sugar

Where to begin?  I won three prizes in a raffle today.  :)  My luck had waned after my grand prize of a positive pregnancy test, so I welcomed the renewal.  I was awarded a $5 gift certificate to Sonic, a dinner-for-two certificate to a small, local Italian restaurant, and a free oil change.  Dinner's on me tonight.

I've been spending a lot of time preparing for my first craft night.  Jesse recently went back to school (this is very exciting!) and he's now working most evenings out of the week.  As a result, I have a lot of time on my hands and I decided it couldn't hurt to have some girls over for a fun evening of chatting, eating, and crafting.  I'd had my eye on some cool embroidery books for many months, and I determined that it would be the perfect group-conducive craft to try.

We'll be practicing a variety of stitches, learning how to transfer an image onto fabric, and then working on a small project.  I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing before trying to show other people, so I spent a night trying about 10 different stitches on scrap fabric.  I then moved on to a small sugar skull design that I found in the book Embroidered Effects by Jenny Hart.  Here's my progress so far:

This piece incorporates the backstitch, split stitch, cross stitch, straight stitch, and the lazy daisy (aka isolated chain stitch).  The lazy daisy stitches (in the center of the eyes) was the trickiest, but I think I did a decent job.

I have a couple more lazy daisies to complete, along with several French knots, then I'm finished.  I have a million different projects I'd like to try out, it's just a matter of deciding which one is next!