Nashville Market (and a giveaway winner)

Hello everyone! Sorry it took me so long to make this post.  Life was busy when we returned from Nashville, and now I've caught some nasty cold thing.  I have almost no energy, which is no fun at all!

We ended up leaving a day early for Nashville, thanks to the snowstorm barreling into North Carolina just before our original departure date.  So instead of being snowed/iced in in Greensboro, we had a stressful hour or two of snowy driving just west of Asheville, and then all was good.  Flash forward past some room mixups at the Embassy Suites, and you would have found us all set up for my first official Nashville Market as a designer!  Here's a peek at a bit of our room:

We tried to add a lot of flowers and light colors to make the room bright and cheery, and I really think we succeeded.  The show went well, I think, and I made several new friends on the trip.  Since we were in town so early, we found enough spare time to hit one of several antiques shows going on that weekend.  This one was at the state fairgrounds, and was called the Tailgate Music Valley Antiques Show.  Boy did we do a lot of walking around!  Our purchases included a new antique sampler for me, and two new antique samplers for Mom.  I don't have a picture to share with you right now, mostly because I just don't have the energy to get a proper photo at the moment.  I will try to share before too long.  We also ran into a few other designers who were taking advantage of some free time to do a little shopping.  I don't think it's really my place to say who I saw buying what, but there are some fabulous reproductions bound to show up out there in the next year or so!  I also picked up another treasure for myself from an antiques dealer at the Nashville market itself.  Again, I haven't the energy to take a picture of my new baby just yet, but I promise I will share in the future.  Suffice it to say that I was showing my new treasures off all weekend long.  I can't wait to put needle to linen and breathe some new life into these precious pieces!

I have some photos of Mom's new releases that I want to share with all of you, but my energy is already fading.  Bleg.  So I will get down to what you are probably really interested in (a winner) and save the rest for another post.  Numbering each post and then using a random number generator to choose the winner, and....





The winner is Cath of "The Stitching Chicken."  Congratulations!!!!!  Please email me at robin@threadsofmemory.com with your address and your choices of patterns.

That's it for today.  I'm headed to the couch for a nap.  More updates soon (I hope).

Introducing Harriet Hodges

Hello world!  I will have to make this a quick one, as the winter weather is throwing a major wrench into our Nashville preparations.  Here is the last pattern that I will have available this month, Miss Harriet Hodges:

I feel a bit like this photo doesn't do her justice, but it's the best I can do.  Harriet stitched her sampler on a very fine linen using silk threads.  I have used 40 count Beige linen from Weeks Dye Works for my reproduction, and it is stitched using NPI silks.  It was quite a challenge to chart and stitch, because Harriet's cross stitches weren't always two threads high and two threads wide... not something easy to show on a chart in so many colors!  I have done my best to be faithful to the appearance of the original sampler though.

There's just a little more time left to enter my giveaway, which can be found here.  There are not a lot of people entered, so you have a fabulous chance of winning!

The original plan was for three of us, Mom, me, and our friend Chris, to leave bright and early Thursday morning for Nashville.  We would arrive just after 5 that evening, giving us plenty of time to set up our room and even do a little sightseeing on Friday before the market gets going.  Our first bump in the road came when poor Chris came down with the flu.  She will be greatly missed on this trip!  Then there's the weather.  Not only do we have to make it over a mountain range to get into Tennessee, but now they are predicting that this could be a major ice event here in middle North Carolina.  So what do you do?  Do you wait and hope that you could travel safely a day later?  Do you leave early?  How early?  And that's where we are right now.  I think we're going to live before the sun comes up tomorrow and hope that we can get through the mountains before it even begins to snow.  But we're watching the weather closely all evening, as we scramble to pack and get all those last minute details ironed out.  Hopefully, I will be updating early next week with a happy little report of safe travels and lots of sales.  Hopefully.

Stay out there my friends!

Two more new releases

Good morning all!  Hope you all had a pleasant weekend.  I'd ask if any of you enjoyed the game yesterday, but it was a real snoozer for those of us who aren't die hard fans of one of the two teams involved.

Anyways, I'm hard at work assembling patterns here.  The cats are supervising, but I don't let them get too close, or else I'd have sheets of paper and plastic bags skittering everywhere!  I wanted to share my other two original designs with you this morning.  First up we have Springtime on Hodge Hill, which was inspired by my love of designs with houses on them, and by the flowers on the Harriet Hodges antique (repro to be shared later this week).

This design is stitched on 35 count Linen line by Weeks Dye works using overdyed cottons from Weeks Dye Works and Gentle Arts.  It's another small design, and stitches up pretty quickly.

And finally this morning we have Yield Not.  After charting my reproduction sampler with the Adam and Eve on it, I decided I wanted a smaller Adam and Eve piece, and this design is the result.  It is stitched on 40 count Vintage Exemplar Linen from Lakeside Linens using overdyed cotton threads from Weeks Dye Works and Gentle Arts.

If you like what you see here, please let your local needlework shop know about these designs.  And please share about these patterns with your friends too!  I can be reached for wholesale orders at robin@threadsofmemory.com, or you can contact my mother at Cherished Stitches.

Don't forget to enter my giveaway, which can be found in this post.  Til next time, stay warm, and I hope you have plenty of time to be creative!