Purple Haze & The Artificial Time

Yes, it's my favorite time of year again, when we start daylight saving. Bah humbug! Cutting a foot of the bottom and sewing it onto the top does not a longer blanket make. Anyway, a little cranky for the next few until I get adjusted. Someday, when all I have to get up in the morning is ME, I will stay on REGULAR time all year round (or move to AZ, where they do this already). Considering I was seriously dragging ass last week, this week's not looking too promising - or at least won't until Friday, which I have off, through next Tuesday!! Ahhh, some days off, and THIS TIME, I will NOT have a crud :) Unless the artificial time does me in, coupled with the pollen that has all of us sneezing the last few days...

 

(Booger's Violet)

As for purple, it would seem all I worked on this week was purple :) First, Iris fairy finally saw daylight again, first time since the impulse to start her last year won out. I LOVE these colors :) Not particularly liking dragging the Kreinik through the stitching to get those wing veins on (this is 32ct fabric - so hand dyed, probably closer to 34? It's a tight fit - hope the beads fit, or I'll have to swap 'em for 15/0s), but it looks really cool :) JE does such a good job making the wings appear translucent with shadows from the objects behind. Next time she's out, her hair and face...

And also of note - thanks to Lisa completing the Crescent Moon Dragon and now working on another JE, I was compelled to start getting kits together for more JE projects (because, you know, all my kits start with spreadsheets); I have the four Seasonal Fairies, Fire & Water Goddess, and Poppy Fairy all beginning to be kitted up, 4 of them having fabrics already (the Silkweaver debacle last fall helped me out there tremendously :) ), and Kreinik & beads ordered for one from JJ's spring sale this weekend (along with a pile of DD silks for Deep Blue Sea).

Speaking of stash, I got some more beads in, from Beadies Beadwork,  again split between Sparkly Hummingbird and Deep Blue Sea, and my fabric for Hummingbird is dyed & paid for, so hope it gets here this week - it would go well with this post if it had been here in time.

Since I am actually getting a tax refund this year (yeah, the boys are off the hook in having to flip for who gets to black-market an organ), I have fabric picked out for Deep Blue Sea - I just gotta decide if I want to lose my mind and go opalescent or not...

Okay, back to the purple - I guess that stash interjection was from the haze part... So in my local group, Jackie & Tricia have both completed the Ink Circles Halloween Mandala from last year's special edition JCS Halloween book, one as charted on tha great PTP Voodoo, and another on a green (Eek? I thing that's what she used). It just happened to occur to me that I had this great piece of purple fabric, an RAK from Laura, that I had set aside to do a couple of my favorite blocks from Boo! Club on, to make into a flatfold. Well, I got it out of the cabinet, just to measure - and woohoo! It's big enough for the Mandala!!! So off to HL I go for floss. I am glad I took the fabric in with me - I was going to just go 310, but when I laid the skeins down on it, it looked really flat :( Not quite happy, I tried a few other colors, including blood red, which might have worked for a more sinister design. I settled on 839, which looks like a really rich black on this fabric :) So Friday, I put the first stitches in, and plowed through almost half of it - and one complete skein of thread - by Sunday afternoon. Obsess much? Yes, yes I do  - but it's so purple!!!

I have the mandala in the travel bag - I think I will be able to see it well enough to work it at IHOP on Tuesday night. As for the main focus of the week, I am getting L&U back out, now that my fingers have had a rest (of a sort) - and I found some of these at HL when I was getting thread, too, so this will help immensely! As I have a long weekend coming up for myself, I may try to get the mandala done, too. Assuming I don't sleep the entire time, of course... I gotta rest up for end-of-quarter/end-of-year panic for the two weeks when I get back...



On that note, Happy Stitching to everyone!