Another Gift

This afghan is going off to Kosovo. One of the embassy's locally hired staff is having a baby this month (at least, his wife is). He helped tremendously in getting Mattie back here to the States, and I wanted to do something to thank him. According to my information, the baby's supposed to be a girl. Afghan is made out of Bernat Satin and it's soooo soft. Worked up fairly quickly for being a dense all double crochet. I hope they like this. This also makes my third finish for the 25 project challenge.

Up to F

This is going fairly quickly and I should be able to finish it by the end of September at latest. I'm already on F, which is about a quarter done. The colors of the floss I'm using go really well with the other colors on the piece.

Darning the Leaves

See Anda? I got even more done! I did the darning stitches in the big leaves and started the satin stitches in the small ones. Those satin stitches were supposed to be cream colored, but I wanted them to look like real leaves, so I used light green. It's coming along pretty well, and I have more stitched than this picture shows.

Spiraling Corners

I did more string art this week - spirals in the two top corners. They took up a lot of thread but were fairly easy to do. The hardest part was working with the rayon threads. They're from Edmar and are meant for Brazilian embroidery. All I know is that they tangle often and coil around themselves, making these string art bits with them extra difficult. They look pretty, at least. I don't think I'd use them for a project of my design, though. I'd be more likely to use a silk perle or something similar.

Header Half Way

I'm over half done with the header now. Those letters are wide, so they take up a lot of floss. Easy stitching, though. There are only three colors of floss for the whole design.

A New Block

The CQ Embellishing group on yahoo is having a round robin. The theme is "my favorite things". The steampunk block I posted a couple of weeks ago is part of that round robin. I received Ann K.'s block a week ago and have started working on it. She has a LOT of favorite things, so it's pretty easy to put something on her block. What I've started on the light blue area is a small flower garden. The stems are stitched now, with whipped chain stitch. I've crocheted three small flowers for it and will be adding a button or two and some ribbon flowers for the rest. Then I'll work on a couple of seams.

Two Down, Two to Go

Two of the corners are now done and I've made a good dent on the third. These go pretty quickly, even though there are three different colors of blue in each. I'll be happy when I can go beyond this central square.