My Stitchin-n-Stuff

Petite Christmas Angel SAL

Last week, we finished our angels.  I'm ok with my color choices and like the way she turned out, but I still have to decide how to finish her.  Any suggestions?

Mosquito Bites, Open Windows, Leaves and Spring Flowers

Early Spring Flowers -- Blooming in Winter

Our weather turned summer-like last week with temps in the middle 80's.  Our normal temps this time of year is mostly 30's with some days in the 40's.  With the warm temps come bugs, spring flowers and leaves budding out on the trees (and allergies in full force).  We've been really enjoying these warm days and evenings, cooking on the grill, eating outside on the deck, getting yard work done, but never would I have thought I'd get eaten up by mosquitoes in March!
 
With such warm, summer weather, I felt drawn to spring flowers not snowmen and Christmas ornies...

 
So, I stitched up Spring Basket (a members only design by Bee's Needlework for the TSS yahoo group) instead!  I'm thinking this might make a nice pillow for my bedroom, but I'm still tossing around finishing ideas.

Collecting, Craft Room and Computer Housekeeping

I have a problem, my dear friends.  I like to collect recipes, magazines, designs and STASH!  Do you know what happens when you've been collecting digital files of embroidery and cross stitch designs for years and have upgraded computers several times over those years?  Yep, I've got alot of digital files on my hard drive, CD's, a couple of external hard drives and even some floppies and USB sticks.  Now that my current computer is acting up, I decided I had better get things backed up just in case!  While I was backing up my files, I decided to organize the designs -- something I had always needed to do, but you know how you just put those things off.  It took hours to organize my thousands of digital files, but it's finally done.  Hopefully, I can stick with keeping them organized.

I need to tackle the magazines and recipes.  Ever since I was a teenager, I've torn recipes out of magazines and with some magazines, I just keep the whole thing.  Now, stitching magazines are ones I'll never part with, so those are neatly organized in my craft room.  But how to handle the recipes?  I always thought one day I'd copy those recipes down on cards and file them in my recipe box, but then the thought of all that writing kept me from actually starting it.  After collecting recipes all these years, I have a few boxes full of pages torn out of magazines.  I must admit, I don't even go digging through all those pages to find a recipe.  Maybe they'll be heading to the recycle bin -- after all, I can look up any recipe on the internet, right?

I've been very slowly trying to organize my threads and fabbies.  The threads are the easier part -- snack size baggies, gallon size baggies and several plastic shoe boxes.  It's the fabbies I'm stuck on.  Quite a few years ago, I subscribed to a monthly fabric club and kept the subscription for alot of years.  I've just been adding the fabbies to a large plastic box, but whenever I want to start a project, I have to search through the entire box.

What is the best way to store fabbies?  They were all sent folded nicely in individual plastic bags and that's how I've kept them.  Should I sort them by fabbie type, color, thread count or something else?

I'm a Winner!

I actually won something!  Thanks to Meari for letting me know she had seen me listed as a winner on the Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe blog.  You can read about the give-away here.  I won 4 skeins of plum floss.  My pics do not do justice to the deep, rich plum color of these skeins!

Quote for the week:  

        "I'm too blessed to be stressed!" 

Until next time...
Happy Stitchin'