Oct16

A Stop at Quail Run

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I arrived today in Phoenix and met Rosie and Harold at the airport just before Harold was getting ready to leave for Salt Lake City. After lunch, Rosie and I decided to go to one of the needlepoint stores we had on our list, Quail Run in Scottsdale. This is the shop where Linda M. had ordered Serengeti for a group of NJNA gals. Since they are planning on starting this as a group project in the coming year, I couldn’t be left out and knew that I had to pick up the directions and kit which I did. The shop is lovely, large, with many, many samples stitched, finished or framed and displayed well.

A Wall of Threads

And a few of the standing displays. Rosie is looking at a stitched ornament that she liked and you can see more stitched pieces.

Threads, Painted Canvases and Finished Pieces

The sales woman who assembled the Serengeti kit for me, told us that one customer did not frame her piece or make it into a pillow, but had a customer acrylic tray made for it. We saw some of the acrylic pieces there and thought they might be the answer for some pieces.

Custom sized tray with removable stitched piece

Or a stitched piece can go in the side of a box.

Another Acrylic Piece

There were some accessories such as magnets and laying tools that were both beautiful and unique at this shop as well. As you know, we are always on the look out for a design that might have universal appeal to our SOTM crew. Here we saw some kimonos designed by Julie Sackett that had both similarities as well as uniqueness that we will put in the pool of selections for a coming year. Rosie did get permission to take pictures. Yes, this was a successful stop for us today with things to purchase and wonderful help from Susan. Do you want to see what you might find that you cannot do without? The link to the shop’s website is on the NJNA website. Swing over and check it out!

Ready for a new day! Sue

 

Oct15

SOTM, October, 2014

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The October SOTM met today for a “catch up” day for anyone who had not finished the fourth octagon. It was a small group of Dee, Linda, Carol, and Sue C. Linda decided that since she had completed her octagons, she would stitch the five small squares on a doodle cloth so that she could see what each square looked like. Fortunately for us, she is willing to share!

The squares are numbers one to five, left to right.

Thank you, Linda!

 

Oct14

Choosing Colors for Sudoku

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I won’t be at the meeting tomorrow — I’m out of town, on vacation — so Carol asked me to post about how I chose my colors for Sudoku.

When I choose colors for a design, I frequently start with some color inspiration along with the actual materials list for the piece which I think of as a model, leaving out the colors but taking note of the values (dark vs. light). I  also noticed that Marilyn Owen’s colors were complementary, or opposite each other on the color wheel — pink and green. After some thought I discarded that as a plan, though, and decided to stick with my own color inspiration.

For Sudoku my  inspiration came from some Persian relief sculptures I saw many years ago at an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The colors have always stuck with me, and in fact I have to resist the urge to do EVERYTHING in these colors! Here are a couple of images I found on the Internet — not the same pieces I saw at the Met, but similar. The colors are somewhat darker than what I have in my mind’s eye, but you get the idea.

warriors-relief

lion-relief

With my inspiration images in mind, I studies the materials list in Needle Pointers: two shades each of two colors, one shade of a third color that might be a neutral, a metallic, and a variegated thread. The samples shown in the article don’t stick to this precisely, though. It obviously makes it harder if you don’t have a specific model to follow (too many choices!), so I decided to try and follow the materials list model. But if the threads I found led me in a different direction, that would probably be OK as well.

In the end I managed to stick to the materials list model — two shades of turquoise Impressions, two shades of green Impressions, cream Impressions, and Watercolors “South Pacific.” I chose a gold metallic braid to go with it — I toyed with silver, which frequently looks good paired with turquoise, but decided that the gold gave it all a richer look.

(For some reason the greens look right in this photo but the turquoises do not — they are too blue and not greeny enough.)

jill-sudoku-threads

Even though I won’t be at the meeting, I’ll be stitching along with you tomorrow night, and will post a photo of my progress. You can never be entirely certain that your color choices are going to be successful — or look like what you expect — until you see them stitched.

Sep15

September 2014 SOTM

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Hi, Everyone —

The Stitch of the Month group met last Saturday and I must say that “A Different View” by Kurdy Biggs has made a wonderful choice for this year’s NJNA SOTM.  The stitches are interesting and provide a lot of opportunity for sharing and learning!  We can’t wait to show these off at the NJ Needlefest in November.  We adjusted our “agenda” so that we will not be doing the beads in November, but will instead use October to get caught up so that we can be working on the small squares at Needlefest!

So, I thought you would like to see these beautiful pieces up close and personal!

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Linda

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Dee

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Robin

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Diane

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Rosie

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Sue C

Doesn’t this want to make you join us next year?  It’s always fun to stitch with friends!

Cheers!

Rosie

Aug29

All Good Things Must Come to an End!

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Hi Everyone —

I thoroughly enjoyed my second day of “Spirit” by Sue Reed.  Sue is so wonderful at giving us all of her accumulated knowledge of needlepoint.  I was watching her make a knot by wrapping the thread around the needle, so I asked her to teach me how to do this knot, which I now know is called a quilters knot.  Worth the price of admission!

It was quite interesting to see how each of us chose to stitch “Spirit”.  I chose to stitch the areas that I wouldn’t remember the special little hints for:

"Spirit" -- End of Seminar!

“Spirit” — End of Seminar!

So last night I took out the color matching threads since one of them had split.  They are now ready to go back into the piece.  So….imagine my surprise to find that IF I had put them in, I would not have been able to put in the Kreinik “X” segments without a lot of bother.  So, it’s all good!

So after all week of trying to go to the Purple Pig, we decided that lunch today was our last option.  So four of us checked it out and had a delicious lunch of fried olives stuffed with chorizo, fried deviled egg with capers and cornichons, roasted cauliflower (my favorite), braesola, English cheddar cheese, shaved squash summer salad with pickled blueberries and roasted hazelnuts, and a ham and cheese panini!  YUMMY!

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Cheese, Swine, and Wine!

Tonight was the closing banquet which was a bit of a let down.  We had the same meat (chicken) as our Sunday banquet but with a different sauce.  The dessert rated an A+ with mini cheesecake, chocolate torte, and a few other chocolate treats!  We were excited to learn that the seminar after Myrtle Beach would be New Orleans, but deflated to hear that the year after that we would be returning to Anaheim.

Right now I have to get back to the first Arizona football game of the season.  I’m keeping an eye out for Marisa and the piccolos!

Cheers!

Rosie

Aug29

End of a great seminar

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Today was the last day of seminar and there were so many things I planned/wanted to do and never accomplished. I guess I had better hope we return here in the future to see the Chicago things I hoped to see. The seminar things I missed are now lost.

My BEADazzled class went very well today as we applied beads in two other areas, the center section has a Bargello frame and the beads are applied by stitching the delica beads to the canvas with FyreWorks thread by Rainbow Gallery. The black band on the left side has random beads stitched on with black beading thread. Take a look.

New ways to bead

If you double click on the picture, you can enlarge it and actually SEE the beads in the left black band. Not only did I learn new techniques of applying the beads to the canvas, but I never used a beading needle! With a Bohin size 26 needle, you can go through the delica beads. Nancy told stories and passed on many tidbits that were both interesting and educational. She knows how to keep a class happy as she had cookies from Eatily for us after the afternoon break.

Before the banquet tonight I took a walk down along the riverside to the east of Michigan. It is a beautiful walkway with eating places, landscaping and fountains to see along the way. Just west of the Lake Shore Drive underpass is a beautiful residential building that had tiny gardens in front of each unit filled with flowers and well maintained. It is nice to see such an inviting area in the middle of a big city, an oasis of calm and beauty.

You cabin see through the water fall

The best part of the final banquet was learning that the 2016 seminar is in….New Orleans, but then we heard that the 2017 seminar is in Anaheim. Both Rosie and I were shocked that we were returning to Anaheim so soon after the last seminar there in 2013. Chicago and Philadelphia it is not. Home tomorrow. What will I stitch first? Another seminar is history.

Sue

 

Aug28

BEADazzled is dazzling!

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My last class began this morning. Yesterday's outings revitalized me and I was off to new adventures in the stitching world this morning with Nancy Cucci's class where we will be attaching over 2500 beads before finishing, yes, I did not make a typing error, 2500. The piece is about 5.5 inches square. Today we learned three different patterns for the beads. The first was to stitch a basket weave stitch but with on open thread between the stitches. The beads are applied to every other open intersection making the overall appearance less intense. The second area had the same open basket weave but with beads applied to each open intersection making the appearance of beads stronger. (You will have to take my word for it having seen the model because I have not yet put beads into this area). The next area you stitch the beads on with floss on every other intersection so that the beads are in diagonal rows. Next we will stitch in floss between the beads over two threads so the overall appearance is off a diagonal mosaic.

Continental outline and basket weave

The pilot group for this class was Fox Chapter which is near to Chicago. Many of the participants in the pilot class are working here at the seminar and are unable to take classes. They did bring in their finished projects for Nancy (and us) to see. Nancy suggests that we take her design and use it as a starting point although we could stitch the design as the model is stitched. Seeing the pilot stitchers' finished pieces certainly did give us ideas of changes that could be made very simply. Tomorrow I will give you an idea of what my possibilities will be.

After class while Rosie and Carol went for a swim, I walked down to Millennium Park. This weekend is the Jazz Festival in Chicago and they were getting ready for a concert tonight at the open air auditorium in the park. I saw many couples and couples with youngsters walking toward the park with their chairs, blankets, coolers, etc. in preparation for a picnic on the lawn before the event. On the way back to the hotel walking across the bridge over the Chicago River, I saw not only the tour boats but also a number of kayakers enjoying a late summer outing on the river on a beautiful evening.

Evening on the river

Last day tomorrow; how did the week go by so quickly!

Sue

 

Aug28

The “Spirit” of Chicago!

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Hi, Everyone —

Today I started a new class, “Spirit” with the lovely Sue Reed.  Three of my fellow chapter members are also in this class.  Most of today’s stitching was straightforward and I was able to make a fair amount of progress.  Toward the end of the day, however, Sue taught us how to find matching lengths in our over-dyed threads so that we could do color matching on each of the four corners of our canvas.

"Spirit" -- End of Day One!

“Spirit” — End of Day One!

Sue used my canvas to demonstrate this technique and I was rolling right along UNTIL one of my threads split and I ended up with 2.5 plies instead of 3 plies.  So tonight my spirit is sad as I begin some remedial repairs…

Cheers!

Rosie