Happy Birthday to me

While we were out of town, my long-awaited birthday gift arrived from Spoonflower. I told Mr. Lemon that I wanted fabric for my birthday so I picked it out and ordered it. It's much easier that way. These are from Heather Ross' new collection for Spoonflower called Macaroni Love Story. I decided to go with the organic cotton sateen. I have some of her cotton voile, some of the linen, and some regular quilting weight cotton, and of course this, so why not keep mixing it up? The sateen is very soft but feels hearty.

I love this design. When I go to pick out fabrics for a project, however, they are rarely like this. So I went with a test swatch of the two colorways that I was having trouble deciding between. I like having just a little bit -- enough for a pocket or some trim. As you can see for the aqua, I adjusted the scale from 300 to 375 dpi. It's not very noticeable but I just wanted to experiment. It made the people a little bit smaller.

These three are my little impulse buys. The Snow White is by Heidi Kenney of My Paper Crane, the yellow school buses are, of course, by Anda, and the awesome gnomes are by Paper Sparrow. I only remembered after I ordered the Snow White that I changed up the colors for the cross-stitch I am working on; it's not going to match. I'll have to figure something else out.

Thank you awesome computer for saving this entire post when Blogger didn't. Oh, and soon Andrea from Paper Sparrow will be doing an interview. Yay!

After I can sew no more...

In the evenings when I'm shot, I like to watch TV. I hate to just sit there though so I bought this awesome cross-stitch pattern from Heidi Kinney's Etsy shop. It's a fabulous rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I'm using some linen that I got locally (after spending hours searching the web). I'm not sure if it's the 32-count in the sample or not but it is working just fine.

I switched up the colors a bit to match Zadie's room: orange, apple green and aqua instead of red, kelly green and royal blue. It's lovely to count. I guess I like doing math and stuff. When I'm working on a small project, I keep all the gear in one of those bags that curtains come in. It keeps everything contained and neat. See the safety pins? Yeah, I don't like to use an embroidery hoop (plus mine is broken). Maybe that will change after a visit to Michael's.

I would love to make an apron for a dress out of this. That was the plan. But I've spent 3 - 4 hours on this already and I have 3 hats, a shirt, a belt, and one belt buckle stitched. So this was originally a kids clothing week item but we'll see. I estimated this would take me 22 days to stitch.

I blurred the pattern in the photo because even though the resolution of the image is small, I didn't want someone to be able to use it from the blog.