A Couple of New Projects

When I'm not knitting new vestments for Daisy, I have been starting a new stitching project - Strawberry Thief - a William Morris design charted for cross stitch by Whoopicat on Etsy.

I'm only doing a portion of it - part of the bottom left quarter on navy 32ct linen. 

I'll have better photos tomorrow in good light. I really love the bright colours against the bright background. I will probably make a pillow or project bag out of this piece.

I also have become quite interested in doing a blackwork piece and found this Stitch Along (SAL) on the Steady Thread Blackwork SAL on Facebook. There are several options of layouts and I have selected the garden layout. Each week a botanical piece is released to stitch with blackwork in one of the spaces. Other layouts include squares, squares with a drop shadow, hexagons, and vases with flowers.  If you're interested click on the link above and click on 'Files' and download the various .pdfs and see if it appeals to you.

Every week for 49 weeks a little chart will be released. I'm already 11 weeks behind and I may or may not catch up with the group but it looks fun. I'm trying to decide what colours I'll use for the flowers. Hopefully lots of people will show their photos in progress and I can just copy what I like. I had the 16ct Aida in my stash and will do all the layout stitches first before starting to fill in the designs for weeks 1 - 11. 

I knit Daisy two cardigans yesterday with some lovely Jamieson's Shetland 2-ply yarn. I LOVE working with this yarn - it blooms so nicely when steamed and the stiches smooth right out. Again, when there's better light tomorrow, I'll show some pics.

Continuing Daisy's adventures from yesterday...

After Daisy and Curly arrived at her grandma's they had a lovely visit. Grandma had put out a sign that said 'No Wolves Allowed' so they knew they wouldn't be bothered by Big Bad ones or any other kind of wolf.

I got a few fiddly jobs done around home this morning. I replaced the innards of one of our toilets that was starting to go on the Fritz. I had installed a Korky in one of our other toilets recently so knew how to do it, reminding myself of the process by watching the YouTube video on the subject. It's REALLY easy to do and costs about a tenth of what it would cost a plumber to do it. 

The second fiddly job was to clean the ashes out of our fireplace. We've been enjoying a lot of cozy fires this winter, even though it hasn't really been cold for great lengths of time. I usually do it at the beginning of summer but this year, since we stayed home for the winter, there were a lot more fires so a lot more ashes.

The third fiddly job was to tighten the nut under the sink that holds our kitchen faucet in place. The faucet wiggles loose every once and a while so I have to crawl under there and tighten it up. After doing that several times over the past few years, I have it down to a science and it only takes me 5 minutes to do it. I know the exact flashlight and wrench I need to use. I have all our under-the-sink bottles in a tub that I just have to pull out and set aside. Then I climb under there on my back, reach up, tighten the nut, and I'm done. 

These jobs have been on my 'to do' list for a while so I'm glad I got off my butt to tackle them. I wanted to get them done before a Zoom chat I had scheduled for 11:30am. I also did some grocery shopping this afternoon. 

Now I'm going to sign off and start stitching the outline for my botanical blackwork piece.