Knitting and Stitching Show 2012

Hooray!!! It's that time again!!!

The Knitting and Stitching Show is currently on at Alexandra Palace in London (11th-14th October), then moving on to Dublin (1st-4th Nov) and Harrogate (22nd-25th Nov).

I got a severe ticking off after last time, and I have so so much stuff already waiting to be stitched, so I was determined not to load myself down with too much this year.  But I did still want to visit, and see some of the exhibition pieces.

The stands which stood out for me were of course the Mr X Stitch one, who curated a stand full of interesting big and little stitching with a wide range of materials.  I loved the stitched car door and the real door and he even personalised a book for me :)

The other exhibition stand which was incredible, as I expected was the Royal School of Needlework.  Sadly, no photography allowed on many of the stands, including this one, but the pieces were outstanding, beautiful, wonderfully and perfectly crafted.  Way to make me feel like my work is totally inadequate!!!  There really is no substitute for going to see the finished pieces in person.

Anyway, I was good.  I came away with only one bag of stash.  This contained:

One Table Magnifying Lamp - finally a mains powered lamp and magnifier.  Sadly, the floor standing ones all seem to have enormous bases, which won't fit under my sofa, so at least if I have a table one, I can work on some of my smaller pieces during the dark evenings.

 Some new xmas card designs from the Nutmeg Company - these went down so well when I made them for a previous xmas, so I thought I'd buy some more!

A couple of small Michael Powell designs.  I've liked these for a while, so I decided to get a couple of small pieces to work on.

Sparklies fabric!
The stand had an amazing large piece of orange hand dyed fabric with a black dragon stitched onto it.  I bought 5 pieces of various hand dyed fabrics, the pale green (sparkling rainforest) and lilac (Lilac Ice) with opalescent sparkles in the fabric.  I also got Slate, Fire and Black Dahlia.  These are all small pieces just to see what I can do with different fabrics.

And that's it!  I can't wait to rip all the packets open and get started.

Moonlit Waters Page 2 complete!!

Woohoo!

I'm so glad to see the back of this page, I can't believe it's taken me 5 months.  So much confetti around the trees, but I've kept going through it and it's done... hooray! Just 34 pages left to go :)

Having a little change for a while as I'm stitching up something halloweeny for the in-laws next...Feel like I need a little break from the big piece and to have other finishes this year.  But first, I'm going to have a weekend off.

Arkells, This Century, The Maine - Electric Ballroom, London

It's not often when I drag Rob out to a gig for a band I like that he goes straight to the merch stand after their set and buys a CD.  But that's what happened with the Arkells.  They had the whole rock thing right down, the audience was fully engaged despite this being the first band on.  We'll eagerly be looking out for their return to the UK - the Jackson Square CD that we picked up at the show was on the hifi for the whole of the next day and the songs Pullin Punches and Whistleblower are firmly fixed in my head.

Second up was This Century, and it seems that although this is only the first time in the UK, a lot of the audience had done their homework and were already familiar with their music.  It was like a giant singalong/dancealong and I think even the band were surprised.  Having said that, The Maine are excellent at promoting the bands they take on tour with them, and they seem to have pretty good taste.  I think it was more my kind of thing than Rob's, but with a number of EPs and a full length record under their belts, I will be watching and listening with interest for what happens in the future.  I hope that they will be back in the UK, because it seems that they will be pretty popular with people here and again they looked and sounded great on the stage.

Onto The Maine then.  Although Pioneer was released at the end of last year in the US, it was only officially put out in the UK recently with the addition of 6 extra songs (Pioneer & The Good Love).  When I first heard the new songs, I thought, yeah, I could see maybe why they didn't make it onto Pioneer.  By the time I'd heard them through twice I was sitting there going 'These are my favourite songs they've ever done.  Ever'.  Sometimes I listen and I hear bits of old school 50's and 60's rock n roll with the 'oooh-oooh-oooh's' and the 'sha-la-la's' and the 'bye-bye-bye's', and then sometimes I hear something more modern and Killers-esqe, but there's always variety and crazily catchy guitars and drums. In the Maine's whole catalogue, there's not a single song I don't like or skip over, and this is my go-to band when I can't make my mind up what I'm in the mood to listen to.  So I know, when I go to a live show, I'm not going to be disappointed.

The gig was fantastic and it was so good for them to finally get a decent amount of time as the headliners - no offense, but they are too good in their own right to keep playing support to other bands. With 3 full length albums behind them, and this being the Pioneer world tour, we got most of what is on the latest album mixed up with some of the older songs (which are sounding better with age anyway).  

What I like about The Maine is that although you have the recording of a song on a CD at home, when it gets to the stage, they have played around with it and although it might sound a little different, it also sounds brilliant.  The average age of the audience has also gone up, and there were more fellas in the audience - the ones around me were singing along and discussing how fab the band were, which is a nice change from the girls shouting 'John, take your shirt off' - although there's still always one, isn't there? (no, it wasn't me)

So, we came home happy, having done a little dancing, a little singing, a lot of laughing (mainly at Garrett's Celine Dion impression) and now I shall eagerly await them going back into the studio for the next album.  In the meantime, their DVD 'Anthem for a Dying Breed' is out this month and for those in the UK, Pioneer & The Good Love is out on spotify right now.  Go listen.  And then go and buy it. (my favourite is Hello World - I think I may be singing it in my sleep, it's so stuck in my brain).

Meet The Maine - Electric Ballroom, London

Last week was a pretty exciting time for me, since I got to go to a meet and greet with one of my favourite bands.  Whilst these boys usually come and greet fans after the show, my husband is usually dragging me straight towards the tube station at this point, so to be presented with an afternoon Meet the Maine opportunity, well, I jumped at the chance, because quite honestly, I never expected it to be a possibility.  So, at 4pm last weds, having downed half a pint in the pub while everyone else queued in the rain, I joined the queue, got my wristband and headed inside to watch the guys play a couple of songs before they met everyone.  I was still 5 rows back, but that's probably the closest I'll ever get to stageside at these things, too old for all that queueing from 9am malarky.

Then I got in another queue for the meet and greet, got my poster signed by them all, told John about my by-now-quite-upset-husband who had missed Kennedy singing Ice Cave, which is his favourite (he claims it's their big sounding stadium song), and John promised that they would do it next time.  When I got to the other guys, all ability to speak properly had just popped out of my head, so I just about said hi to them all and they were very sweet to me, and then I got this lovely photo taken:

L-R - John, Charlette, Kennedy, Jared, Me, Garrett, Pat

A hug from each of them later (good hugging!) and I was outta there.  Considering what some bands charge for this sort of meet and greet, I paid £15 for this and it included a digital copy of the latest album - so thank you to the guys for not charging the earth and for spending your time doing this when you didn't have to.  It means a lot.

TUSAL September 2012

Ok, Ok.  I'm late again.  I do have a good reason though, I've been halfway up the country to visit my folks.  That's ok, right.

Here's how my jar looks now:

And here's the travelling pattern I've been putting a few stitches in here and there... and over the week:

It seemed to stitch up quite fast at first, but has rapidly slowed down.  I think I'm about halfway though, so that's ok.  I don't normally get on with hoops, but this piece is just an awkward size where it's too big to hold in my hand and too small to fit on a scroll frame. So I am trying the hoop.

I'll be catching up on everyone else's posts this week, hope you all have a great weekend.

Pumpkins and Stitchy Things

A finish to show today - taking a break from the dark colours in my main project, I was after something fun and fast - I present Pumpkin & Bittersweet, from Waxing Moon Designs.  I've stitched it on a small piece of the lovely oatmeal fabric that was so very kindly RAKked to me from Marlene earlier in the year.

Not quite sure how to finish it.  We have some orange walls, or else I was thinking we could somehow hang it on the fridge door, which is dark brown.  Anyways, it sure brightened up my ORTs jar.

Otherwise, I've been doing a little shopping today, on the HAED appreciation week.  In order to boost sales at our lovely favourite mega project online store, and to show our support for actually buying the charts rather than those people who choose to ignore the copyright, a few hundred of us got together on Facebook and vowed to buy a chart (or two... or in some cases even more).

I've decided to go for Green Dragonling and also QS Dahlia.  I don't have a clue when I'm going to get round to them, but it's been so nice seeing what all the other group members have gone for and chatting about them.  It's also perked me back up to getting on with Moonlit Waters again, hooray!  I'm determined to finish page 2 this month.

Right, that's all from me for now... seeya!

Hello September

Although I've enjoyed the Olympics and the Paralympics, I'm hoping that when it's all over there will be some good TV on... it's been pretty rubbish as of late except for the sport.  Still, we are heading into Autumn TV now and Dr Who is back tonight.  It's one of my faves for a Saturday night.  And generally the schedule starts to pick up again from about nowish.

I've not done much on Moonlit Waters recently.  I set aside a day this week to have a solid day working on it and my progress was so very slow.  There was almost a tantrum.  To keep my stitching going I've been working on a Halloween piece.  Every year it gets to Halloween and I wish I'd made something to hang on the wall, but this year I am determined.  It's a small piece but is almost complete, so there will be photos soon.

Speaking of Halloween, I've been catching up on my blog reading, and it seems everyone else has also been stitching up a storm! I'm loving seeing all your work!

Just a short post today, I'm off to get some munchy lunch.
Have a great weekend.
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