success and chugging along

NOW it's ready

yesterday afternoon I finished stitching the last of the beads into the pattern and coated the back of the piece with fray check

I use that stuff by the pints when I'm doing a lot of bead embroidery, but I think of it as an inexpensive insurance policy to stabilize the back of the work with all those many, many stitches that hold all the beads in place

today I will start stitching the bead work and the upholstery velvet together with that metal cuff sandwiched inside
way back last fall I was working on this hat

even though it had been through the washer for felting several times it still didn't seem quite right and I was feeling a little discouraged about it

fast forward to March -- I decided that the water heater just wasn't getting the water hot enough -- there comes a time when the small saving on the gas it would take to heat the water a bit hotter is more than offset by the cost of the water being wasted in the upstairs bathroom waiting for the water to get hot enough to shower (or wash dishes!)

over the weekend I ran across the hat again -- wait -- what if it just needed a hotter wash to improve that felting?

this morning I unpinned all of the flowers and vines and leaves -- I'm going to run this thing through the washer again with the new, hotter water -- we'll see if I'm right

the border on the Hawaii piece is being stitched on

I have the top edge and the left hand side all stitched on -- they are narrow pieces (about 2 inches wide)

the bottom edge and the right hand side are wider and my plan is to applique the trunk of a palm tree silhouette in the bottom right corner and have it curve over into the "ocean" and to add all of the fronds as thread painting -- sort of like I did with the feathers on the hats

we'll see how that goes


as predicted the petals of the cone flower on the top layer are taking a considerably longer time to stitch -- I got one and a half stitched yesterday

more work today on that

this is the newest toy that I got for the DH -- consider it a sort of Father's Day/Anniversary gift

he has one of these tables already, and he has used it to build a lot of furniture as well as work on a lot of other projects

recently our daughter asked him to build her a table for her printer to fit in a specific place

he wrote down all the measurements and drew the rough sketch

and he mentioned that it would be helpful to have a second one of these tables to do the construction of that table

then the local Ace Hardware had it on sale

ok, 'nuf said!

I'm expecting great projects (who knows, maybe I'll come up with some new ideas too)

this morning it's like we're back in April again -- it's been raining off and on all night and it's cool -- the high today will only be in the 60s -- so no outdoor work today

just laundry and lots of studio time

I'm okay with that