A little chicken feeder

My husband and I love to go to a little downtown street festival a city in our area holds each month. There's live music, food and vendors selling everything from antiques to plants. We picked up a chicken feeder that I thought would be cute to use as a planter. When I was working late one day, my husband suprised me by planting it with succulents we had been collecting and hanging it up next to our patio.

 

 

We have a chain link fence separating the backyard from the alley that we are in "stage one" of camoflaging. We're planning to plant some jasmine vines all along it, which will look great eventually twining around the chicken feeder. Baby steps!

What I'm Working on Wednesday

Wow! Green! Even though I was enjoying that yummy blue silk, it's nice to finally hit one of the other two colors.

Waste canvas: not just for sweatshirts and geese

I first learned to cross stitch in junior high school, but got really into it in the early 90s when I was in college. I guess it was a stress-buster during breaks from studying, juggling work, etc.

Remember back in the 80s-90s when many of the cross stitch designs were cute little geese and teddy bears and Christmas nutcrackers? I decided that it would be great to have some sweatshirts or t-shirts with these kinds of designs stitched into them and bought some waste canvas to make it happen.

Fortunately good sense or lack of time prevented it from happening. Meanwhile, I've had this waste canvas in my stash all this time, and I finally pulled it out for my crazy quilt project.

I think you're supposed to baste it onto your fabric, but it was such a little piece that I just used a couple of pins. The stitch count is very high - maybe 14 ct - so I had to search for a motif that was small enough to fit onto a little patch. I settled on some cutie birds from Blackbird Designs.

After stitching, I trimmed the waste canvas close to the stitching. Since the directions had gone missing long ago, I couldn't remember if you were suposed to wet the canvass to loosen the starch/glue that tacks the fibers together, but I didn't want to wet the border, which worked out to be fine. I pulled out the stitches with tweezers.

All done! Oops, except for a missing stitch on the first bird's tail. Well, good thing I was looking at the photos while I'm still in the middle of it all. :)

What I'm Working on Wednesday

For a long time, I've been wanting to make a crazy quilt wall hanging for my son. I have a photograph of him from when we went hiking and camping at Goose Island State Park that I love, so I thought I'd make it the centerpiece of the little quilt.

I printed the photo on fabric and pieced together the borders some time ago. Then I got distracted by holiday gift crafting.

Now I've been able to rejoin one of my stitching groups that meets once a month so the time is perfect to pull it back out.

Most of the work so far has taken place on the bottom border. Alexander liked the macrame lace. I stitched his monogram and added one of his Boy Scout patches. I have plans for some beading on many of the seams.

A while back I stumbled across a wonderful book at the Half Price Bookstore. I've since learned it's out of print and considered quite a treasure on the used book market. I don't think I paid more than $12 for it and it's going for $50-$1000 online. Wow!

The stitching in it is really wonderful. Alexander picked out a few motifs that he liked and I started with this fish. I like how it turned out for a first attempt.

Now I'm going to have to figure out the seams and border around the photo so it doesn't look like the fish is biting Alexander in the behind.