I spent this afternoon stitching and was reminded why I haven’t done much stitching (or reading) this summer. I can’t see worth beans! My eyes are so slow at focusing. Today I used the magnifying glass on my craft lamp. That’s a pain in the tush. I had my glasses on, but had to have the magnifying glass at just the right distance. Too close or too far was blurry. Just right was great! I threaded a small needle on first try. The problem was keeping the glass at the just right distance. Thankfully, my eye appointment is next Thursday, so I hope to be able to see better in a couple of weeks.

Anyway… I persevered. I put together a small nine patch. My goal was to work on stacked running stitch, but I didn’t get to that yet. I also thought of skitch skatching an elephant, but after looking at my background fabric, I like the eland in the print, so I’ll stitch that and do the elephant on something else.

The more I look at it, the more I like the idea of embroidering the eland and maybe the giraffe’s head. And then doing the stacked running stitch (and perhaps other stiches) on a lot of the brown marks that look like grasses.

I love my little nine patch. Between 85% and 95% of all my fabric (large cuts and scraps) comes from my sister. Lots of beautiful colors, but there are very, very few browns, tans and “dull” colors. I can imagine her looking at this and saying it’s too dull for her. I’m normally drawn to bright, deep jewel tones, but this is so soothing to me. The top left, and middle left and center are all three from the same scrap (cream with peach flowers and a brown border with larger peach flowers, something I made (an apron maybe??) about 45 years ago. Finding coordinating colors took a while.

Iqbal is such a great fan! When he saw this he asked me to frame it so he can hang it when I’m done. Although he did like some of my mom’s work, I can’t imagine my dad ever asking that.

My other project this week was to finish the string art that totally frustrated my sister-in-law. The instructions were worse than awful and page two was missing. To figure out how to do it without wasting a ton of thread, I did it on the computer first. (Erasing is so much easier than ripping out even though string art ripping is easier than stitch ripping.) It only took a single whole afternoon (half of each of two afternoons, actually). The thread I originally chose for the wings was variegated and glittery, but also darker and finer and very hard to see. It looked realistic, but simply did not show up well enough on black. It would be great on medium to light colored background. I then chose rayon, which was a pain to work with, but worth it. A few of my knots came out and sections had to be redone. I think I’m going to redo the body. It’s one I redid because of a loose knot, but I should have gone back to the gold thread. Body and tail should be one. I may redo both in mylar thread. I’m also going to dab some glue on my knots.

I’ll take a new picture if/when I redo it.

Other than that I’ve been finishing up my machine embroidery files. How do I transfer folders from the laptop to the USB and hard drive and end up with different numbers of files on each? Not only that, which could be due to a) adding files to the original folder and forgetting to add to the others and/or b) there were forgotten files already in the hard drive and USB folders, but there is at least one folder I compared file by file and found them to be exactly the same, but properties still says one has two more files than the other. I unhid all the hidden files so that’s not it. I don’t know. Apparently it’s too late to go back to Windows 10, which is what I’d like to do because it has much less problems. On the positive side, I’ll have twice as much RAM by Monday and that should help with some of the issues.