In full swing…

I’ve been getting ready for my big summer trip – I’m heading to the midwest next month. First I’ll be attending the TNNA Needlework tradeshow in St Charles, Missouri and then am heading to Chicago for the ANG National Seminar. I’m taking a class with Orna Willis and looking forward to being with someone who has great color sense! I’ll also be participating at Expo Night. I’m looking for a couple of people who have experience in such events who would be willing to help me – contact me privately if you are interested. 

Before I go to Seminar, I’ll be teaching August 22-23 at Tomorrow’s Heirlooms. You can get more details on their Facebook page here. I’m really having fun working on the piece and wish I could show you part of it but alas, it’s a Mystery! I haven’t done a Mystery class for the last two years and I’m happy to be designing another – I look forward to being able to share it and eventually publish it.

I will be releasing six new designs at the show – three of them are posted on my website and I will be posting the other three later this week. First up is Yule Logs – the Seasonal Logs were such fun, that I went on to create a Holiday Logs series; at least I’m planning on a series! I’ll be releasing Yule Logs first and am working on the design for Boo Logs (look for it next year!). Here’s Yule… I used a lot of fun threads – Watercolours (lots of them!) and one Waterlily (Holiday, of course!), Overdyed Vineyard Silks, Kreinik metallics, and ThreadworX Pearl Cotton. There are 144 different “log” pattern in this piece! I kept thinking I’d run out of ideas, especially as the logs are only six threads but I managed to make them all different – there’s no boredom in stitching this!

Recently I received several photos. First up is Pandora’s Boxes from Rebecca in Georgia. She stitched it in the Monsoon colorway – lots of blues and seafoam greens. This is the first time I’ve seen this colorway stitched up – it looks so different than the Original and I really like it! This was the last Mystery I designed and taught – you can see the other Former Mysteries on my website. Of course, they’re not mysteries anymore but they are available and they all have multiple colorways.

Shawn from San Antonio chose the Appalachia thread kit – I love the way this came out since I’m such a lime green fan! It’s so fun to see how all the different colorways come out – it makes every piece unique, especially in combination with the batik fabric in the center. Such a fun class to teach…

Shawn is now working on Colorwaves and doing it in diagonal rows – it’s fun to see it this way and I love that she’s posting photos on Facebook! I still miss working on this piece – it was so much fun creating it!