Annies Crazy World

With the change of background colour for the new month the seam is also covered with a change of colour, the grass which has been brown for so long turned green with the rain and grew, some of it has been mowed.

and with the new month autumn has blown in with the wind.

Febuary was a buzy month when I got a few things done to the house…when I sat down with Sharon to work out which events I would include on my sampler, I started with a written list on a small piece of paper (see image below), when Sharon interpretted pink insulation bats as pink Bats I drew a roof with bats flying around in it and before I knew it we had incorperated all the events on the list into a cartoon style drawing of the cross section of a house…I am still working out how to interpret some of the drawing but am posting the detail in progress so that I can keep the sequence of the sampler in order but still go on posting the TAST II stitch before the next one is out. I will add the finished detail and point back to it when I have it finished.

I have pulled my box top out again and am aiming to do at least one seam a month which means that it could be done by the end of the year

It was meant to be Thorn Stitch (a variation of feather stitch) but as I got near to the end of the seam I looked at the instructions again and found that I had been doing something different….

And so to my sampler, the first thing to notice is the change of colour, I have decided to change the colour every month with the alternate months being different colours.

the top band is the stitch as I did it on my boxtop

the second band is how i reinterpereted the instructions

but still it didn’t look like the picture, another look at the instructions from which band 3 was done.

the instructions I was following where some I had printed at a very small size (to make them handy to carry in my sewing box), me thinks now that they were to small, after referring back to the full size intructions the 4th band is Thorn Stitch.

What did I learn from this stitch?…I learnt that miss reading instructions can be a good way to come up with different stitch variations.

the short seam on the left is raised band feather stitch.

Tonights detail is a tribute to my daughter, poor coordination when she was a baby was one of the early indications that she had problems, as a child she never did well at any sporting activity and when she started ten pin bowling, I didn’t expect anything different, we bowled for the fun but over the years she has continued to improve, it’s like the bowling helped her coordination and the better coordination has helped her bowling…last year she joined the disabled bowling league and last month she played her first tournament, she had no expectations other than to have fun and enjoy the experience, she was surprised and absolutly delighted when she won 2 silver medals.

The flag charm is for Australia Day.

Tonights detail is the statistics of my sampler at the 2 year mark.

last year I added the first baby elephant to be born in australia to my sampler, now On the 16th of January another baby elephant was born in Australia, this second little elephant is a girl. I have left space to add her name when I know it.

I have always loved elephants, the image to the right is some of the elephants in my collection.

I started the new year by flying to north with my sister for our youngest brothers 40th Birthday, the quote ‘the most bautful baby ever brought home’ is what I wrote in his baby book when I was 13 years old, the miss spelling has become a family joke.

we have 2 brothers living in north queensland, both live on the same road and between them they have 4 kids and as spending time with the our neice and nephews was a very special I chose to illustrate our holiday as a kids drawing.

Today is 2 years since I started my sampler…I haven’t quite caught up on stitching the Journal events but am nearly up to date, todays details bring me up till christmas, and hemming the bottom and binding the edges to finish the panel takes a few days, so I am happy with my progress

Below are the 9 panels of my sampler shown side by side

I have cross stitched my little blue car for the last weekend of November when I drove to Nowra to visit a friend…we shopped in Kiama, lunched at Berry, talked and stitched and went to the Nowra Quilters meeting and had a lovely time.

While I was there I took a photo of her sampler (see below) and have added some of her stitches to my sampler.

As the day I returned was the first day of Summer I have slipped Summer in as one of the rows of cross stitch patterns.

While I was there I kept my fingers buzy stitching the Celtic block below, it was an extra block for a charity quilt that my friend had started and I was able to save her the time of stitching it down…I used one side of the pattern to embroider on my sampler.