A little haul and some embroidery

When I was at retreat recently, I forgot to use my coupon that the LNS had given us.  So yesterday I decided to hit the road (2 hours, 1 way) and use that coupon before it expired.  The shop owner later told me that she made the expiration date a couple of weeks after the retreat on purpose because some folks might not have wanted to shop during the retreat.  I thought that was nice planning on her part.  

So here's what I got: 

Two project bags, one striped and one pink.  The pink one is under the pattern in the upper right.  It kind of blends in with everything else, lol.  The limited edition Needleworker pattern from Little House Needleworks.  This one was debuted at one of the Nashville Markets.  I've wanted it for a long time, but knowing it was limited edition, I figured it would probably be hard to find at this point.  But the LNS had one, all kitted up with the needed threads.  I gladly took it off their hands, lol!

Next pattern was Wise Wisdom from Stoney Creek.  I had seen this during our first shopping stop to the LNS during retreat and had fallen for it at first sight.  I usually don't buy things right away, but wait and see if I still want things a week or two later.  After two weeks, I still wanted this, so I got it.

Bottom left corner is a Christmas ornie pattern set and a wooden snowflake to mount one of them on.  When you buy this set, you get all three snowflake stitching patterns, but only one of the wooden snowflakes for the finishing.  This is by Lynda Keske at Keslyns.com.  

The magnifying glass is a gift from my husband, given to me on the same day I did my shopping.  The rest is just some odds and ends; beeswax, needleminder, some more variegated thread I was running out of.  

All in all, it was a lot of fun and the biggest shopping I've done for stitching all year.  My stash is rather large so I decided to nix unnecessary stitchy spending this year and I've done a good job of that.  So it was nice to have this little treat.

About the only things I've stitched on the past few days has been one of the napkin sets I'm doing for someone's charity raffle.  Originally, I had three of the first set done.  I used a padded satin stitch, Kensington outline stitches for the stems and outer part of the leaves and regular backstitching inside the leaves.

But then I had a friend who is a much more experienced embroiderer than I am, offer me some advice on a ~ perhaps better ~ method for stitching these cherries.  She explained how on these circular type of things you can start at the outside and go around and around in a spiral and, especially with variegated floss, it will make your color changes less abrupt.  So, after talking with her, I realized I had seen that method used before in embroidery, but had never done it myself.  My intention was to finish the last napkin in the same way I had done the other three and then tuck this spiral method in my hat of tricks for the next time I came upon a shape that would be a good utilization for it.

But....the more I thought on it, the more I wanted to go ahead and use this method on the cherries.  After a bit of mental arguing with myself I just took the plunge and picked out all of the cherries I had done.  (But not the stems or leaves.)  You can see the spiral method shown below, it ends with a French knot in the middle.  On the first cherry my thread never made it to it's point of variegation, much to my chagrin.  But I ***was not*** of a mind to pick it out.  It stays.  I'm going to try and make the third cherry match up a bit to the first, so it looks like it was intentional, lol.  I really love how much texture I got.  Between the spiral method, the Kensington outline stitches, and a French knot in the middle ~ I'm quite pleased.

Right now what I need to finish are these napkins ~ they have a late September deadline, my animal towels for my charity ~ also a September deadline, and I want to get Frosty Friends finished too.  So I guess that for at least the next couple of weeks, those will be my focus projects.