One Day project

I bought this kit at last fall's Wool Day at Canterbury Shaker Village. I enjoyed the little sheep rug hooking project from the kit from Harrisville (from my previous post), but I didn't really want to do a big project, so I picked this up. I love sheep. Can you tell? And it's not because I love yarn, I've just always liked them!



This little sheep is about 8 inches by 6 inches, and is made up as a little mat. It's on the coffee table for now. I'm not quite sure what to do with him. I could open up one of the seams and make it into a pillow, but as I've just finished the other three pillows shown in my last post, I'm not sure what I'd do with another one. Maybe this little guy should be a trivet/hot mat? Hmm...

I love Canterbury Shaker Village, but Wool Day is especially fun. They have people demonstrating tons of things: rug hooking, knitting, crocheting, sewing with wool, lace making (that was neat - hadn't seen that in person before), spinning, weaving, felting/fulling, and more. I'm not sure if they had someone doing braided rugs or not. They also had the woman that makes the Shaker cloaks for dolls and women, and she showed me all the steps of the lovely work she does. The Shakers used to make them for sale, and wealthy ladies in the city would buy them for opera cloaks.

Plus, they have vendors at Wool Day where you can buy finished products or supplies to make your own items! I bought a drop spindle there to try my hand at spinning some yarn, and will post about that sometime soon. There was lots of yarn to choose from, but I don't think I actually came home with any last year. I came home with the kit for this rug hooked sheep instead. This year's Wool Day is Saturday, September 25th.

The museum store is terrific, as well, with some crafty type kits for adults and children (the basket I made and featured on in early post I got as a kit at the museum store at Canterbury Shaker Village). They also have lots of beautiful hand made items like furniture, Shaker boxes and peg boards, as well as books and so forth. You don't have to pay admission to the Village in order to go into the store, so it's worth a stop.

Rug hooking is one of those things that I am glad I know how to do, but I don't presently see myself doing a full sized rug for the floor any time soon. Plus, I'd almost hate to step on something like that! :-) Although, I am working on something that will become a rug, but more on that another time.

Finishitis. I've got it.

This is the first needlepoint I ever did. I finished it a couple years ago, but hadn't gotten around to making it up into a pillow. It is done with embroidery floss, not yarn. I wasn't sure how it would turn out with the extra border around it, but I'm pleased with the results. :-) I like that it was a relatively small project, and made me feel successful in a shortish time. I had gotten the canvas from Michael's, but they don't carry those anymore, more's the pity.




This is the first rug hooking project I ever did. I had seen the kit to make it at the Manchester Millyard Museum gift shop (I love museum gift shops!) several years ago, a kit designed for children, and told my husband it would be a good Christmas gift idea. It didn't take me too long to make, really, but then it sat in a box for a year or two, also waiting to be made up. I made it up as a little pillow, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. I kind of like how it looks against the old books, though.



This is the needlepoint I just finished. I bought the kit (also done with embroidery thread) online, after obsessing over exactly what I wanted, to bring with me to England. Four years ago. I had visions of me spending the hours on the plane working on this. Yeah, not so much. I worked on it off and on after that, and got finishitis a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty pleased at how it came out, though I wish I had had fabric that better matched it for the back of the pillow. I thought DH didn't pay too much attention to what I made, but the day after I finished it he said, "Did you put your name or initials on that anywhere? Don't you think you should?!" Very gratifying.



Last year sometime I bought another needlepoint kit, this one with yarn, at a second hand/antique store in Dover. It was super cheap, as these kinds of things go, and I did a bit of work on it in the next week or so. Then I put it away, feeling that I should work on the one I already had going before I started that. So now that I finished with the piece above, I can really dig into the next one.

Soon I'll make a real foray into the abyss of my craft stuff downstairs and see what else I have that is unfinished. Plus, my aunt just told me she had found a needlepoint project my grandmother had started at some point and never finished, so she's going to send that my way. That'll be cool.

From which platform does the train to Normal depart?

I am still waiting for the New Normal to kick in. We feel at home in the New House, I feel at home with the New Commute, but I still feel quite unsettled. Can't quite figure it out. So if you see that train to Normal, will you let me know? Or even the plane.....

Being Lax

So we've been a bit busy in the last few weeks. Selling a house, trying to buy a house, not buying a house, finding another house, doing all the various things to get that house, and now packing while we wait for word on a specific closing date. I just finished and emailed off my final paper for the class I took in July, so now I can focus my energies on getting rid of a bunch of accumulated crap and packing the rest! I look forward to being on the other side of all this!!

What I did today.

I made this basket. I have had the kit since Mother's Day of last year, and finally had the time to make it up. I think it's about the fourth basket I've made. It's fun to do.

A few days of sunshine

It rained most of last week. I mean every day, most of the day. And if it didn't rain, there was a thunderstorm at the end of the day. It was just a crazy, gray week. Friday we finally had some sunshine, and it lasted most of the holiday weekend.

This year we had a kind invitation from our friends to go to their condo in Bartlett for the weekend. We had a great time. There was a parade, food, walks to a river for wading (the water was too high and cold for swimming), ice cream, a walk through North Conway, music and fireworks, a drive up Mount Washington, and short hike to a waterfall, and a genuine terrific time with good friends. When we got home on Sunday evening, I felt like we had been gone for days instead of just overnight. And isn't that a testament to a good weekend?

Again I've been using Maggie's camera a lot, but halfway through the weekend it seemed to sort of die. So annoying! It would turn on, but then not shut off, or it would be on but not have anything on the screen and not let me take a picture. I don't think it's just the batteries, but I'll look into that this week. Danielle took some wonderful pictures, as usual, so I'll hijack her photos for our own memories!! These few I did take:

DJ and Paul, wading in the river.

Maggie and Kaylyn hamming it up. What a surprise.

Danielle and I had to figure out a way to make the t-shirts work when things didn't go as planned with our first effort, but they turned out great! People kept commenting on them, and it sure did make it easier to spot the kids and do a head count while we were in North Conway! Plus, her three wore them in the parade as part of their decorations, and they won first place for their 'division'!!

And finally, a good picture of Danielle! And she can't delete it, because it was on our camera, not hers! :-)

On Sunday we drove up Mount Washington, which was a bit harry, but fun, too. It was so windy at the top, and we were right in the middle of a cloud, so we all got wet! I'm glad we did it (though Paul doesn't have any interest in doing it again!) The drive down was the worst, in one area where the road is dirt and it is very narrow. But luckily I was only a passenger and not the driver! Jonathan did a great job.

As soon as I figure out how to copy pictures from her site, I'll post more photos. She took a nice shot of our family, and a cool one of our car and the mountains in the background from her car as we drove up the mountain.