Don’t you love it when you need just a little something more to qualify for free shipping? I am very pleased with this purchase and may take it to Staples to be wire bound so the pages lie open.
I also have this book which is more about small projects than about the stitching. Small projects are right up my alley!
This tiny dragonfly is my first attempt at beadweaving:
It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be, or as much fun. Oh well, it’ll make a cute little embellishment for a crazy quilt project someday.
I have so many projects going at once, I decided to create a project database. I chose these fields:
Project/Craft/Progress/Needed Materials/Location/EDC/Complete
EDC stands for Estimated Date of Completion. I listed 12 projects I would like to see completed soon. So far I’ve completed two and updated the progress on several. I’m pretty pleased with myself, and maybe this will help with my ADD tendencies.
I finished this piece of silk ribbon embroidery by adding tiny seed beads to the centers of the flowers instead of French knots. Here are a few lessons I learned while working on this practice piece:
Nancy Eha’s tip about sewing beads straight up and down through the fabric (90 degree angle) is a good one. It makes the beads, “sit on edge.”
Sewing through each bead twice for extra security is another of her good tips.
A number 9 “between” needle will fit through the tiny opening in a seed bead.
Long braided collapsible eye beading needles ARE NOT good for sewing beads to fabric. They are good for threading the tiny eye of a tiny #9 between needle.
YLI’s gold metallic thread does not shred and unravel like DMC.
I need something more than my finger to hold the “curl” of silk ribbon. I think a pencil or similar sized crochet hook might work well.
I got my pattern from this book, and if I had to give up all my craft books except one, this would be the one I’d keep:
I think I’ve posted this before, but the very best tip I ever got from watching Tipical Mary Ellen was this:
Save the tube from inside a roll of wrapping paper. Cut a slit in each end. As you take lights off a tree, slip one end of the string in the top slit, then wrap the lights around the tube. Slip the plug in the bottom slit. They’ll be tready to unroll without tangles the next year.
My front door went from this:
to this:
I’ve been in the basement off and on all day pouring some soaps for Christmas:
