Hi! [wave]

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

I just found this com a few days ago and I've been commenting so I figured I should introduce myself and all. :) My name is Angie, I'm forty-two (well, forty-three next month) and I'm in Long Beach. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was three and I've been doing some sort of needlework ever since. I've picked up a bunch of techniques along the way because I like learning new things, and although I'm pretty good at a few things I'm not really expert in any one thing. I knit and crochet, do various types of embroidery and lace techniques and I've done some sewing, although I'm considerably heavier [cough] than I was last time I sewed anything and I probably won't do any more until I get back at least within spitting distance of a size sixteen. I'm the sort of person who always has twenty different WIPs lying around and hardly ever finishes anything. [wry smile]

These are the three pieces I've worked on the most recently, meaning they're the most likely to be completed some time in the next decade.





This is a baby Sumatran tiger in counted cross stitch. It's a kit based on a design by Carol Bryan. I don't usually do kits but CCS really isn't my thing and I'm not up to designing anything anywhere near this complexity, within like a lightyear. But my husband is a cat person and when I saw this I knew he'd like it. Unfortunately CCS drives me insane so I don't work on it very often, but every now and then I get this inexplicable CCS bug and I dig it out and work on it for a little while until I remember just why it drives me insane and then I put it away again for a while, LOL! Our tenth anniversary is in about a month, though, and I had some crazed idea that I might buckle down and finish it so I can give it to the spousal unit but we'll see.





This one is a Hardanger pillow top, from a Dover reprint of some Priscilla designs. I've actually done a bit more since I took this picture; I'll post another one when I finish the surface embroidery and am ready to start the cutwork, yay! This design has some really large and crude-looking cross stitching in some of the blank areas for... additional decoration I guess :P but I don't like it and I'm leaving it off. Our livingroom carpet is mostly shades of blue with some grey and lavendar, so I'm planning to make this into a throw pillow for the sofa.





This is a needle lace practice piece. Since it's only a practice piece I just sort of scribbled a flowerish shape onto paper with a pencil -- please forgive the lopsidedness and complete lack of proportion. ;) I'm doing the petals with different filling stitches. In the top petal I tried to give it a sort of shading effect by spacing the stitches farther apart in the center area. It's working in principle (assuming the pic is good enough to see the difference [squint]) but in practice the spaced-out area's edges are too irregular for it to really looks good, so it just looks sloppy. I meant it to be that way, honest! Umm, sort of. [rueful smile] When I'm done filling the petals and pointy-things, I'm going to try that heavily padded and tapered border you see on Venice lace. I have a book that shows how but I've never tried it and there are some logistics that aren't really covered in the instructions so we'll have to see how it turns out.

I have a bunch of other ongoing projects, but either I haven't worked on them in years or in the case of one embroidery there's really too little to show yet. Later. :)

[wave]

Angie