Wednesday 22 February 2023

What’s On Your Workdesk? Wednesday 716

My desk is untouched, unchanged, nothing to see, move along please. So that’s not the photograph du jour. Mind you, if my desk has been used, changed or better yet, the alphabet file and it’s contents sorted, refreshed and properly used, I will have to assume that my house-sitting family member has had a turn! We’re away, on our winter breaking sun seeker of a trip. 
Accompanied as always by my two faithful past times, the stitching and the reading. Of course Mr Dunnit is here too, my easily bored let’s-do-something all the time life companion. It’s nearly 38 years so we’re well used to each others holiday requirements; indeed as I type this he’s settled with a cup of tea and some frightful sudoku. I’ve got about forty minutes, I reckon, before we have to go for a walk!
So my real desk is this towel covered sun bed. The fancy spa slippers are to stop my feet being cold on the marble (?) floors of the apartment. I really appreciate this because I hate cold feet and barefoot on these floors causes just that. Cold feet. In just 2 short hours though, I’ve discovered that these little slippers are absolutely lethal on the inside floors. So, for a while, I shuffled. But still came close to breaking myself with some impressive slip-and-recover moves, so am now silently gritting my teeth and wearing sandals all the time. So ya see, it’s not all sun and Sangria! OK it is, but the story of the slippers may save you a similar problem where your next trip involves marble or tile floors! No need to thank me, just show what you’ve been up to whilst I’ve been slumming it in the sun!!





Wednesday 15 February 2023

What’s On Your Workdesk? Wednesday 715

I’ve had a weekend away, doing nothing but scrapbooking and trying out hilarious dance moves. Well, they were actually brilliant dance moves made hilarious by five over tired women who aren’t capable, frankly. It was fun and I’ll bore you with pictures of my LOs as and when I feel you can face them!
I unpacked all the stash, put away everything except the file full of alphabet stickers. When I bought my Scan N Cut I stopped buying alphabet stickers. I cart this huge file to every crop and for at least a year, it’s been very difficult to make up whole words from matching alphabets because of course, the vowels are always used up first. This will come as a surprise to some I’m sure, but despite my slapdash and haphazard approach to almost everything, I really don’t like mismatched fonts. I find them difficult to read and they make my teeth itch. So, the next job is to go through this ridiculous pile of alphabets that aren’t whole and come up with a plan. And the end result will be, I hope, a satisfactory and manageable pile of useable, and a marvellous idea for the unusable….I feel a masterboard coming on. 

Anyway gentle Desker, fancy a little challenge? There’s another anniversary looming (WOYWW728) and in the grand tradition of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, I feel an ATC swap is in order. And, if I can align things…fancy a link up on screen? There’s time to work out the wrinkly bits, you don’t need to commit to doing either or both, but let me have your (gentle) opinions! 

Meanwhile, show us your desk will ya? Gimme a break from the crisis of consonants. (Sorry, had to.)

Wednesday 8 February 2023

What’s On Your Workdesk? Wednesday 714

This is intended to be scheduled, if I mess it up, please forgive. Believe it or not, this time it’s the car that needs an MOT and I have to take it to Salisbury first thing. Which means joining the actual commute, something I work hard to avoid, adding to the clogged up roads is pointless if you don’t have to, huh! Ah, tales of domesticity…!
What about this then?
I’m getting ready to leave! A weekend of scrapbooking with The Coven is in store. Really looking forward to it. AsI haven’t had time to sit at my desk for any creative purposes, I’ve rushed in and out and put things on the desk each time I’ve thought about something specific I want to take. So that involved hauling out the boxes and files that whatever I was thinking about are kept in, and so the pile has become quite serious! Mind you, it’s nowhere near complete…last year I managed to take my trolley too, and I’m considering doing the same again…depends how much room is taken up in the car by non essentials like clothes and food! Hey, apology again for last week…I said you could see lovely LLJ on my phone in the picture. You can’t. Turns out that the picture I see in the blog post is bigger than the one that is actually posted by the App! Strange. It was such a pleasure to roam around your desks last week, please post again!

Saturday 4 February 2023

Don’t challenge me…

If you were to go through this blog to find the challenges I’ve taken part in, you would not need more than one hand to add them up! I don’t really know why, except that I do. I end up doing them to the exclusion of anything else because of the need to get the commitment out of the way. Believe me, that sort of takes the pleasure away!
Likewise, because of the commitment thing, I haven’t ever taken part in anything that consistently requires something of me. I know I do WOYWW each week, but that’s a bit different. I think.
You are probably as familiar with this as I am!
 Nearly seven years of adding stitches in waiting rooms and on holiday.
 I’m in no hurry with it, but I am committed to finishing it some time. 

Aaanyway. At last year’s February scrapbook retreat with my girlfriends, Lolly was infectiously enthusiastic about thread journaling. Getting a piece of fabric, sticking it in an embroidery hoop and stitching a small picture on it daily, to sum up the day, every day for a year. A YEAR! Literally, thread journaling. We all looked it up, Pinterest scared us because of the skill level; we talked about it, and then largely forgot all about it. Except it didn’t go away. Later that year I found myself buying a thread journaling kit to stash away for Christmas to give to Miss Dunnit. She likes embroidering patches and etc, so it seemed a really good gift. At our October retreat, Lolly was talking about it again and somehow made it sound eminently achievable, so I set myself up. Including Miss Dunnit, four of us are having a bash, and we’re all doing it differently. The first thing that frightened me to death was that a lot of people have 8 or 10 inch embroidery hoops and have divided the circle into 12 equal portions so that they have a clear portion to sew in each month. I can’t do the maths and really didn’t want to have to draw on the fabric. I also didn’t want to have to stitch that many straight lines. I’m not good at straight. So in the end, after humming and hawing and sketching out some alternatives, I decided for heavens’ sake, just do it.

Interestingly, having decided against sections per month, I seem to be keeping them all clumped. They are not dimensional images, I need practice and more experience. They are totally freehand though, which is why the scale varies wildly. And, I’m happy to accept that some of these little images are in need of description. So I bought a cheap diary, and each time I embroider an image, I enter it on the day’s date in the diary with a really brief description.
I’m enjoying it! It takes longer to decide what there is about any given day that needs recording in a single image than it does to actually embroider it. And of course there are days that are so ordinary that it’s a bit of a stretch. But as I can’t imagine 365 images actually fitting on this erm, canvas, it won’t matter I think, if I leave off the days where all I manage is more domestic stuff. Having said that, I have only recorded WOYWW once so far and you can see an iron…I did actually spend a long day doing nothing else in the early new year, catching up after a houseful at a Christmas! 



Close up you can see that despite washing my hands, the fabric is already grubby at the edge where I hold the hoop. Now I use that little piece of felt to protect the fabric from my grubby left thumb. You live and learn. And as for freehand…I have help. Lolly found this fab site called the Noun Project which has probably millions of icons of well, almost every noun you can think of. Very very helpful. Doesn’t mean I can stitch them to look familiar, but it helps. Ask me again in a couple of months, see if I’m keeping up! At least with a diary, I can enter the intended idea and do a catch up session if necessary- although that starts to be work rather than ten minutes with a cuppa I think. Are you doing a year long ‘thing’? I’d love to hear about it. 

Wednesday 1 February 2023

What’s On Your Workdesk? Wednesday 713

Skidding into February with a late one, so sorry. I scheduled it and it says it’s published, but clearly it hasn’t, so I must have done something wrong….thanks to LLJ for fielding messages whilst I was out delivering the van for MOT! Chilly first thing I can tell you. Anyway….
You can see Jan on my phone, we had a lovely video chat whilst I tidied up after the little album caused me to make an incredible mess. That’s done and will be posted today, so whilst chatting, I staged and snapped this pic because I thought I might start on something else and make another mess and then I wouldn’t have evidence of a clear up in between! You can see some new stamps that Neet caused me to buy out of sheer FOMO. So the stash diet lasted 27 days. Hmmm. Although, as stamps, these weren’t necessarily on the diet list, that was and remains about scrapbooking stuff.  That black thing on the floor at left is my scissor sharpener, and like so many things, I’ve only noticed it because I took a photo! As I won’t get to my desk again this week because of month end and loads of diary stuff, please let me be vicariously crafting by showing me what you’re up to. Grand!