Catching Up With A Punch Needle UFO

I'm doing a little workshop - an introduction to punch needle - with some of my Saturday morning stitchers in December. When I rounded up all the stuff last Saturday to do a little display, I remembered I had a UFO to complete.

It's Pumpkin Bouquet from The Old Tattered Flag. I bought it as a kit a few years back

 and got this far on it before abandoning it. 

Since it had an autumnal theme and I really only had the background to finish, I did some more work on it last night and this evening. Punch needle is pretty fast.

I finished the neutral background using all six strands of floss. This is the back.

and this is the front. 

The kit had 5 skeins of the background floss but I only used 2 of them. I have no idea how I'll fully finish it but I have some sense of accomplishment getting this much done. Next will be the darker part.

I use a Morgan hoop. It's a double-decker, lap stand. A regular hoop can be used but one must be careful to prop it against something and not just lay it across the lap. The punch needle is very sharp and could easily impale. This hoop has two diameters - 7" and 10" and the mechanism to grip the fabric to drum tightness. It is very expensive, though. 

I just checked Amazon and it's available there but I noticed  another brand (probably a Chinese knockoff) that has square hoops (like the Nurge hoops) about the same diameters at about half the price. In both cases, the hoops can also be used individually.

I popped into Kimat Designs today to pick up the rest of the floss I needed for my Smitten project. More work was done on it. I could have used DMC equivalents instead of the hand-dyed Gentle Art threads but for the large areas (red mitten and cuff) I like the look of the variegation.

The one colour I decided on the spot to get after seeing it in person was Gentle Art Cinders. It's the dark colour just inside each circle.

I'm not going to lie, stitching this is quite tedious. Because of the dyeing, the linen has bloomed so the holes on this 40ct are not very open. I generally use the sewing method of stitching - down then up in one motion - but on this project I really need to use the 'poke and pull' method. This is much slower than I am accustomed to. However I'm really liking the colours and I poked and pulled while listening to an interesting - yet depressing - audiobook. 

It's John Grisham's collaboration with Jim McCloskey called "Framed - astonishing true stories of wrongful convictions". 

Before DNA testing, many innocent folks were convicted of horrendous crimes based on bad police investigations, poor eyewitness accounts and testimony, and unqualified 'expert' witnesses. Several of the folks in this book were on death row and sadly, not all of them were exonerated before dying in the electric chair. Texas has put hundreds of people to death in their prison system at the penitentiary in Huntsville TX. I actually attended Francey and Rich's wedding in Huntsville 45 years ago. Some of the places cited in the book are places I either drove through back then or on one of the trips Skip and I took to south Texas for the winter - Palestine, Corsicana, Longview, etc.

Another thing I accomplished today was to wash the exterior, downstairs windows. I had been waiting for a sunny, cool day and today was the day. I had ordered microfibre covers for my Swiffer mop and they arrived yesterday. They fit perfectly on my Swiffer.  

I thought one of them would be really good for giving my windows a good scrub. I used hot water, about a cup of vinegar, and a small squirt of Dawn soap. The awesome thing was using the new 16" squeegee I bought at Canadian tire today. 

Screwed onto the extension pole I already had, it did a fabulous job of squeegeeing the soapy windows. It's much wider than the previous one I had used. I completed the task in about 3/4 of an hour. I hired the job out last year, mostly so they could do the upstairs windows but they didn't do a very good job and I didn't get around to hiring them again this summer. With winter coming on, I like the maximum amount of sunlight coming in during the day so the windows needed to be cleaned.

When I got home and after finishing the windows, I had some WhatsApp chats with Barb and Poppy who are in London. They attended the Knit + Stitch Show at Ally Pally (Alexandra Palace) and had lots to show and tell about. Jen1 and Jeanette head to join them this weekend, leaving tomorrow and arriving on Sunday morning, UK time. I am thoroughly enjoying living vicariously and look forward to more chats by text and seeing their photos.