Blue for you, blog sharing and a Serendipitous find.

Not much actual stitching to show as I've been working on prizes and cards.  But here is a Blue Peter special:

I very successfully tea-dyed some fabric using fruit tea recently and had a look round the kitchen to see what else there was.  Not a fat lot in my kitchen TBH but there was some food dye in blue and red.  Hmmmm, blue food dye - that might work.  I dumped a bit (maybe a teaspoon?) into a bowl and popped a scrap of random white evenweave in there too.  Swirled it around, pulled it out, put it back and repeated every so often until 9pm then I left it until bedtime and put it on the kitchen roll to dry.

In the morning a nice pale blue colour, perfect for a snowflake.  And if I feel tired when I'm stitching I can just lick the fabric and get a blue-dye rush!  Have you ever seen a kid high on blue dye?  The large boy had a Thomas the Tank Engine cake one year - hyper hyper city!

I've mostly been stitching on A Dark Alphabet by A Company of Friends this week.  I've nearly finished "Q" which is fantastic, she's a Queen of the Night.  I love her and will post a pic soon.  I haven't got so much done during the day as the Small Boy has discovered the art of communicating his hunger via dragging Mummy into the kitchen and positioning her in front of the relevant cupboard for cereal, fruit or drink depending on his wants.

I have been mailing out my Giveaway prizes, two people haven't responded with addresses yet.  Blue Star Stitcher and Terri P but I think it may be a problem with AOL and Gmail as they're both on Gmail which seems to think AOL is spam.  I've got a new gmail address now so I'll try again.

I bit the bullet and subscribed to Cross Stitch Collection again.  They will be featuring the Joan Elliott Garden Fairies every other month this year so that would cost me 6 x £5.  Or I can subscribe for £11.39 a quarter and get 13 magazines.  The 7 without Joan's fairies may well have something equally nice or they may find themselves Ebayed or Giveawayed on here!  If you see anything you like the look of on my Mag Contents page in the forthcoming months let me know and I'll either send you mine or get another one.

As there isn't much stitching this post I thought I'd share two blogs.  The first is this one Whole World Biscornu.  It's in Russian, but we all speak a little Russian don't we?  If not then there's an English part to each post as well as the Translate button.  The project is to share biscornu themed by various different countries.  They are wonderful, I love the Great Britain one in blackwork and there's a cute one with cups of tea and Sherlock Holmeses round the edge.

The second one is christmas ornament sally earround  Oh no, wrong spacing - its christmas ornaments all year round!  Anyway, most months have a theme and you stitch and post something for that theme.  February is Christmas Trees.  Well, having found that ancient old UFO of a tree and then receiving a delightful little Prairie School tree from Kathy Ellen as a little bonus with my 12 Days of Christmas prize I couldn't ignore the message from the Stitching Gods.  I must join Christmas All Year Round!

The results of the Just Nan poll are in.  People are in two camps - the Enablers who say just one or two pieces before I buy Snow Flowers and the Stash Police who say I have to stitch the biggest one before I buy any more.  And then there was Ewa, Queen of the Enablers who said "None, break some rules!"

I hate posts without pictures!  So here's a random Chinese Dragon for the New Year.  Stitched way back when I used aida for large projects.  I've always liked the bamboo effect frame on this one and the metallic details too.  Neither of which can be seen in this photo!

I bought this chart years ago when I first started stitching (1993/4) and when I dug it out to credit the designer, it is by -

wait for it -

Serendipity Designs

How weird is that?

Finally, don't forget to sign up to be a Secret Stitching Sweetheart.  Plenty of time, I just need your photos of your stitched pics by 10th February please.  More details here.