Stitches, books, bits and Orts

We are having another sunny day here in Florida today,  I know that must sound silly coming from someone living in the sunshine state but January has been gray skies, cloudy, foggy and rainy for two weeks.

This week I have been keeping to my goal of being more creative in 2015, I began the stitching on my Greenman piece. I started at Thursday's Thread Therapy group which meets at the Yards n Yarn shop.

The Thread Therapy group had a wonderful turnout with lots of talented women working on all sorts of projects, next week I plan to bring a crochet project.
This weeks stitches for the Joyful Embellishments facebook group gave me a bit of a challenge but I worked them out after a few pull outs. I make changes when ribbon is used, I am not ready for that just yet.  I did use more beads this week.

week two stitches

I do like the variations of the feather stitch even with the few blunders I made as seen in this photo

my blunders

This week the walk down the driveway to my mailbox held a few prized possessions to add to my collections

The co-author of this book Valerie Bothell is the creator of Joyful Embellishments and her stitching is amazing.

This book is going to be very helpful as I explore and create more crazy quilt projects, I have a few blocks in mind the gypsy block I mentioned in an earlier post  using this fabric piece as focus point.

I found this cute little tambourine charm to use on the block

This year I decided to give The Month of Letters Challenge a try again, after the rude comments and messages from a few participants about how much mail I send daily I just closed my account so I didn't have to bother with the petty bullshit. I have been a penpal for most of my life so I write lots of letters, for this year's challenge I created a new account. Speaking of letters I have three waiting for a reply so let me post this, brew some tea and pull out my stationery and stamps.

Oh yes I will once again be doing the TUSAL (totally useless stitch a long) and tomorrow will be the first post of my orts jar for 2015. Not exactly sure what an Orts is, click the link here and read all about it, you may want to join too! Its free, its fun and its totally useless.
http://itsdaffycat.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-totally-useless-stitch-long-2015.html