One Stitch Leads to Another...

In July me and 6-7 other girls spent an afternoon at my friend Susie's house in Eugene.  We gathered to enjoy lunch on the garden patio and craft afterwards with her sister Jeri, who is an artist visiting from Maui.  The theme of the afternoon was "leaves", we were to make/decorate something with leaves and Jeri would help us work out a design.  I really had no idea what kind of project I was going to do, but brought DMC floss, yarn and fabric as instructed.  Susie and Jeri had recently visited the Sisters Quilt Show and were full of ideas, as well as fabric.
Projects started that day: In short, inspired by fabric and birds, I made 4 quilted coasters and started on a little birdie pillow.  Jeri taught me a couple different embroidery stitches and I was off to decorate my birdie pillow.  I ran out of time at Susie's and have toted my birdie around with me, decorating him as I go.  Here's where I'm at so far:

I loved playing with the DMC thread and I have lots of colors from previous cross stitch projects.  I was looking forward to learning more stitches on another project soon.

The next project appeared on our camping trip a week later.  While setting up camp I found that a mouse had eaten a hole in the back cushion of my favorite camp chair.  Since I had packed the craft tote, I had everything I needed to make the perfect patch for my chair.

Here's my chair with piece of fabric inside the hole and some thread holding the edges of the chair fabric together:

Here's the fabric patch I cut and then embroidered to cover the hole. This is some of the leftover fabric from my little birdie project.  I've started playing with different stitches across the batik design:

And finally, the patch in place.  I added a little zing using metallic silver thread in random loops:

I like my mouse chair even better now that it's personalized.


One final crafty update....yesterday I had a day off work after working a 48 hour shift.  When I work two shifts I like to relax and do something fun on my one day off,  this day while cleaning my work space I came across the material to make boxing glove inserts (to keep your gloves from stinking), and decided to take the project on.

I made a pattern from an example that Irene gave me, decorated the gloves with stitched writing, and sewed them together.  There are inserts inside the outer black covers, that are filled with absorbent material and lavender buds.  The inserts are the same pink and green fabric that is used to finish the edges of the covers where the access hole is.  I forgot to stick the blue nylon strap into the sleeve before stitching it up, and it doesn't look good now.  I'm going to cover it with something to clean up the look. This was the perfect project and just what I needed yesterday.