Xmas cactus and retreat goodies

After seeing Wanda's post with here Xmas cactus, I needed to go look at mine to see if it had blossomed and it did!

So here are some of the goodies I brought home from the retreat. I will show the last of it tomorrow. I was so tired when I got home from work yesterday that all I could do was take pictures of my goodies and then do nothing. I am still tired. One more good night's sleep and I will be ok. I do love all the different things people come up with for table gifts. Most people bring a few extra just in case. I received these cute pincushions.

Some candy

These are a mix of dangles to add to a zipper pull and holders for floss.

I received this cute jar with goodies inside. The goodies were trims and things for finishing smalls. There was a lot in that little jar!

I got some skeins of floss, a tiny pair of scissors and some do-dads. The bag has weathered jingle bells in it which I will use for finishing a small.  Everyone needs a little from with sunglasses!  That little glass piece in the first picture is an emergency needle that you can hang on a necklace!  LOL!!

One lady had brought these beautifully decorated cookies her daughter made that looked like a tomato pincushion! It is too pretty to eat, but some ladies did eat their cookie and said they were delicious.

Since there were four designers, we received four kits - meaning, the charts, floss and fabric! This kit is to make a scissor holder and fob, a tiny pin cushion, and a tiny needlebook. I took a picture of the pin cushion beside a tea bag tag so you could see how tiny it is. It has a bee theme. Everything fits into the tin. The designer assured us that the instructions were so anyone could stitch and finish each item.   This kit is going to my sister since she likes bees and is good at stitching fussy little items. Merry Christmas Kathy!

The next sampler came in lovely box. It is a reproduction.

The third project was another reproduction sampler. It has lots of different animals on it and there are a lot of colors! Look at all that floss!

The last project was another reproduction, but a completely different style. It is a German sampler and they gave us a skein of silk floss! I have never stitched with silk so stitching this one ought to be interesting! The person that owned the original sampler gave it to the designer so we passed it around to get a good look at it.

The shop also has quilting fabric. They have some beautiful fabric, but it is all $12.99 a yard - yikes! I don't really need any fabric, but I had to look at the 70% off bin. I found these three bolts and each one had a bit more than 8 yards on them. I thought they would be perfect for some baby quilts.  You had to buy the whole bolt but after doing the math the fabric was only $3.88 a yard! It had been marked $12.99.  I forgot to look to see what brand it was.  I will let you know tomorrow.  

There was a room of marked down fabric I missed so I went back on Saturday and found this darker fabric that I thought would be a nice accent color. It from a different line, but I think it works. It was 40% off and I bought 3 yards.

Back from my cross stitch retreat

I had a wonderful 3 1/2 days in the Fingerlake area of NY for a cross stitch retreat at Hobby House Landings needlework shop. I stayed up the hill at the retreat site. I reconnected with some stitches I had met at other retreats and met many wonderful new friends! There were four designers and they are showing the projects they designed for us. They wre all lovely ladies, spent time talking to anyone and everyone for the full three days, and thanked me for the gift of a project bag, thread bed and scissor pouch I gave them. The one designer who is probably 80 brought her cousin, Maggie. She was older and was just learing to cross stich at the retreat! I had a leftover table gift set, so I gave that to her. She was thrilled! Tomorrow I will show each project up close. Read on for what happened when I got home.

Here are some of my fellow table stitchers hard at work.

There was plenty of tables set up and counting me there were 6 at our table so that left me with two extra table gift which one went to Maggie. I had plenty of space to set out my project bags and thread beds. I started with 100 PBs and came home with 68. There were only 83 stitchers; at the previous retreat there were 150+. I started with 183 thread beds and came home with 116. I received a lot of wonderful comments on the quality of the TBs and PBs. I guess I am already ahead for the next retreat! I was happy with the number I sold. It was funny that I would leave to go do something and when I came back I would find money! The ladies would shop and just leave the cash!

I ended up with lots of goodies,

but I didn't have time to take pictures last evening. When I got home, I emptied the car and threw the clothes in the wash. I was just getting ready to start putting things away when my neighbor stopped over. He needed a 9 volt batter and a screw driver. The keypad to open his garage would not work so he though the battery was dead. He had been outside power washing and had closed the garage door. Well, about 5 minutes later he came back and changing the battery didn't work. He was locked out of his house, didn't have his phone as it was in the house, and didn't have the car keys so he could get the remote control garage door opener out of his LOCKED!!! car. Geeze! So he came inside - he didn't want too because he was wet and dirty from power washing -and we called AAA. Yes, we told a little white lie and pretended it was my car, but other than breaking a window, he was stuck. So he sat on my steps watching for the AAA guy and I went down to the lower level to try and get unpacked. This all happened while I was talking to my sister who had called to wish me a happy b-day. When my neighbor came over I had to hang up with her to take care of him. All I wanted to do was to sit and relax after a 3 1/2 hour drive and look at my goodies. AAA finally showed up, got his car unlocked, and he got his garage door opened. It was 6 PM before I could call my sister back. By then I was starting to crash. I did take pictures of this cute case we got. It is not a Winterberry, but it is beautifully made. They had a bunch of colors to pick from. One of the ladies offered to add my initials for my b-day gift! She was making scissor fobs or bag fobs.  That was so sweet of her!

I did make a trip to the mall to get something. I think a person could spend all day in this mall. It is the biggest one I have ever been in! Here are two branches and you cannot see the end of either corridor!  This is only a fifth of the mall!

Not enough time in a day!

I wanted to make this last evening

but I just didn't have time. After work I ran some errands and dropped off the scissor pouch for my beautician. She just happen to be at the front door of the shop when I arrived. She loved the pouch. I then headed home. I needed to do some dishes, clean up the kitchen, and make some food for my lunch tomorrow. I did catch a glimpse of the sunset. Gosh, it get dark early! UGH!!!

My cold is getting better. I did get another bottle of Zicam while I was out doing errands.

One more PB, thread, and clearing up the big table

I forgot to publish my post from yesterday! What the what? So if you are interested in my three days of crazy go take a look. Meanwhile, I packed up the PBs. I counted 99 including the bunch that were returned to me. They filled three containers. Add in another 11 for the designer gifts and table gifts and that's a lot of project bags!  LOL!!

I decided I needed to make it an even 100 for the people at the retreat so I took that leftover interfaced lining piece and cut the rest of the pieces I needed to make it a bag. It didn't take long to make.

I then packed up the thread beds. Here are 183 I will be taking. Add in the 11 for the table gifts and designers, 1 for Anne, 1 that I kept because of that mark on the flannel, another one I decided to keep and the new pig TB. Well, you get the idea - I made a lot! LOL!!

Two boxes were delivered yesterday.

One was some thread from a friend who didn't want it.

The other was thread that had an extra 20% off the sale prices.  The smaller spools are regular sewing thread.  

I had to laugh that one cone I bought was the same color as a cone that my friend sent me! This will be perfect for quilting one of my bunkhouse quilts.

I have been still cleaning up the studio and here is the table after last weekend and what it looks like now. In the back corner are two quilt tops that are first on my list since I am done with TBs and PBs for now.

Three days of crazy!

I took Friday off to get some stuff done. I went to my hair appointment, ran some errands and then headed to the sewing studio. I got the one scissor pouch and PBs I needed for table gifts done.

Here is the back of the odd one. I don't think it looks too bad.

I was cleaning up the big table and found enough pieces to make two more scissor pouches.

I made a different type of pouch for my beautician's scissors.

For my brother, I fixed two shirts, an equipment bag for the band, and a seam that was missed in one of the shirts we sell at the merch booth.

I finally got the snaps in these 18 thread beds.

Then I needed to replace a few snaps that had fallen out of the thread beds my friend had sent back to me. These 15 TBs were made before I bought The Hulk. I replaced the missing snaps and put each snap back in The Hulk and pressed them again to make sure they won't fall out.

There is one lady at the needlework shop I wanted to make something special for. She mentioned she like ocean fabrics so I made her a thread bed and scissor pouch.

I wanted to make something for me and experiment with adding another pocket to a thread bed. I had bought a cute chart, but in my regular TB, it was close to not fitting. Here you can see it just sticking out of the pocket.  I kept this TB after I noticed that there was a dark streak thru the flannel.  No way I could sell it so I just kept it for myself.  

Here in this new version, you can see the chart easily fits in the new flannel pocket side of the TB.  So now there are two pockets.  I will have to make and send a couple of this style to my sister to get her opinion

I interfaced the flannel and backed it with matching fabric before I sewed the binding at the edge. I made the width of the TB 1 1/4" wider and the height just 1/4" bigger.

For good measure I decided to make some boxy pouches for little gifts just in case.

I spent time putting things away in the studio and did spend about an hour blowing leaves. On top of all of this I caught a cold which started on Friday and spent a lot of time blowing my nose this weekend. I have killed off almost two boxes of Kleenex already. I do feel better today and I think taking Zicam with elderberry has helped!