progress on many fronts

more "gardening"

now that the center of the piece has been totally filled, I'm working my way up the side

slowly, slowly

looking good


(and in keeping with the indoor gardening, there will soon be outdoor gardening -- this morning before we did anything else we made a trip to the hardware store -- they were having a sale on the fence boards that we need to finish up the back "zebra" fence -- and while we were there, we picked up a bag of fertilizer to give the lawn a shot of iron and help it green up -- we're supposed to have some wet spring snow tomorrow, so we hope to get that fertilizer onto the lawn today - nothing better than nature's water to perk up that lawn!)
the "painting" in the trees is now complete

I'm not as happy with the technique for the back color behind the redwoods, but I know it will be a good backdrop for the thread painting that I plan to do there

so today I can start on the next layer of color on this piece -- stitching on individual aspen leaves and additional "twigs" along those branches


the first of the feathers on the smaller hat is complete

this one is a slightly different shape than the ones I did on the big hat

and the next ones will be different again

as I do these I'm still having the "did I do that?" moments as each one actually looks like what I wanted it to look like

at this rate of work I should be ready to start on the quilting phase of this project by the end of next week

WHOOT!!



and actual progress made on the afghan

this is now 70% complete


and yesterday the new knitting needles that I ordered for myself arrived

even though I have two different sets of needles that have interchangeable tips, I ran into a problem last weekend when I wanted to cast on another project -- I didn't have enough cable of either set to be able to start something that needed 200+ stitches

after checking what the price for just one of the three sizes of needles I would need for this in my local store, I let my fingers do the walking through the google pages and found that for a little more that what two of those three needles would cost me I could have a whole set of bamboo tipped circulars (oh look, I can have LOTS more things on the sticks!)

so there will be a new project in the works soon

time for some breakfast!