Day 7 - First week is over!

As always it pays to save what you are doing on a computer - I'd been marking my progress on the pattern on my computer in Paint.NET but apparently completely forgot to save it *at all* and when my computer started acting up for other reasons I completely lost all progress that I'd made. After thinking about things for a long time and re-marking the colour I was working on at the time I decided to skip re-adding everything and just work on the colours I still had to do as I had kept the colours I still had to do separate from the finished ones. This caused a fair bit of lost time of course so I only completed the one colour yesterday.

I noticed that between the lines of the embroidery things are not as flat as they should be (yuk) so I decided that instead of leaving that space uncovered I'd add some stitching there too and chose to do a strip pattern in 3 shades of white. In the photo above the colours do not show so clearly but there is a tiny difference (I can just hear the guys say "Difference? There's a difference??") that is admittedly more obvious in sunlight (which of course is hidden behind the clouds right now).

Colours finished:
3772

Working with:
3865
White
B5200

Going to be working with these three for a day or so but I'll still post an update photo tomorrow :)

Day 6

I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped but then I'd forgotten that yesterday afternoon was the last chance to go birthday present shopping before oldest's birthday tomorrow so that needed doing as well (I hate doing it before then as it's rather difficult to hide stuff here so I end up putting it in the larder for the duration, with the obvious complications of doing that and having to hide the key). Admittedly the colours I'm did had more than 30 stitches each with the most being 103 stitches and the colours I'll be working with today will stay in that range.

Colours finished: 7
433
434
543
632
712
801
3860

Working with:
3772


There are 11 colours left that I haven't worked with yet for the main part of the embroidery.

Day 5

Yesterday after the sleepover party had ended I was able to put my feet up and have a rest, which meant I could zoom ahead with my embroidery while I did so. After I'd finished some of the colours with the most stitches I decided to work on the colours that didn't have many stitches as many have less than 30 stitches. As a result my list of completed colours is rather on the long side hehe.

Colours finished: 25
436
437
738
739
779
838
839
840
841
842
898
938
951
976
977
3031
3064
3371
3773
3857
3859
3862
3863
3864
3866

Working with:
801

With my joints playing up today (as predicted) I'm not going to be able to do much more than embroider so hopefully I'll put another dent in the list of colours I still need to do.

Day 4

As predicted I didn't get much done yesterday but I did get a bit done and managed to finish the colour I had almost completed yesterday and also get a bit done on the next colour.

Colours finished:
3770

Working with:
3064 (33% completed)

The sleep over kids are still here and will be wanting pancakes for lunch (not the small American kind but the large English kind) but I have a feeling it will become brunch because they are showing no interest in actually eating breakfast lol. Either way I'm going to be kept busy for a bit longer and will be more dead than alive when they are gone.

Birthday sleepover

It's almost my oldest son's 11th birthday and he wanted a sleepover party - I wasn't too keen on the idea but I decided to give it a go anyway and see how things went. (it's actually going better than expected lol) Any way - with a party there is party food and I spent the greater part of today in the kitchen baking, decorating and preparing food. First there was the afternoon party with a couple of friends who weren't allowed to spend the night but did want to come> I had baked a sponge cake and filled it with raspberry jam, made 4 kinds of cupcakes (melon, lemon, peach and popcorn) and 2 different types of biscuits (that's cookies if you are American ;) )  One batch was using an "Animal crackers" recipe and was first letters of the names of the kids coming to the party. The other batch was sitting dogs that due to the black splodges I gave them looked more like cows, stegosauruses and fish made with a sugar biscuit recipe. On top of all that I also served a "Chinoise" a French style "cake" made with mini rolled up brioches filled with French cream and then baked - I cheated and bought this in the shop though hehe.  I gave the kids a choice of orange, strawberry and blackcurrant lemonade to drink.

For dinner oldest wanted home made pizza - ones they could "decorate" themselves. So I spent an age cutting stuff up for them So I made the tomato sauce for them, red/yellow sweet peppers, spring onion, normal sliced onion, sliced cherry tomato's mushrooms, tuna, boiled back bacon (the dutch call this casslerrib) , raw back bacon, leftover kebab from last night, some mince I cooked specially, salami and ham. I offered 4 cheeses: old Gouda, young Gouda, a special blend of "gratain"  cheese and last but certainly not least: mozzarella. The kids had a load of fun making their pizza's and then spent the next 20 minutes complaining that it took so long to cook lol.

In a short while I'm going to be a good mum and make the kids a midnight snack, not entirely sure what yet but they will enjoy it :)

Day 3

Yesterday I didn't get as much done as I would have liked because I was up to my eyeballs in getting ready for my oldest son's sleepover party today - the house hasn't been this clean in ages - but that's mostly due to the kids *both* having their rooms clean at the same time for a change lol

Colours finished:
3861

Working with:
3770 (75% completed)

Not sure how much I'll manage to do today - got a load of baking to do for the party and then the party to deal with.

The Bathroom...

A couple of weeks ago I finally managed to get the landlord to see that the "wall" in the bathroom was about as safe as walking across thin ice over a tank of hungry piranha's and he sent a builder over to remove it. The guy got out a chisel and a hammer, put the chisel against the wall and leaned on it just before giving it a big whack and almost fell through the "wall". He was horrified at how bad it was - I suspected it was bad but didn't realise it was *so* bad. 

As you can see it didn't look too good after the builder went through the wall - he even took photo's because he said "My boss will never believe me if I don't take a few photo's." It didn't take him too long to take the rest of the wall down - it was water logged, mildewed and rotted through in many places and the only thing holding it up was the tiles lol.

Once the wall was gone we had the rail to remove and that left a nasty hole in the ceiling that I had to fix myself. Fortunately I CAN do that so once I'd worked myself up to do it I managed to do a decent job - it's not perfect but the only way to get perfect was to plaster the whole ceiling as the previous tenant had kindly used that nasty paint with bits in it and I just don't have the physical ability to do that.

Once that was dry and sanded I first painted the area's that needed it with anti mildew paint and then it was time to paint the bathroom a nice bright shade of green. As it's mostly tiled I could get away with a brighter shade than I could have if there wasn't so much white and I LOVE colour! 

Only about 75 cm / 30 inches at the top could be done and I chose to also paint the ceiling the same green as you can see in the image to the right

This is the bit to the right of the door above the sink and to the right of the shower.

 And this is the shower with the shower curtain that I installed yesterday after my shoulder had recovered from the painting - it's always fun to get out my power tools to do a job that far too many men *still* don't think that a woman can do - or should do in some cases. It was nice to have a shower with the shower curtain in place for the first time as I'd had to shower without for a couple of weeks before I was able to get started on this.

Day 2 of the project

I got a fair bit done on the project in-between doing other things around the house (more on that later). It's now 4 x 3 1/4 inches and for now that's not going to change too much as the basic outline is now done.

Colours finished:
3853 (will need more of this for the border)
301
435

Working with:
3861

A good friend of mine told me yesterday it looked like a slide with bacteria on it lol.

Secret project...

Or not so secret as I will be posting pictures...  however I'm going to leave you to guess what I'm making *wink*

What I can say is that it's small - the entire piece of 18 stitches per inch Aida I'm using (that's a type of embroidery fabric for the non cross stitcher's out there :) ) is 8 x 7 inches, the pattern is 81 x 96 stitches and I'm using 53 different shades of brown in it. I also didn't need to buy a single colour to make this hehe.

I started this yesterday (well the 2 stitches I did the night before don't really count ;) ) and this is what I have done so far:

Area done so far: 3 3/4 x 1 7/8 inch (which happens to be about the same size as my phone)

Next update: Tomorrow with a photo taken before I start embroidering :)

Update time...

So life has been busy and I've not really been remembering to post here... not that I've not done anything - just not posted it all here too.

Cooking wise I've mostly been doing stuff I've posted about already so you don't need to see it again ;)

I've lately been more into embroidery than into quilting so that's what I've mostly been doing. Below are some pictures of what I've been making instead - many of the pieces are inspired by humon's SATW comic which I LOVE.