May Ort Report, BAP Challenge update, and other stitching thoughts

It's time for my monthly TUSAL update.  If you want to learn more about the TUSAL, check out Daffycat's blog here .  As I have moved since my last TUSAL update, I have to find a new location for my ort jar photos.  So I decided to give the birds a chance to admire all my lovely orts:

In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest decision.  Don't some birds find that bits of thread make excellent additions to their nests?  Stay away from my orts little chickadee!  Seriously, I am having such a great time watching the birds that gather around our little bird feeder.  It's right outside the kitchen window, along with a humming bird feeder, so I can watch them any time that I'm doing something in the kitchen.

I spent a week working on my BAP challenge sampler.  It's not an impressive amount of progress.  I went from here:

to here:

I've only been devoting about a week a month to this piece.  I may have to bump the stitching time up later in the year, but for now, I think I'll stick to that schedule.

On Wednesday, I drove over to Mom's house for an intense 'framing' session.  For many years, I have not had the majority of my finished pieces framed.  This happened for several reasons: I didn't have space to hang the pieces, I didn't have the money for framing, and my mom doesn't really love the whole framing process all that much (I mentioned in my last post that my parents are photographers, which also means that they are able to provide me with a large selection of framing options for a far cheaper price than your average consumer can find).  But now that I've got this nice big house to fill up with stitching, I feel like it's time to put some of these beauties on the walls.  We started by dragging out every single stitched piece of mine that we could find.  This in and of itself was a bit overwhelming as Mom had finished pieces, both mine and hers, stashed in several places in the upstairs of her house.  Much of our work is hidden under piles of class kits and stitching models, etc, etc.  It took a while to find everything.

Once we had a nice big stack of needlework, we carefully measured the size of each piece and wrote it down on a master list.  I forgot to bring my camera with me, which is a shame, because you might have gotten a kick out of seeing that big pile of stitchery, just waiting to be framed.  We also found two Christmas ornaments, one large pillow, and a needleroll, all waiting to put into their finished form.  The ornaments and needleroll have come home with me, to be worked on here at my house.  After we finished with the measurements, I selected a half dozen or so pieces to be the first to receive their frames.  We spent another hour or two picking out the frames for them.  Dad has ordered one of the frames, and will hopefully order the rest when they return from Connecticut later this week.  Next week, I will return to Mom's house for a training session in pinning.  No, not Pinterest, pinning the linen to mounting boards so that each piece will be smoothly stretched across it before going into the frames.  Sigh.  I'm not really excited about learning how to pin.  But I will learn, and I will do it, because the end result will be worth it.  Sigh.  So hopefully I will have photos of one or two beautifully framed pieces sometime next week, followed by many more in the weeks to come.

Having been inspired by this week's trip down memory lane, I've pulled out some of my patriotic finishes and put them up around the house.  I figure they can stay out from now through September 11th and be perfectly appropriate, right?  Anyway, I only took a photo of one of the pieces before I sat down to blog, so that's the last photo that I'll share with you today.  I have a fondness for stitching sheep.  Don't know why.  I just do.  So here's an oldie but a goodie:

I spent my stitching time this past week working on Sous le Soleil.  But I don't feel like I stitched very much. There were just so many other things going on.  So I'm going to keep working on Soleil this week.  Til next time, I hope everyone has a beautiful, crafty day!