking distance (round trip within about 1.5miles), and the weather was beautiful, so it was nice to get some exercise in between bouts of sitting and stitching. My table mates were Debbie, Mindy, Rachel and Chris (from left to right, with me in the middle and Nora sitting at her meet & greet table), and it was a very nice group to spend a few days with at table 17:

How fun is a photo booth?!

Every person won a door prize (which is pretty amazing because there were almost 150 attendees); my table number must have brought me luck because I won the OOP Adia the Garden Fairy:

However, I already have two Adia charts so I gifted it to Rachel, who is a relatively new stitcher. It was so nice to sit with a younger stitcher and see someone at the start of their stitching journey, but also odd because I don't feel that differently than I did when I was the younger stitcher!

There was also a table full of prizes that were raffled off on Saturday night. Everyone got some tickets in their welcome pack, but you could also buy extra tickets at a rate of 5 for $5; the proceeds from the sale of those tickets were donated to a local animal shelter. The grand total raised and donated was $5213, which is absolutely amazing!

The brag tables took up one entire wall of the room, and pieces were still stacked up in piles because there wasn't enough room to have them all displayed:

Even knowing how much better these designs look IRL doesn't prepare you for the so much blingy beauty in one space--it was almost overwhelming!

Nora Corbett did a meet & greet on Friday morning, then gave a talk on Saturday morning and the hosts did a Q & A with her as well:

She also spent time visiting tables and getting inspiration for possible new designs. Someone suggested doing Betsy Ross, so Nora spent some time with an attendee studying and sketching her hand movements as she stitched:

It was such a thrill to see her in action, after being a fan for so many (30!) years. And if Betsy Ross shows up as a chart in about a year from now, you read it here first! 

I took Silver Moon Tea with me, and spent Thursday evening working on her; basically, all I stitched was the teacup and the steam trails above it:

There was a chart designed by Nora for the attendees (which will be released a free chart for everyone at some point in the future), so I decided to work on that starting Friday morning. I bought a piece of fabric from Grace Notes Fabrics, who was a vendor in the room; it's called Melissa and it's on 36ct linen; this is how far I got by Saturday night:

I finished it last weekend, and am planning to send it to a finisher to have it made into a project bag using some of this great fabric that Maggi used to have notions bags made for all the attendees:

I had to laugh at this picture that Rachel took of Mindy and me scouring the floor for a bead that I dropped on the last night:

In my defense, it was a Magnifica bead, which are currently unavailable for who knows how long; I did end up finding it, as well as another bead that wasn't even mine, so I doubled the return on my time investment! I guess the person who dropped the other bead isn't as obsessive as I am...

On the trip home I had a 6-hour layover at O'Hare, so I improvised a truly portable stitching stand and spent the time working on a Mill Hill kit:

The time really flew by and I was sad to see it end, but I was pretty tired by the time I got home, and it's always good to see my guys and critters. Maggi and Amy will be announcing their 2024 guest in a couple of days, and I'm hoping to be able to get into that event set for next October--fingers crossed!

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Hardly any stitching

In the past couple of weeks I have been doing some charting work, so my stitching time has really suffered. The only thing I worked on was Quilting A-Bee-Cs, and so far I only have one color from part 3 finished:

I've been charting a couple of things; the first was a hand drawn chart by Nora Corbett that she gifted to her Patreon subscribers:

Nora suggested that "hand" could be replaced with the stitcher's name, so I decided to do that (luckily the capital M had already been charted!), and I changed the single blue flower to pink because I just couldn't get past one flower in a different color:

Then, since I was already working with the charting software, I decided to test out an idea I've been pondering for a while. I've always loved the skirt portion of Lavender & Lace's Angel of Love (which was actually designed by Nora for her mother's company), but I've never really liked the top portion of the design. I was wondering if the top of Mirabilia's Angel of the New Dawn would look good with the Angel of Love skirt, so for the past several days I've been working on a mashup of the two. I still need to do some tweaking of the chart, and I'll be converting the beads from round to cylindrical, but I think I'll be able to make it work. Here are the two designs:

And here's a rough draft of the mashup:

I'll probably start working on it sometime after the retreat, which I leave for next Wednesday. Right now I'm starting to get everything together for the trip, and I'm probably not going to get much stitching done in the next week. It's been quite a while since I worked on a Mirabilia so I wasn't sure what stitching to take; I went through my WIP bin and found Silver Moon Tea, which was last worked on about 10 years ago--at a retreat, funnily enough! This is the last photo I found of it in my blog:

I might have done a bit more on it than this; if I did, I'll take a photo before the retreat so I can see how much progress I make. I like this one because it's fairly small in size, so I can take moderately sized Qsnaps, and it won't take a lot of room to work on at a shared table. There is also going to be a chart by Nora handed out, so I'm taking a few fabrics in case I decide to work on that instead, but it's hard to pick a fabric without knowing what the design looks like!

I'm also expecting Hands on Design's final Gather Round kit to arrive later this week; it turns out Cathy did surprise us (or me, anyway) by making it "Gather Pinecones" instead of "Gather Snowflakes". I think it might be my new favorite of the set:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Appleton/Green Bay Tiny Town is done

I finished my personalized Heart in Hand Any Town Tiny Town last week, and while my buildings would probably have fit better in a Medium Town, I am pretty happy with the result:

Here are the three buildings I replicated:

I have three Tiny Towns completed now that I want to send to my finisher, but unfortunately, I've already missed the cut off to have them done this year. By the time she'll be ready to take them I'll have at least one more town done (Harvest Tiny Town), and possibly more if Cecilia releases another one in a few months. Harvest will be my ninth; I'm glad I started these fairly soon after the second (or third?) one was released so I can keep up with them as they are released--such a fun series!

I decided to start on part 3 of Quilting A-Bee-Cs instead of Owlvira's house, since part 4 should be available at 123Stitch in two or three weeks; I don't want to get too far behind on a fairly large design and then have it end up in the WIP bin for years. I haven't made a lot of progress since I spent quite a bit of the weekend cleaning, but I'm hoping to get a lot done this week:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Autumn would be my favorite season...

...if it weren't followed by winter! I'm always a bit sad this time of year, knowing that we're heading for shorter days and colder temps; February is the shortest month of the year but I'm already dreading how long it seems to take to make it through to March. Not that March is noticeably better, but at least there's the tantalizing possibility of that first little peek of spring, and knowing that soon everything will be turning green and there'll be beautiful weather ahead for months to come.

We're actually having a mini heat wave here for a few days, hitting around 90F during the warmest part of the day, but we recently had some pretty cool days so I made use of them by getting most of the fall clean-up yard work done already. I'll probably do a bit more trimming on some of the bushes and trees, but it's nice to have the bulk of the work finished this early, especially since I'll be heading to North Carolina one month from today for a Mirabilia retreat that Nora Corbett will be attending. It's getting close enough now that I need to start figuring out how to pack so that I can just take a carry-on bag, and my flights have already been changed a couple of times so when it gets a bit closer I'll have to figure out if I need to change anything with those. I wish it was close enough to drive, but I know I would go crazy being in a car for that long!

I haven't been doing a lot of stitching because I've been busy outside, but I did finish part 2 or Erica Michaels' Quilting A-Bee-Cs:

Part 3 has arrived, but I'm not sure when I'll get to it at this point. I was going to work on it after I finished my Any Town Tiny Town, but Just Nan released another amazing 3D house design that I've already kitted up and that I'm excited to start:

The main part of the house is stitched together on one piece of fabric in a cross shape, then sewn together. The chart has every side being stitched in the same orientation on the fabric, but that means when it is assembled some of the sides will have the top legs of the stitches going in a different direction than some of the other sides. I think when I stitch it, I'll probably turn it as needed to make sure all of the sides have the stitches going the same way when assembled (since I'm just weird that way!).

First, I need to finish my Any Town, which I should be able to do tonight or tomorrow; I need to finish the flower shop, add a tree next to it and then go back and add some French knots and buttons:

I was concerned that the buildings I designed would be too big and they are, but I couldn't really get them any smaller and still make them look like the originals so I'm just not going to worry about it! Someday I'll probably stitch the town as charted, though probably not for a while since I still have Harvest Tiny Town to get to.

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

Almost time to stitch a Tiny Town

I received the Any Town Tiny Town chart a couple of weeks ago, but I decided to finish up the Hands on Design Polar Plunge and Gather Pumpkins pieces before I started it. I also still need to finish charting another local shop; I have the basics now, but I need to refine it:

This was going to be my next start, but then Cecilia released Harvest Tiny Town and Frill, and I think I'm probably going to start it when it arrives since I really love the color palette:

Right now I'm still working on part 2 of Erica Michaels' Quilting A-Bee-Cs, which I'm hoping to finish tonight:

Part 3 should be arriving at 123Stitch soon, so the plan is to start that after the Harvest Tiny Town. I have to say that while I'm enjoying getting some of these smaller designs stitched (and even fully finished!), I'm starting to get the itch to work on a Mirabilia design--missing the pretty ladies!

Finally, I was able to finish Amy Bruecken's Moonlight Magic last week, stitched with Classic Colorworks on PTP Crystal Haunted:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!

My first Friendstitch

Friendstitch is an online retreat hosted by the designers of Heart in Hand Needleart and Bent Creek, which I hadn't heard of until recently. This year is the fourth time they've had it, and I think this is the first time that they've split it into two "pop up" events; this past Saturday was the Halloween PopUp Gathering and then there will be a Needlework PopUp Gathering in October. I received the box with the charts, supplies and miscellaneous goodies on my birthday, which made it even harder not to open, but they were pretty clear that we weren't supposed to open it until the Zoom event (and I am nothing if not a rule follower!):

So, I was good and held onto it until the retreat and it was a lot of fun to open and explore with everyone else. There was some candy in there (but not in the photo that I took today because it's already gone!), a little notepad and a couple of little Halloween decorations, a great tote bag and then there were the stitchy goodies:

This was also the first time that they had a special guest, and she was perfect because she has such adorable Halloween designs--it was Amy Bruecken, and she designed this sweet little chart for the retreat:

I'm hoping to get that pumpkin finished tonight (or, more likely, tomorrow), then I'll probably stitch the crow and leave the larger chart for last. I really like all of the designs and am happy that I signed up for this without knowing exactly what was involved. Now I'm looking forward to the Needlework PopUp in a couple of months.

While I sat waiting to find out what was in the box, I worked on part 2 of Erica Michaels' Quilting A-Bee-Cs, which still isn't finished:

I've been stitching one color at a time for this part, and it's been fun to see it come together in this way. I'd say I'm about halfway done with this section, so not horrible, but I don't know if it will be completed before part 3 arrives. Must stitch faster!

My son has been subletting an apartment in Madison this summer, so my husband and I drove down there for a day to visit and tour the area; we had a really nice day, though it was about 90F and it felt good to get home that evening. It's about a 2-hour drive, so I took a Mill Hill kit (Kitty Treats) with me to work on in the car, and then I finished it a couple of days later:

And today I finally took pictures of the last two pieces that I got back from the framer recently; they are Dog and Cat Lessons for People by Lizzie*Kate, which I stitched back in 2011/2012:

Hope everyone has a great stitchy week!