happy blogaversary! :-)

Friday was my first year blogaversary. I can't believe it's been a year already. Over the past year, I've had such a good time getting to know a wonderful circle of people. And I can't believe how much I've learned and just how much I've acquired during this short time. :-)

It became very evident to me Friday on just how much I've acquired. I worked from home and during emails and various downloads, I went through my stash to find the perfect combination of linen and fiber for Coq au Pins smalls. My original thought was to use the dark blue/green piece of linen I purchased from Silkweavers for my Cirque des Cercles. If you remember, the piece I received was really ugly and blotchy and not at all what I was looking for. On Thursday evening I decided to experiment a bit. I figured after all I had nothing to loose. I got a big bowl of water and put several drops of beach in it. And then the entire piece of linen! After a couple of hours the water was a nice dark purple color. I pulled it out and dried it and the linen was much improved in color. :-) I could see the two colors (dark violet/blue and dark green) that made up the piece of linen and the blotches of light color didn't even stick out so much. I thought it was a great success. In fact for a while I thought that maybe it would now work for Cirque des Cercles. (Here are the two fabrics that I've been debating over - but I'm still thinking of using the piece on the right from Picture This Plus.)

So anyway on Friday I was going through my stash of fabrics and fibers working first with the dark blue piece and matching it up with Vikki Clayton silks. I found a combo that I thought I liked well enough but to be sure I had just the right mix of linen and thread, I pulled out my Silkweavers stash. I have over 16 pieces of Silkweavers! Well that just opened up a ton more options especially when I pulled out my fiber stash and went through was felt like hundreds of options. :-) It was such fun! I'll end this story by saying that I was so grateful at that point that I had a blog and had acquired all this cool stash. Stash that for the most part I learned of it's existence from you the people who's blogs I read. Tomorrow I'll show my selection of linen and color and my progress on the piece. And it isn't dark blue and cream silk thread. :-) I think it's much prettier.

Monday morning I'm flying out to NY on business unexpectedly. I expect to be there until Wednesday evening for sure but I need to stay flexible in my plans and I might not be able to come home until Thursday some time. I'm working on a project with a co-worker in our NY office and it's falling apart in the worst way. We decided on Friday afternoon that the only thing to do was to work together for several days and get it back on track. I'll bring my Coq au Pins piece with me but except for during the flight, I probably won't have any time at all to stitch.

Oh, and the picture at the top is of course my St. Reatham taken after Thursday stitching. I'm almost half way done with the first page. Only seven and a half pages to go. :-)