Spring Cleaning

Before I get into the real subject of this post, here's a quick progress check on the TTT:

I finished the front (yay!) and started the first sleeve. I have to admit, I had a bit of trouble making this work. Some time after I split for the neck, I realized I had way too many stitches on one side. I had to carefully rip back, while counting the rows. Then, since my scratch paper was getting kind of messy, I had to do a bunch of math to figure out where I was in each set of shaping. (And this was while trying to watch X2. I finally just put the knitting down. And yes, I am very upset about Jean.)

So now on to spring! I think I've mentioned before that I'm the kind of neat freak that gives us all a bad name, right? My room has to be spotless, or I start getting really annoyed and end of cleaning at 6 in the morning just to stop the insanity. Ahem. Anyway, although I am not the kind of person that needs a push to clean, I did start to feel it this weekend. On Saturday I put away my heavy sweaters and pulled out my summer clothes, and yesterday my dad helped my manhandle my mattress so all the bedding could get washed. (Thanks Dad!) I also helped my brother clean out his closet for the first time in years (he did not inherit the clean gene), which is where these come in:

Nice new/old bins! I used to have these in that spot:

but my brother and I got rid of so much junk I got to have four sliding bins. Much easier than having to move all of the stacking bins to get to the bottom one! Here's a quick peek at what I'm storing in them:

The top drawer is mostly knitting, but I do have my crochet hooks and a bit of thread in there, too. As you can see, I am due to make another needle roll for my DPNs. The next two drawers are both sewing:

First, I have some patterns and notions. The blue tray goes in a sewing box, but I have so much fabric I had to take it out! :) The next drawer has felt and some floss. I had no idea before today, but I actually have a lot of DMC floss. What you see there doesn't have numbers (and a few aren't DMC), and everything else was sorted into my system. You may remember that I hit a roadblock with the HP cross stitch when I realized how much floss I needed to buy. Well, this may have solved part of the problem! I need to create an inventory of some kind so I can figure this out, but hopefully at least a few of the colors I need are in those bags.

The final bin is my repurposing bin, which is currently kind of hard to open. This is mostly because of the large number of old jeans that are in there, waiting to be made into something awesome. Once I start using some of those, it'll be a lot neater.

I'm looking forward to looking more closely at the floss, but right now I have to go read forty-odd pages on Tesla. You jealous?

RDJ Marathon

First, check it out:

That's about 3-ish inches of the front of the TTT. (That was completed during the viewing of Sherlock Holmes (with Robert Downey Jr.), an excellent movie. Creepy, but excellent.) Plus I worked on it a little this morning. I feel like the front might go a little faster than the back, and not just because it's less knitting (I think, don't hold me to that). I am seriously in the rhythm of the 3x2 rib, and when I get in the zone, I can really zoom through it.

I'm going to have to move my focus of the TTT for the next week, because I need to make five little hats representing five of the jobs of the president. That's fun stuff, right there. I've drawn out little pictures and planned everything out, so this week is going to have a lot of itty-bitty sewing. I've got a baseball cap, two top hats, a construction hat, and a captain's hat. And no, I have no idea how I'm going to pull this off!

If you don't want to read about anything but crafty stuff, have a great day, and I'll see you tomorrow!

OK, we're good. I think I mentioned last week that I was going to watch Iron Man with my brother, right? We did. And then we watched Iron Man 2. Right after. Let me tell you, that is unprecedented in our house. And it was awesome!!!!!! I completely loved both movies, and I just found out that Iron Man 3 is coming out on May 3. Even more awesome!!!!!! Then on Saturday night, we watched Sherlock Holmes (again, unprecedented) and it was also spectacular. So basically my weekend was like a Robert Downey Jr. marathon with a ton of homework in between. Not bad!

I also redid my desk yesterday afternoon, which basically just means that I took everything off, dusted the whole desk, then put everything on in a different way. This is what I do for fun. Sad, no? Anyway, I want to do the same with all my craft stuff. The way I have it now is working, but I want it to be even better. This will take more planning, but I'm looking forward to it! (After the hats. Gotta stay focused on the hats.)

What post?

OK, so I know I said I was going to have an awesome post yesterday, but I didn't. I had a few things that didn't go well, and by the time I would normally post, I made this guy:

look like the Class Optimist.

Anyway, I did actually cross stitch this weekend!

I think this was Saturday night.... maybe.

This is right now!!!!

My goal is to have this done by the 15th, and for the Slytherin one to be done by the 30th. I don't know if I can do it, but I'm definitely going to try! I did a lot of work on this while watching the election coverage, and other TV things. (I don't normally watch a ton of TV, but it very good for working on cross stitch!)

I am now going to show you how I am organizing my embroidery floss right now. I have six baggies:

that have bundles of thread in them. Each bundle has the label tied to it with the floss that has already been cut off. The bags are labeled by number:

and I just tole the numbers from the first website I clicked on. That's creativity, right there. As I get more thread, I may need to relabel them with smaller chunks, but this'll work just fine for now.

My other pastime for this weekend (well, not the only other one) was looking at funny Harry Potter icons. (If you're not a HP fan, you can stop reading now. Bye!) I'm going to put one at the bottom of my posts for a while, because they made me crack up laughing! Here's the first one:

I do actually like the Twilight Saga (cant wait for BD Part 2!) but I am loyal to HP! Have a great day!

A Parade of Two

Here is my parade of two for today:

That's two WIPs out of the way, which isn't bad for one weekend, right? Here is the detailed, descriptive list of my other WIPs I want to finish:

1. I have a cross stitch kit for a hummingbird coaster, which I started a few months ago. (Well, I say kit, but it didn't come with thread.) Anyway... I kind of messed up the pattern, and I'm not sure if it's something I can just live with. I might need to rip out the offending stitches and redo them. My goal: finish
2. I would like to get a good start on my HP cross stitch project. There are a lot of bits and pieces to it, and I do need to do some research to figure out what thread I need, but I will be starting this soon. My goal: buy/find all thread and do the four house emblems (center rectangle)
3. In my latest WIP count, I mentioned that I wasn't going to finish the needle holder until I had accumulated all the sizes of DPNs, but that I wasn't going to just buy them all. For my work on this, I will just be sewing the first six sizes, all of which I have. My goal: sew the "pockets" for sizes 000-3 
4. For my brown skirt, I honestly would just like an idea of what I'm doing with it. If I can, I would like to implement this, and right now, I'm thinking about getting another zipper and sewing it in by hand. My goal: figure out and (hopefully) finish the closure
5. You know, I just realized I should probably put the etching projects on here. Just saying. They need an Exacto knife and a free afternoon. My goal: finish
6. Oh boy. The sequin skirt. Here's my plan. While I work on all of these other things, I will sew on ten sequins every day. Then I'll see where I'm at, finished-wise. There are a lot of sequins, though! My goal: sew on ten sequins everyday while I work on everything else

Here is the simplified list I will be putting at the bottom of posts, just because they make me happy:

To Do To Start:

• cross stitch hummingbird coaster
• the center square of my HP cross stitch (house emblems)
• sew the pockets for needle sizes 000-3
• figure out and implement the closure for the brown skirt
• make the etching projects
• sew on ten sequins every day I work on these other things

I like having a nice little list of everything I need to do!

My First Blogiversary

In honor of my first blogiversary, I finally did something I have been meaning to do for ages. I went back through all my archives, and made sure they all had the correct labels. A lot of my earlier posts were missing labels that I made after I made that post, so I am glad to have that all sorted out. I also fixed some of the fonts that were wonky, and corrected some typos. But I'm sure there's a bunch more!

(OK, so I know most people probably don't care, but I am obsessed with being organized, so it makes me very happy.)

Anyway...... I had originally put all of this stuff with yesterday's post, but it was kind of super long, so I split it up.

I've been working on the catnip ornament:

And I made this little pouch:

which clips on to things. I actually just took a zippered pouch I had, and shortened it, but still. I like it!

And I played with the hot glue gun:

All done! But I still want to make two new ones. It's not pretty enough to give away! :)

Yesterday afternoon I was a gingerbread ornament machine! I made three little guys in about two hours. I have a set of two that are going together, and one that will be going with a necklace. I could have sworn I took pictures of them, but I'm not going to aggravate myself trying to get that organized now. That can wait until Monday!

My Crafty Christmas To-Do List

• make two etching projects
• make a mohawk hat (I have a printed pattern, I just can't find the link right now)
• make two necklaces
• finish catnip ornament
• make another cross stitch ornament

I hope you're having a great day!

It's spring!

I know it's been spring for a while now, but I'm really starting to feel it this week. Spring cleaning (lot's of it), warmer weather, birds, bugs, and all kinds of flowers are making their way into everything. Since this month is Records and Information Month, I thought I would share how I organize my crafty stuff!

First up, yarn. YARN!!!! OK, so I have this big white thing that I hold stuff in. Mostly yarn. I don't know how to explain it, but maybe you can see from the pictures. I have the yarn sorted by colors: cool, warm, and neutral. (I got a few skeins of Sugar 'n Cream today, so I pulled everything off anyway. I wouldn't just randomly do this. I swear.)

This is all my warm yarn. It's mostly pink, despite the fact that pink is one of my least favorite colors! (can you see the white metal thing?)

I have a lot of cool yarn. Mostly blue, and it barely fits into one compartment... Is that a bad thing? :)

I have about the same amount of neutral yarn as warm, or maybe a little more. I also have the partial Pound of Yarn attached to the tree skirt.

I also keep most of my fabric in one of the sections. It's mostly fleece, from when I made about a bazillion 18x18" fleece pillows. By hand. I was a little crazy!

This is a really big binder. It has a lot of pockets and secret hiding spots in it. Well, they're not really secret, but that's not the point. I have all of my swatches (that would be a total of one) in one pocket, but mostly I use it to organize ball bands! 

This is something I recently started doing, maybe in August or September? Before that point, I didn't know what those were for.... at all. But now I do, so I cut them out (carefully) and glue them into this notebook, sometimes with one edge flapping up so I can read the back, sometimes with the back rewritten on the page. In total, I have about five pages filled.

I keep that binder on a bookshelf with my craft books next to it. 

I also have bins with my WIPs or random FOs and general supplies (you can kind of see the latter at the left edge of the picture).

And finally, my sewing machine gets a little cupboard all to itself. And the instruction manual. And the pedal and spare bobbins. But other than that, all to itself. 

Alright, that's all for that! (Just a note, if you think there's a lot of pictures now, when I first wrote this there were about two or three times as many. But then I trimmed it down, and the only "fluff" picture left is my blue yarn, because I wanted you to see how much there is!)

****We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.****

Here is a picture of the monstrosity:

(It's getting kind of hard to photograph this thing!)

My goal is to have all the HDCs done by next Monday. That's 7 rows in 6 days, plus maybe a little of tonight. I'm not sure how well that's going to work out, but here's a look at the chart:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

(Up until this point, it will be HDC all the way, with a few increases thrown in here and there. 21 will be SC to set up for the shells, which will be Row 22.)

21

22

We'll see! As for other things, not much as been happening. I've really been concentrating on the tree skirt. Toodles!

Back Again, Am I? (2 Months of Pics, Part 2)

The next post was this week! But because I didn't even leave the computer, you have to wait for hat pictures. Sorry.

I had a brief foray into the world of needle felting, attempting to make the Heartfelt Bunny from Softies by Therese Laskey. It didn't really go that well, and it is taking a time out.

This is my Dad's Christmas present, before it was finished. There was a lot of hand stitching (see the pretty stitches?) and machine stitching (I don't like Velcro anymore!) and frustration, but it was worth it, because I think he may have liked it.

Behold my mom's Christmas present: a bulletin board for her new office. As you can (hopefully) see, it isn't finished in this picture. What happened was, I needed to use the staple gun, but I'm a little nervous around "tools," so I had to wait until I could have help, and when I finally could, I ran out of ribbon after only a three strips! I went to Michaels on Black Friday, but I couldn't find this exact ribbon, so I had to go back later to get a different one that still matched. Then I pinned all of the ribbon into place so I was ready to staple as soon as I had help. My mom loved it, and I don't think she took it into the office yet, so I will try to get a picture of the finished product soon.

I got this bag for Christmas, and I really like it! It has a lot of pockets, and I am using it to hold my WIPs right now (time out zone!), but I could definitely take this on a trip, maybe even as a regular bag!

I am trying to make a t-shirt quilt with camp shirts, sports teams shirts, etc. (Just a note for the sharp-eyed, there isn't anything wrong with the shirts, I just blurred out the years and the name of the camp.) On the bottom is the bottoms of all the shirts I cut up, which I may use for my evil, upcycling purposes. Muhahahahha!

 This is a little drawstring bag I made from a jeans leg. I thought I had posted about it ages ago, but I couldn't find any pictures of it elsewhere.

My aunt once made all of her nieces purses like these, which inspired me to make my own. The hardest part was stitching over the part in the middle where the zipper is: I kept on thinking I was going to break the needle! The strap is an old belt, and the purse hangs down to my knees, so I think I'm going to have the shorten the strap somehow.

 Next post: The finished product pictures of my parent's presents, what I made my brother, and a few projects that haven't come up yet at all!

And the hat. I almost forgot the hat!