12.25.09
Caroline’s Christmas stocking
My niece Katie was born in October, so there was no way she was getting her Christmas stocking for her first Christmas. But get it she did, and for whatever reason, I stitched 2007 into it – to show my tardiness for posterity and confuse people about her birth year, I suppose. I stitched Elizabeth’s Stocking from Shepherd’s Bush for Katie, with some tweaks in charm placement and the addition of a personal message in very light yellow.
Caroline had the good sense to be born in June, meaning she’d get her Christmas stocking (Shepherd’s Bush again, of course!) for her first Christmas – if just barely. For Caroline, Stephanie (her mom) and I chose Sophie’s Stocking by Shepherd’s Bush. Coincidentally, Sophie was one of the names on the short list for little Caroline.
For Caroline’s Christmas stocking, I changed just about every color from the original charted color. I thought the green of the angel’s dress was too muted, so I picked a darker green and started tweaking the other colors from there. I had perle cotton laid out all over the floor of the cross stitch shop, and the ladies there were hesitantly offering help, which I waved away. (I don’t always agree with Shepherd’s Bush color choices – they’re beautiful coordinated actually, but I think the designers at Shepherd’s Bush prefer colors a bit too muted for my taste.) I chose the hair color based on the color Caroline’s hair was when she was born – wouldn’t you know, it’s now a soft red like her Tonton Allen’s hair.
(For those of you stitchers who care and want to use any of these colors, feel free to leave a comment with a way to contact you, and I’ll send you the list of the substitutions I made. I don’t feel comfortable posting the “instead of ___” bits on here, as it pertains to Shepherd’s Bush’s copyrights.)
Once satisfied with my color choices, I took liberties with the combinations within the stocking pattern too. I laid out all the color skeins for the hearts, then moved them around and switched others in to find my favorite combination. I played with the stars and the row on the bottom of the stocking similarly. With the stars, I actually stitched them all and was disappointed with the second star from the right, so I pulled and replaced all of the light pink stitching with darker pink/light purple. I figured I was going to have to look at it for a very long time!
The angel’s hair is made of many, many French knots, which was a real pain in the tucchus. Some were a bit unruly when I finished, which I fixed by sewing them down with the clear nylon I used for her halo. I used the same nylon for the charms, of which there were fewer, so they were easier to place than on Katherine’s Christmas stocking. I used it again for the ribbon, which I attached during the finishing steps, by twisting the ribbon and then tacking it to the stocking with the nylon.
Cate helped me with the finishing for the stocking again, and thank goodness for her! Having actually seen the steps, I think I’d be comfortable doing the next one, but I was too nervous to do much of the sewing at all on this one! Cate deserves a medal for her patience with me! You’ll remember (or read in my other post) that Cate made the pattern for the other stocking because Shepherd’s Bush doesn’t put out a detailed pattern for their Christmas stockings, but we both misplaced our copies of it. We started from scratch on the stocking finishing pattern, which has inspired us to set aside some time in the coming month to put all of the steps into a short manual for finishing these stockings.
I stitched the last few stitches to close the toe of the stocking during our Christmas Eve dinner. Phew! And after all that description – and months of work! – here is Caroline’s stocking:
I was also able to get a couple of good pictures with both stockings on the mantle before sending them back home with their pint-sized owners.
Alright, who’s next?
11.28.09
Our kitty is sick! (But he’s getting better…)
Pax waited until we woke up on Thanksgiving morning to start demonstrating symptoms. We got up late – just 15 minutes before we’d intended to leave for the Turkey Trot 5K – and as we prepared to leave, Pax sprayed the wall in our bedroom.
“Stop, stop!” I yelled and waved my hands wildly, to absolutely no effect.
When Pax did stop, he sat himself down a few feet from us to watch the cleaning efforts. As Allen finished cleaning, Pax peed on our bedroom floor.
What were we going to do? We went to the 5K. We came back to find that Pax had peed on the kitchen floor while we were gone.
He seemed fine after that, but our friend suggested that he once had a cat who did that when he had a urinary tract infection. The wise and all-knowing internet let us know that frequent licking of <ahem> was another symptom.
But he looked okay. We waffled about calling the vet on Friday, but decided for it in the end, and got a 5 pm appointment that day. The vet took a urine sample (with a needle!), and found that there was blood and bacteria in his urine. (Ew, ew, ew.) She prescribed an antibiotic, thinking that it was an infection, and is doing a culture on the bacteria just because it costs more (or to confirm infection, I guess). Pax’ ph levels were also lower or higher than she wanted (whatever), and she suggested we switch him to Prescription Diet food. The price is similar to the good food we’ve been feeding them, but it’s disappointing to see that we’re back to something with corn meal and gluten in the first four ingredients (where the other cat food had none of either of those at all, but had organic chicken as the first ingredient!).
Pax took his first antibiotic pill with a little bit of wet food (but we’ve had to force feed him the next three). Around 6:30 pm though, he began to crouch and try to pee on the floor, resting up to 5 minutes in one spot before moving to the next, leaving no pee behind. He looked bloated, and he became lethargic and irritable. He yowled mournfully when we picked him up or moved him. When we went to bed, he was laying unnaturally on his side. It was hard to reconcile the thoughts that he was now visibly in pain and that we had to wait for the medicine to have a chance to work. It was clear he was completely unable to pee at this point. (This was, despite all the TMI, very sad to watch.) I was feeling very concerned, but I was also incredibly glad that we’d trusted our instincts about his behavior and brought him to the vet.
When we woke up in the morning, Pax was not on our bed like he usually is. In fact, he wasn’t in our bedroom at all. Allen and I breathed a sigh of relief when we found himself in the hallway licking himself (yes, there, again). Then Allen noticed a small wet spot on the carpet. I honestly never thought I’d be happy to see my cat pee on the carpet. The medicine was working!
We spent the next half hour following Pax around as he peed on one surface and another in small amounts. We cleaned, and he peed, and we cleaned behind him, in a strange and gross cycle. At one point he started to pee on the arm of the chair, and I pulled him off, getting pee all over myself too. Maybe we could just stick to peeing on the linoleum?
We were a little concerned that he wouldn’t want to go back to the litter box (inability to pee = pain gets associated with the litter box), but we took one upstairs so that we could leave the cats in the sun room while we were out. We moved all the furniture out of the sun room so there was nothing but tile (and the litter box) to soil.
When we got back home a few hours later, Pax seemed like a new cat. The antibiotics had obviously helped ease most of the pain, and he was interested in his surroundings again, peeing in the litter box, and purring when we pet him. Now we just need to finish the round of antibiotics, and we’ll get to keep this healthy kitty around for a while longer.
11.25.09
I love Etsy!
Etsy has been my infatuation for over a year now. It’s only the best place to buy handmade directly from the handmaker!
I can’t believe how inexpensive and pretty these board book pendants are from prettytheory.etsy.com:
And props to Pretty Theory for a memorable name, so that when a Lush employee complimented me on the bird pendant, I was able to recall the shop name and write it down for her.
Speaking of Etsy shops with GREAT BRANDING, I’m very impressed with Bananasaurus Rex at bananasaurusrex.etsy.com. I purchased a lavender and flax seed filled pillow from Bananasaurus Rex, and I was tickled that it was mailed in a Trader Joe’s bag. Great packaging and branding makes me think great shop because it looks so professional (and delightful) when it arrives.
And of course the pillow smells divine! Allen laughs at me when I put it over my eyes.
Oh dear, though…looking back at the site makes me want things!
Now, my absolute favorite Etsy site is retrofied.etsy.com. I purchased a custom “diaper bag” from Retrofied last winter, and I followed up this spring with a hobo bag in Joel Dewberry’s Deer Valley fabric:
Click here to see the fabric inside the bag! I think the worksmanship is great, and I love the color combinations. Shortly after I bought it, she posted her Raspberry Wasp bag, which I lust after, but how many bags do I need?
I’ve found plenty of jewelry on Etsy too, and I love that I can find so many different styles of jewelry in “one shop.” For example, I love this branch necklace I bought from thalassajewelry.etsy.com.
That picture comes from her listing here. And again, I’m finding other things in her shop that I love and want as I look back! But then I can find something completely different too, like the book board pendants from Pretty Theory!
My next Etsy post? Custom finds on Etsy! Or should it be gifts I’ve found for people? Or bookplates (because I could fill a full post on that!)?
11.24.09
Adam’s asparagus
Katie has a small obsession with Allen’s Adam’s apple. At first, she couldn’t remember what it was called, and we’d play endless games of renaming it: Adam’s apple, Adam’s pineapple, Adam’s grilled cheese sandwich.
She still likes to ask what it is, but we know she knows the answer now: Adam’s clementine, Adam’s banana, Adam’s lychee, Adam’s chocolate chip cookie! We love to hear Katie laugh hysterically (when don’t we?). Adam’s apple, Allen’s uncle…
And Katie does love her Tonton Allen and his Adam’s aardvark.
11.14.09
UFOs: Unfinished Objects
I went through my entire cross stitching stash and took pictures of all of the unfinished pieces. I’ve got enough projects to keep me busy for the rest of my life!
I started and set aside this project in April 2009. It’s called Toile Rooster, and it calls for a variegated dark brown/black for the rooster and the alphabet that surrounds it. I set this one aside because I picked up a new project that I just had to start right away: Pains of Love by Moira Blackburn.
Pains of Love is a pattern I’d never have purchased from just looking at the chart, but when I saw the colors in a stitched model, I was hooked. When I set this one aside, it was for Caroline’s stocking and to finish the piece that I entered in the Arlington Country Fair.
I started Bent Creek’s Teacher Row when I started teaching, in September 2005. I think what derailed this one at the time was starting teaching.
This is a Prairie Schooler design of an Amish village in the fall. The rectangle at the bottom will be a quilt hanging on a line. Allen wants me to finish this one soon, as he prefers more pictures and fewer words on the cross stitch pieces.
I love these little designs by JBW Designs. This one will be a Christmas tree made of the words “a very merry Christmas.” I started this in December 2007.
I started this piece almost five years ago. The silk birds are incredibly delicate (and a little bit blinding to stitch). I spent a lot of time adapting the pattern (particularly the text lower down on the piece), and I got hung up in trying to design a row of roots (which would make sense with the full text).
The Irish Blessing will eventually read, “May the sun shine warm upon your face, May the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May ____ hold you in the ________.” Ha – I’m too lazy to go get the piece and see what it actually says in the end.
This is a simple piece from Prairie Schooler’s Santa Rides pattern. I have always enjoyed hot air balloons, and I like the dark brown as the main color. Eventually it will also include a Santa and a few embellishments in a light yellow.
This is Marriage of the Minds by The Drawn Thread. I bought it around the time that Allen and I got married, and I don’t expect it to be done in time for our five-year anniversary this May, but one day… The Shakespeare quote on this piece was also one of the readings at our wedding. The blue and white clouds took me a while to do, and when I was finished, I realized that I was supposed to do it with two threads instead of one. The thought of pulling that all out was too much right then, so I put it aside. I’ll get back to it.
This is my project as big as a couch. Yes, it will be huge. I am thinking of finishing it with a quilt “frame” and backing, rather than a rigid frame that would be more difficult to move and protect. Our plan is to hang it over the mantle in the living room, but I think it would also be nicely sized for the upstairs hallway.
My most recent unfinished object is on its way to be done very quickly – maybe today! This is the 7th “day of Christmas” from Prairie Schooler’s Santa’s 12 Days of Christmas.
Alright – off the blog and on to stitching!
11.13.09
Cross stitching wish list
This week I finished Caroline’s birth sampler, adapted from La-D-Da’s Sweet Dreams pattern.
It’s at the shop for framing, but in the meantime, that means I’m ready to find a new project!
Choosing a new project is a delightful task in itself. I’ve got a good ten projects that I’ve already started and put aside. Those get high consideration. Then there are the many projects I’ve kitted up – that is, purchased the fabric and threads to go along with the chart.
In a category of its own is The Shores of Hawk Run Hollow, which I am stitching on 9 or 10 count fabric (like the stockings) with DMC Perle Cotton. For those of you non-stitchers out there, that just means “big.” The exaggerating, slightly rude woman in the cross stitch store said that this project would be “as big as a couch,” so I like to refer to it as my project that is as big as a couch. In reality, it will be approximately 2 x 3 feet. It uses an entire yard of fabric – think lap quilt size – and its frame is like a small table. I should take a picture. It’s amusing to look at. If I could just keep the cats off it…
Next are the larger framing projects that I kitted in Oklahoma in April. I started Pains of Love, but I have two others kitted and unstarted too. Not to mention the wedding sampler (Marriage of Minds by the Drawn Thread) that I “am doing” for Allen and me. (Our five year anniversary in May will not see that finished, mostly because I put it aside after I stitched a whole swath of it in one thread rather than two, and I just can’t bear to pull all that out!)
It’s possible too that I buy something new every time I cross the threshhold of the cross stitching store. So I now have Prairie Moon’s The Red and The Black kitted up. And during the last visit, I picked up La-D-Da’s All Our Troubles. At first, I took the saying the wrong way – you think I’m a big whiner? But it stuck in my mind, and I kept thinking that I would chose my troubles over others’ and that maybe it meant more about being thankful for what you have and taking the bad with the good. Now it will go on my wall, to remind me of that.
All those choices, and I decided to stall. I’ve been working on Prairie Schooler’s set of Santa’s 12 Days of Christmas since 2007. (In fact, I’ve been working on it since the month I started this blog, which would have been a good time to follow through on the project and get it done for Christmas!) I finished the first six of them during that year in Paris, but when I started the seventh day of Christmas and stitched a swan in the wrong spot, I stopped and set it aside. Since finishing Caroline’s sampler, I’ve picked it back up and will have finished the seventh piece this week.
I won’t be as optimistic in 2009 as I was in 2007; I probably won’t finish it this year for Christmas. But with each piece taking about a week, the time is there…if I use it.
10.31.09
Success for DonorsChoose!
The DonorsChoose giving challenge has reached its goal of $100,000 in teacher-inspired donations in October! Donations right now total $101,334 from 2,316 donors. Amazing! You can see the results by clicking on this sentence!
Thank you again for your support of this great organization! I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the teacher proposals that will be funded now that the generous donations of inspired donors have earned DonorsChoose another $100,000 in funding!
Here are two that were funded with help from my awesome friends:
35 high school students in Missouri now have an LCD projector for their classroom from the proposal Projecting our Bright Futures to the World.
150 7th and 8th graders in southern California now have materials for science fair projects from the proposal Science Fair Project 2009.
Here are two more that received partial funding with the help of my friends and family:
ELL Students Love to Read Too is a proposal for bilingual and Spanish-language books and for WhisperPhones for English language learners in Chicago. This proposal needs $232 more to be fully funded.
From the Printing Press will provide cutting supplies and linoleum for an 8th grade art class. Another $206 will bring these enriching materials to students in a high-poverty, Washington, DC school.
Less than $1500 to go for DonorsChoose!
It is the LAST DAY of the Giving Challenge for DonorsChoose, and we (you, me, all the other donors, and all the teachers and students) are so close to meeting the goal of $100,000. When we meet it, corporate donors will provide an additional $100,000 to fund DonorsChoose proposals and help public school children.
DonorsChoose needs just $1,390 more. Teachers have donated and inspired other donors to reach $98,610 so far. As for that remaining $1,390? That’s 1,390 people donating $1 each, 278 people giving $5, 140 people donating $10, or just 56 people giving $25. Could you be one of those generous people?
In addition, thank you to all of the people that I know of who have supported this campaign so far: my brother Alan, my dad, my grandma, Julie, Cate, Sarah, Jill, Sara, Ryan, and Allen. I know there are others out there that I don’t know of – thank you too.
How can you help? Click on this link to make a donation of as little as $1. You can then search for any type of proposal you’re interested in funding. If you want some recommendations, click on this link to see the Chez Schmanz Giving Page with some proposals that my friends and I are interested in. Feel free to suggest other proposals for me to add to the Giving Page. And thank you for giving!
I’ll update the page when DonorsChoose meets the challenge!
10.26.09
Renovation station
With all this pimping of DonorsChoose, it’s only fair that I give you a personal post to read as well. Fortunately there’s plenty going on (if only I could spin it into interesting stories for the blog)!
We’ve really gotten serious with the renovation work at the house in the past month. It started with the HVAC system, which “cooled” the house to a chilly 79 degrees all summer (no lower). Being 20 years old or so, it was looking for retirement, and we put it out to pasture a few weeks ago. We got a great deal on a new system from Service Doctors, and we’d highly recommend them. Their technicians also noticed a leak when they were here, which started round two…
The leak turned out to be coming from the half bath downstairs, so one of my student’s fathers came out to have a look. (To clarify, he was my student last year, but is not now.) It was minor, but it took him and Allen several hours to fix. (Allen enjoyed this mini-internship and patched the drywall himself afterwards.) While he was here, he also put in a flexible pipe under the kitchen sink to connect to…
…the new dishwasher! After hand-washing dishes for over a year (the horror!) because our panel-front dishwasher left a layer of silt over everything, we upgraded to a new Kitchenaid dishwasher. I actually don’t mind washing dishes (as long as I can do it on my own time), but I won’t be getting my hands pruny anymore with this new machine. You have to come all the way into the kitchen to hear that it is running. I bow to the new dishwasher.
Let’s not forget the ongoing renovation of the guest room. Allen and I have spent many, many weekend hours working in there. After painting and finishing the wainscotting (that could NOT have just been last weekend…upon further reflection I see that’s because it was TWO weeks ago), we still had to paint the trim a semi-gloss white, paint the ceiling, install a new ceiling fan, and update the electrical outlets. Then we got the call that our king bed (that we bought in September) was finally arriving on Tuesday. That lit a fire under us. On Saturday of this last weekend, we bought sheets for our king-sized bed and the guest room queen bed (which we were too ashamed to pass our sheets on to, though the bed is moving from our room to there). We then painted the trim on the wall that the bed would sit against and moved the bed into the room. (This allowed us to have a guest stay over on Saturday night too – hi, Rebecca!) Allen updated all the electrical, and I painted about half of the ceiling on Sunday. Still to go: the rest of the trim, the rest of the ceiling, moving a dresser from our room to the guest room, and the ceiling fan. Our room is ready to accommodate our new bed tomorrow though!
Somewhere in the middle of all this, we also found time to put a first coat of brown paint throughout the upstairs hallway. (Because we were bored?) Yes, we did originally paint the hallway yellow. And yes, I have hated it ever since. (I quite like it in the sunroom though.) So back to my soothing, wonderful brown. It’s a shade lighter than what we painted the dining room.
When all those things are done, that’s IT. We’re not doing anything else for a long, long time. Except maybe entertaining guests!
UPDATE: Here’s a picture of the guest room bed and the one wall that we finished painting the trim on.
Here’s the king bed in our bedroom.
Now you’ve seen them…but we still welcome guests to show off the updates in person!
DonorsChoose bests $75,000 in the giving challenge!
As of 7 pm on Monday, October 26, DonorsChoose supporters have inspired $76,195 in donations from 1,957 donors! That’s great news!
The goal of the October 2009 giving challenge is to raise $100,000 or inspire 5,000 donors. Wouldn’t it be amazing to do both? If you can give support to this cause – with a donation of as little as $1 – click here to find a proposal that you’d like to provide some funding for.
The proposal I chose to provide some funding for (must practice what I preach) is “ELL Students Love to Read Too.” You can also find it on my Giving Page. This proposal asks for bilingual and Spanish-language books, as well as WhisperPhones for a classroom in Chicago. These are materials that generous donors have provided to my classroom in the past. WhisperPhones are plastic headsets that a student can whisper into and hear an amplification of the words. I love WhisperPhones for younger students, who have little sense of the volume of their voices when reading aloud (and who can create quite a cacophony during independent reading), but they’re also great for older students who are just learning to read. In DC, I had a middle school student who was reading on a 2nd grade level. He was very embarrassed to read out loud, but it was essential that he do so – at least to himself – so that he could hear his own reading and understand what it was that he read. Having the WhisperPhones in our classroom saved him the embarrassment; he could hear himself, but the rest of the group couldn’t hear him. What a wonderful tool.
If you don’t want to just be inspired, but want to go on and inspire others, you can create a Giving Page too. When I created my Giving Page, I looked for projects that were of personal or academic interest to me. In addition to the project I described above, ELL Students Love to Read Too, I have a couple of projects on my Giving Page that were posted by teachers who work at my former schools. (I won’t name them here for confidentiality purposes; you can see pictures of students there on proposals.) I worked with one of those teachers, Mrs. H of “Help Us Give Our Classroom Library a Little Class.” She is an inspiring educator, so I’m glad to add her proposal to my Giving Page. Some of the other projects on there just sounded inspiring to me. I have gotten pretty involved in running, and I’m coaching Girls on the Run at my school, so I added a project from another Girls on the Run coach who is looking for MP3 players for her students. Along the same lines, a teacher in Oregon is training with her high school students for a marathon and requested 16 iPod shuffles to help them keep up the intensity while running long distances. I can get behind that!
I hope you’ll consider the impact a small donation can have: Be one of the 5,000 donors or help DonorsChoose reach $100,000 in October, and another $100,000 in matching funds will become available to fund teacher proposals. With leverage like that, it’s a great time for giving.
