Another Week Has Gone By...

I have been stitching and sewing this past week. I finished the "My Soul is Fed" piece and at some point will FFO it onto the big spool I purchased last summer at The Old Tattered Flag, outside of Watertown NY when we were on our road trip.

Both the stitching and the spool are 4 1/2" in diameter so with padding, it should make a cool pin cushion.

I modified the pattern a bit by doing satin stitch on the 'bobbins' rather than the called-for cross stitches

I did substitute a couple of colours from my vast stash of DMC floss. The fabric is 28ct MCG linen. It is quite irregular but very soft in hand to work with. I wish I had done one blue spool. I may pick out the dark purple spool and do and substitute a nice shade of blue.

I've been wanting to make myself a new thread catcher. The idea was inspired by Priscilla and Chelsea - The Real Housewives of Cross Stitch - and the small design boards they have been using to hold their flosses while stitching. I made a couple of them for Christmas gifts last year using this tutorial.

I raided my scrap bin 

and sewed some strips together randomly.

I zigzagged together a couple of scrap pieces of batting and put it on the wrong side of my little scrappy bit. Then I drew and then cut a circle out of the two pieces, using a circular container lid as my template.

I bound the pieces together with narrow bias tape and added a snap on opposing sides.

The place where I double-cut and zigzagged the scrap batting pieces together is easily seen but is not unsightly at all. On future ones I make, I will spray-baste the batting to the wrong side of the fabric.

It sits on the arm of my sofa and the batting easily grabs and holds the random floss ends (orts).

Then it folds up. And easily tucked into a stitching bag.

It looks like a taco so I'm calling it a 'thread-catcher taco'. I took only a few minutes to make from start to finish. Hand-sewn dome fasteners could also be used or even magnets glued into place between the two layers.

There was great excitement at my kitchen table this morning. The oriole Skip had seen last week actually fed from the 1/4 piece of orange I had just sat in the ant moat on top of my hummingbird feeder.

After he flew off, I grabbed another orange from the fridge, cut it in half, ran out, and rammed it onto the tip of the bird feeder crook. He came back a few minutes later and gustily fed for quite a while.

He is very handsome. I'm hoping he tells his Baltimore oriole friends about my feeder. I'd love to see lots of them there.

"I love to eat food that matches me!"

Google tells me they also like grape jelly and the best commercial one for them is the kind without high fructose corn syrup. Organic Smuckers and Welsh's apparently are HFCS-free. Of course, when I was doing my senior-hour grocery shopping this morning, I forgot to check for it on the shelves and pick some up.