Her Drama-ness

Alright, I thought I would be brave and reveal my horrible stitching mess. As some of you would know, I moved house recently and being the slowest unpacker in the world, most of my stitching stash had remained in their boxes. We visited Ikea on Friday night to get some Billy bookshelves for the lounge room and these arrived yesterday. We assembled a few of these and had them set up. Terrence wanted me to get rid of some boxes so I unpacked my stitching stuff. It's TOTALLY unorganised as I was literally just 'unloading' from the boxes and onto the shelves. I don't think I have a lot of stash (although Terrence begs to differ) but it's just SO MESSY. I know I need to get them organised and catalogued, but I don't know where to start, LOL. I have a rough idea though, magazines will go into labelled magazine files (I already have some up), threads will probably go into storage boxes of some kind (probably alphabetised), this could be the same for fabric. I'm not sure about charts and kits though, what is a sensible, efficient and effective way of organising these? Anyways, I am completely open to any suggestions and ideas, anyone brave enough to help me sort through my mess? Hee hee...

Well, the next order of business is that I got book-tagged by Heidi! I'm a little slow in responding but I promised I would, so here it is!

1. One book that changed my life
I don't think books or movies can be life-changing, IMO anyways, I think you get those lightbulb moments through lived experiences. But, my favourite book of the year, one that really touched me and moved me, was Marley and Me.

2. One book that I'd read more than once
There are plenty of books that I would read more than once, probably the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, the Harry Potter books, and Neil Gaiman's novels.

3. One book I'd want on a deserted island
Probably the fattest book that I can have, I may need it as emergency paper.... LOL.

4. One book that made me cry
Hahaha... have I mentioned that I'm a total sook? I can cry at everything! People are amazed when I tell them I cried while watching A Bug's Life! LOL. To make it easier, the last book I cried while reading was Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes.

5. One book I wish I'd written
Any of the runaway hits that would be able to support my stitching addiction, hee hee...

6. One book I wish had never been written
None that I can think of.

7. One book I'm currently reading
I just finished Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, haven't figured out what my next book will be. I probably should stitch though...

8. One book I've been meaning to read
Too many to list, if you visit my Bookcrossing bookshelf (link on the right menu), you can look at my TBR section, it's massive!

Anyways, that's it from me today! Remember, I am in dire need of help to organise my stitching stuff, so please, feel free to give me as many suggestions as you want! Thanks in advance! (^_^)

Posted by Leeny at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here is a picture of the latest piece I got back from the framer's. I actually picked it up yesterday but didn't get the chance to take a photo till today. For some reason, the frame looks really red in the photo and the other colours very pale, but it's more balanced in real life and I think it turned out gorgeous. It's definitely a feature piece on its own, I just have to figure out where its spot is going to be. At the moment, all the framed pieces have just been hanging up on the walls where the previous owners had put in hooks. We have yet to decide where the pieces should go, but hopefully we will get to that soon! Anyways, I'm going to keep this short as I'm feeling tired and I think it's time for dinner. Till next time! :)

Posted by Leeny at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

As promised, here's a picture of the piece framed. It's not too great a picture as it's already evening here so there wasn't much light. Still, a picture is better than nothing, so you can get an idea how it turned out! I reckon I could have stretched and adjusted the piece a bit better by making it straighter, but I find it quite tough, the 'rolling' part is a bit tricky, I never get it just right! Oh well, I think it's pretty good for this piece.

I actually dropped in another piece at the framer's on Saturday, it was Needle and Thread by 4 My Boys, which hopefully will be ready by this weekend! I had the whole lot done with that one. With the borders, it's gonna be too difficult for me to attempt the lacing so I rather pay the extra money to get it right.

Oh, and here's a picture of what Moonlight Garden looks like if the snowman has a proper carrot nose :( This was my first scan when I had initially completed the piece.

In other news, Australian Idol is currently on and I am absolutely gutted that Bobby Flynn has left the show. He was such an original, so unique, and Idol has never had anyone like him, not even on the American version, I reckon. He's the kind where you either love him or you hate him - I was in the love camp. I didn't think he was gonna win it because he's way too out-there and he probably shouldn't win as the Idol guys will just be at a loss as to what to do with him, but it's disappointing that he's out this early (Top 7), I reckon he should at least be in the Top 3 or 4. And the fact is that Ricky Muscat is still in there! He needs to be booted out, the dude is just horrible, he's too plastic, too fake, too blah. HE NEEDS TO GO. Well, nothing can reverse that decision, I just hope that Bobby goes on to have a fabulous musical career and that this has opened doors to him. As Terrence tells me, if Ricky doesn't win the show, he will have nothing after, but Bobby can make it on his own with his brilliant talents. Good on you Bobby, don't ever change!

Posted by Leeny at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

A couple of posts ago, I shared pictures of my recently framed pieces. Those were professionally done and they turned out great. Amongst those, I also had a framing kit done for one of my pieces, "Moonlight Garden" by San-Man Originals. The framing store near my home offers a DIY framing kit, which helps to reduce the costs. They will cut and join the frame, cut the glass and mats for me, but then I have to put everything together. This then means that I have to stretch and lace the piece myself, which is probably one of the trickiest parts in framing needlework, IMO anyways. So yeah, the framer had shown me a quick example of how to do it, but I couldn't quite remember exactly how he did it, so I probably had to improvise a little bit. I reckoned I did pretty well and that it turned out alright! Much better than I expected, although not as good compared to someone who has 20 odd years' experience! The only unfortunate thing is that it probably wasn't a very smart thing trying to lace the piece on a glass table, so my snowman's nose button broke! *sob* It doesn't look toooooo bad, so I thought I would leave it as a round nose as I really don't want to have to unlace the piece just to replace the button. Oh wells, Terrence reckons that it doesn't have to be a carrot nose and it looks alright like this. It kinda bugs me, but I'm sure I will get over it eventually. In the meantime, here are some pictures of how my lacing went, I will share a picture of the actual framed piece tomorrow!

Posted by Leeny at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

I actually received this a few months ago, but that was during the busiest time of my house move, so that's why this blog post is only appearing now! *sheepish grin* But back to the darling piece. This was the nicest surprise, it was stitched by Harmien from CyberStitchers as a housewarming gift and was completely unexpected when it arrived in my mailbox. Harmien even included a postcard with a note addressed to both Terrence and I, so it's a proper housewarming gift for us, not just for me! Although I did tell Harmien that it should be 'Mi Casa, Mi Casa', because this house is all mine! Terrence can have the garage, muahahaha.... *grin* But yes, I LOVE this design, it's so cute and really made my day when I received it, even till this day! I haven't had any housewarming parties at all, so this is my first gift, hee hee. It was also the first decorative item up in the house, this takes pride of place on my front door, on the inside though, as I don't want anyone pinching this off my door! I took this photo outside because it was too dark in the hallway. A big THANK YOU to Harmien, it was so sweet of you and thanks to your talents, I have such a pretty doorknob decoration. I know it would be waaaaaaay beyond me to put something like that together, I can only stitch and that's about all I can do with a needle! LOL.

Posted by Leeny at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments

Okay, since it's a lovely sunny day in Melbourne, I thought I'd use the opportunity to take some new pictures of the framed pieces from my previous post. Still not super great, but I think the colours show better! I was going to use Hello and BloggerBot to upload these photos, but this is another thing that's not working with Blogger Beta, so here they are via the manual method:

Posted by Leeny at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

Yay, I got a new look for my blog! :) And I did try to do as much of it as possible by myself, although I did need Terrence's help to get the pictures working. It was some complicated CSS thing, which is waaaaay over my head. But otherwise, it was fairly simple and I didn't have to drive Terrence too crazy with too much customisation, hee hee. The only thing that's annoying me is that my profile picture and little blurb has now disappeared, and that is not because of the new layout, it's because I chose to migrate over to Blogger Beta. DOH! I knew I shouldn't have switched! :( Oh wells, I'll get over it, it's the only blemish on an overall successful layout change.

The other thing that called for a happy dance is that I finally got some of my stitched pieces framed! \(^o^)/ I also got some other stuff framed. It's almost a week ago that I got them back but I'm still so pleased about it. The photos really don't do them justice, they dulled the colours a little bit, but they are so lovely in person, I am just happy that I can finally display them, rather than packed away somewhere, collecting dust. Here are the pictures!

Posted by Leeny at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments