B5638 again, my cross stitch stash, and dumpster finds

10 points if you can guess what this is...it's one of my gifts for Dad. (More on the joking side...) 

So, in my last post I showed you how deep that V was!  Too deep for me.  So I spent an hour tonight undoing what I had done. I had enough fabric to cut out that front inset again for a "do over".


So now it's like this:


Full on chest coverage.

I'm thinking of maybe leaving it that way? Or putting some buttons down the inset like it's a placket? I'm a bit scared to cut it again, and if I do, I will cut it more like a U and less like a V.   I don't have another chance to redo the inset after this; I'm out of this fabric.   But I do believe the desire to work on this dress has come back, and maybe tmw I can at least bind the armholes (with self-bias binding) before visiting my parents.

I haven't decided where I'm putting it yet, but here is my new full length mirror, courtesy of the Princeton University dumpster--Tuesday visit.  (I decided last weekend that I wanted a full length mirror for my sewing room.  A trip to the dumpster on Monday revealed only a broken full length mirror, but on Tuesday there were two intact ones and I took this one as it was the "grander" of the two....)



I'm in full-on cleaning and reorganizing mode since Easter Sunday. Today I rediscovered my cross-stitch stash. It makes me wonder if there's some parallel universe for cross-stitching, with some kind of review website, with yearly meetups shopping for kits and the best threads while lamenting about the difficulty of French knots for beginners...

This is my kit stash (Antoinette, check out that hedgehog!)  4 of these are from England and one is from a friend (the "of course I care" subversive cross stitch kit).

And this is my aida cloth stash, old kits I (mostly) completed and my "cash box" (the citrus box).

So I really laugh at myself. With all my cleaning and reorganizing, I usually stop buying stuff for a while. But there were those 47 yards in NYC, and then on Friday I went to Target during lunch to buy new lawn chairs when I saw the "cash box" in the $1 bin. Usually I pretend that the $1 bin is NOT there. But the "cash box" caught my eye. And I bought it, thinking, 3 years from now when I'm in my next full scale cleaning mood I'll wonder why I bought this thing.

But then today its purpose announced itself.

It is the perfect size for DMC thread!

Bliss!

Recently some bloggers have been writing about their oldest UFO.  Well, my oldest cross stitching UFO is this lovely dishcloth:

I remember working on this cloth during a college trip to Canada so we're looking at more than 15 years old, as I had started it way before then.  It's a kit from Rag Shop, RIP.

Here's the Farmer's Mkt flowers this week.  The vase is another PU dumpster find.  Not that I need another vase, but I *love* the shape.


What is this shape officially called? I can't recall. It's like the shape of cooling towers at nuclear power plants...

The flower farmer knows that I like black eyed susans (green eyed variety). This was his first one this season. Maybe next week there will be a whole bunch!

Be well!!  (and be sure to guess what that object is in the first photo).