Stitching In Hawaii

My family was blessed enough to get a week long vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii last week! and I personally was blessed with good stitching time during it! We stayed at a beautiful resort and did many fun things….snorkeling, swimming in the pool and at the beach, eating good treats, driving around to see waterfalls and the Volcano National Park. The boys took a surfing lesson, and my middle girl (age 13) got scuba certified and the big kids and dad all went scuba diving.

A highlight was a night snorkeling trip to see manta rays feeding. It was just incredible. 11 rays showed up to the feeding site (normally it is only 2-3! We got a special experience!) and it was astonishing to be so close to such huge but gentle creatures and watch the grace which with they swim, eating plankton as they somersaulted under the light boards that attract the plankton. They eat for 20 hours a day!! Some of them had wingspans of 13 feet! They need to eat a lot for their body size.

Anyway…the stitching! I restrained myself to bringing 3 projects. I finished the Noel Tuffet by Shakespeare’s Peddler. That was an easy finish. Here is my work.

I use Icing from Belle Soie on a pinky brown linen that I don’t remember. It might be Sleeping Bear. It might be something else. I should write these things down! I think I’ll make it into a pillow ornament.

I also worked on the Red and Green Carnation Sampler by Samplers Remembered. This one is so great for vacation stitching because there are so many straight lines and border, and it was just really easy to make quick and easy progress on it. I finished the bottom section, started in on the letters, and worked on the various vertical borders. Since we got back I’ve spent a lot more time with it working on the eyelet letters I love how they’re coming out.

I also worked on Mary Ellen Turner. I got the border sketched in up to the top turn so I could cut down my half yard of linen to the right size. Now it is less like a blanket when I pick it up to stitch! That’s nice! I put in the cartouche for the name, worked on filling in the castle, and put on the baskets, which are now ready for their berries of many colors. My, this is a fun stitch, one of those can’t-put-down-able projects. Every time I pick it up it is so fun to decide what I’m going to work on right away and then before I know it I’m ready to make that decision again…what I will work on next as soon as I finish an outline, a basket, a section of bricks, or whatever. It stays really interesting the whole stitching session. I think that is the key. I just can’t wait to stitch the parrot. But I did make a small counting error so I have to put the border in from which to count off the parrot because if I use the obvious starting point, the parrot will run into something else… I don’t remember what…I just know when I discovered the mistake and decided not to fix it I thought, ok the parrot MUST be counted from the border, not from the leaves below it.

Now I’m home I also have kitted 3 more projects and I can’t decide which to start! And then I have another post-Dorcas post for you about how I want to attack my WIPS through the end of the year. It is so hard being a stitcher with so many equally great choices!