Update to the Tea & A Cup of Crochet Website

I've finally done it - I've got my Tea & A Cup of Crochet website up and running in a way that I feel good about. My biggest hurdle has been getting over my own perfectionism & just "gettin' er done". If you like crochet, just pop on over to the site, where I have a free crochet pattern of this Lemon Blossom Motif to download:
I hope you enjoy it - this would make a nice & quick little decoration by itself for any of those last minute crafting needs you have :)

Giving Thanks

Happy Belated Thanksgiving to all of my family & friends down south :) I know that I have many things to be thankful for, despite the trying times with our finances over the past 3 years:

I am thankful for family & friends that care about us enough to continually pray for us and to help us out when they are able. I am thankful for these same family & friends to be able to return the same in kind to. When times are down we are each others moral support, when times are up, we are each others cheer-leaders.While my own biological family is very near & dear to my heart, I can gladly say that I have many friends who are special brothers, sisters, aunties & uncles to me! I am truly rich with loving people in my life.

I am thankful that we own our home outright. As hard as things can get sometimes, I know of one certainty - we will not be thrown out on the street, even if we were to lose the bicycle shop & my online business. Knowing this gives me peace of mind for the safety & security of my children. I sure hope I'm not coming off sounding smug - I know all too well the feeling of desperation that comes with homelessness. When we moved from St.Helena, CA back into Canada, the house that we thought was going to be a good match for us turned out to be a complete dud (I'm also thankful we hadn't signed the contract yet!), and so instead of moving in in 2 days, we lived out of a hotel for 2.5 weeks while we scrambled to find a storage space for our things, hope Dan's job offer was still open and find another house - all while I was 8 months pregnant with baby #5. I am extremely thankful that it all turned out well for us.

I am thankful for Dan's new job at the glass manufacturing plant. Although all the money he is earning so far is just being funneled directly into debts, it is better than going bankrupt. I am thankful for a wonderful husband that not only is a hard worker, but even in times of financial stress, he does not lose his temper, give in to self-defeat, or otherwise be negative (unlike me, the worry-wart of the family - LOL!) I've truly blessed by him, and I love him very much :)

I'm thankful for my lovely children, just for being them :) I love when my oldest daughter shows me a new craft project or reads me a poem she just wrote. I love when my oldest son draws his "ant wars" doodles and makes plans to live sustainably on an island in the South Pacific as a scientist. I love my youngest daughter's obsession with all things pink & princess related and her wild hair. I love watching my second son's ability to build with Kinex and imitation of a T-rex. I love my third son's constant happy smile & the way he says "Otay", just like Porky in Our Gang (Little Rascals). And last, but not least, I love my youngest son's laughter when he sees a cat or tries to type on the computer keyboard.

Feast or Famine

If you are a small business owner, freelancer, farmer, fisherman, or other self-employed individual, I'm sure that you've encountered this. Either you have a lot of income coming in all at once (the Feast), or you have a lot of expenses (usually right when there's no money coming in to pay the bills! - Famine).

It seems that we've been fighting a "Famine" ourselves for the past 3 years - LOL! We had a crooked accountant mess up our taxes by literally doing nothing with the paperwork that was given to her - that travesty is now going to cost us $5000 in back taxes & penalties on our PST - we're trying to get an appeal though, as the auditor didn't put into consideration PST we paid already on products for resale & that we are supposed to be on a yearly remittance, not a quarterly one.

Then our water heater blew it's seals (water leaked inside the unit & fried it), so we have to send it down to the US for replacement. This is the third year in a row that we've headed into winter with no running hot water - one of many reasons why Dan thinks this province is cursed! So I'm back to boiling water on the stove all day for dishes, laundry & bathing needs.

My husband closed his bicycle business for the season on October 31st. Nobody in their right mind uses a bike in winter here where temperatures dip to -40º C. Then the job hunt began - which is difficult when you're strapped for cash as it is, but have to spend $30/day on gas to get into the city where the only jobs he's qualified for are. Thankfully, through the networking of a good friend of ours, he landed a job this past week at a glass manufacturing plant.

I'm glad he now has steady work, but I'm not relieved just yet - we're so far in debt that it will take about two months to "get afloat" as it were. I'm constantly praying that the weather doesn't get too severe so that he can safely get into work & back each day. With the high cost of gas being what it is, I'm also hoping that he can find somebody in Swift Current that he can stay with during the week - maybe paying them half of what he would on gas for rent - then he wouldn't risk driving off the road, which is very easy to do at this time of year. That's just a horrible possibility that I don't even want to entertain in my mind.

Maybe, just maybe we will finally move into Swift Current - even though we'd then be carrying a mortgage, it would save us a lot of money in other ways - and it would be a lot easier for Dan to get work during the bike shop's off season. I'm kind of torn though - there are so many more opportunities in Swift Current for activities (good rec center, home school support group events, six parks, to name a few), we'd be closer to Dan's & my friends, and it would be easier for my Dad to come visit us, but then we'd be in the city - the kids would miss their friends, and we'd all miss the peacefullness and wide open space that we've grown accustomed to. If we could find something on the edge of the city, that would be ideal, but there are very few properties available with the economic downturn. Hopefully, the Feast is around the corner....

Hockey Fan Snowman Wearing Canuck Team Colours Cross Stitch Chart

Time for some shameless self-promotion. In between using the Macstitch program for converting Victorian crochet patterns into colour, I've been actually doing some designing of my own on the side. The Canucks fan came about after I had a reconnection with a friend of mine from college (Hi Jane!), who just so happens to love cross stitching, and has an obsession with snowmen. So I came up with a little something for her & Canucks fans everywhere:

Available as a PDF file that is sent to your email
$3.00

It was designed to be worked on an 8" x 8" piece of 16 count fabric. There are 15 colors of thread (chart tells approximate length of each thread needed to complete project), and has full cross stitches and back stitches. The chart is in 8 st/inch for reading. The pattern assumes that you already know how to read a counted cross stitch chart.

You will receive a PDF file of the cross stitch chart within 24 hours of paying, not a physical paper chart or the finished item. I am able to make the chart in different st/inch if you want me to. If you feel uncomfortable buying directly off of my blog, I also carry the pattern on Etsy.

You'll note that I don't have the whale logo though, as I can't have that on there without having a license to do so. Hope you enjoy!

Cruel Yarn Store

Yarnia is by far the cruelest yarn shop on the planet.

They have the most delicious looking yarns - the secret being that they combine them to you liking right in their store! A good reason to make a trip out to Oregon :) But if you live far away in another country, like I do, then you can't do this . However, they do have some luscious pre-made cones available on their online store:

Now my poor children will be crying that all they have is beautiful clothing to wear, and no food to eat this winter. Curse you Yarnia, for forcing me to blow our grocery budget!

All kidding aside though, I think the concept is great, but like all ideas of sheer genius, it may be way ahead of it's time. Only time will tell, but I sure hope it takes off, and that a similar yarn store can be found near me soon.

Re-Interpreting Old Crochet Designs

I love vintage needlework patterns, and often scour used book stores, thrift shops & the internet for them. An ongoing project I've had for the past 1.5 yrs is going through pattern books that have entered the public domain & digitally remastering the patterns. I used to just scan the books in directly, but when they are so very old, there's so much work to be done afterwords to clean up the black & white illustrations and make the text readable that it sometimes seems hardly worth it. I wanted to see those old patterns in color!

So my brain slowly formed an idea. Why not use my cross stitch software (Macstitch) to interpret (or rather, re-interpret) some of those old patterns? I really don't know why it took me so long to come to this idea - as I've used this software for my own designs for over 3 yrs now. Better late than never, I guess! Anyway, the results so far have been fantastic:

This sample was derived from a 1890's crochet pattern book. For choosing the colours, I just went with the colour descriptions that were in the book and what I could find in my own research online as to what those colours would be like. I certainly don't know if the colouring is authentic to the time period, but I still liked the overall effect. I think this would look lovely as an afghan done in repeating strips, with the background done in Tunisan stitch and the pattern cross stitched on. Another use I can think of is to use the black strip by itself as a frame design on a cross stitch pattern with a Victorian theme.

First FO in a long time...

...and I finished it in less than an hour! It wasn't much of a project - just a little something to keep my youngest son busy.

Nathan, for reasons unknown to genetic scientists, loves cleaning around the house. He is only one year of age, and has a particular interest in stealing the mop and swishing it all over the kitchen floor. This would normally be encouraged, because nobody else here in our house really wants to take up this task, but he's a little dangerous with it - often clobbering unsuspecting victims in the back of their heads with the handle when they are seated at the dinner table.

So I created his own personal mop from an old chair leg (sawed off & sand-papered smooth) and crocheted a nice little mop head onto it from some polyester novelty yarn that I had hiding in my closet.

The polyester yarn is horrible to work with on it's own, so I mixed it with some spare Bernat Handcrafter's cotton to stabilize it.

I started by crocheting a chain around the knob and forming it into a ring. (Hand modeled by my lovely DD Deborah)


Next, it's just a matter of crocheting a long chain and slip stitching back into the base of the ring. I made chains of 30 stitches in length.

Halfway there

Ring is now filled, just flip over and...

....Nathan's mini mop is ready to go.

The smile on his face says it all :)