A Few Finishes

Hey, Friends!

I subscribe to Mary Corbet’s Needle'nThread site.  She does beautiful handwork, has a fantastic list of ‘how to stitch’ videos, and does a lot of great reviews for stitch-related items.  This week she shared a great idea – a fabric swatch book.  Many of you may already have one of these, but I don’t and wonder why not!

In the mail this week I got a special treat from Karen in Arizona.  It’s a little pieced pin cushion with embroidery stitching, and trimmed with buttons and pins.  Thank you so much, Karen.

I’m still stitching on Mary Gibson, but since I left work early on Friday because of the ice storm, got a little extra stitching in.  So I spent a little while working on a few finishes.  There’s Jingle all the Way, Winter Row, and Merry Christmas.  Those links will take you to the post where they stitched.  You can see these and others over at SNTF.

I received a comment from an Anonymous user named Ada, but couldn’t reply due to No-Comment address.  With some effort I found out that she is the creator of the DoLolly that I wrote about years ago.  She has been very sick for some time, but is now selling them again.  If you’re interested, you can find them on here on eBay.

Thanks for stopping by, today and always.  I appreciate your thoughts and comments!

May 2013 be filled with Happy Stitching!

Peace♥Love♥Joy

Charlene♥SC

DoLolly - Tail Catcher - Retreat

A while back I posted about my DoLolly, and said my LNS was attempting to find an alternative. I just saw it on their web site, so do have a look. It's called a Tail Catcher.

I also mentioned a Stitching Getaway, and that I'd let you know when it was advertised. It is on the site now, as well. Check out Tea With the Queen!

DoLolly

Someone asked the question on one of my stitching groups, "Can anyone tell me how to fasten off neatly when you are stitching over-one on higher-count fabrics? I'm working on some 36 count linen with a single ply of silk floss, and my needle (a size 28) simply will not go through the back of the stitches to fasten off - at least not without distorting the stitches quite badly!" My reply straightway was, The Dololly.

What is a Dololly, you ask? In the South, 'Dololly' is slang for a thing you can't really describe by known terms, the same as 'thingamajig,' 'doohickey,' the really descriptive 'whachamacallit,' or the ever popular, 'You know...'.

But in stitchers' terms, it is a wonderful little two-piece tool to help hide away the ends of threads. On the back side of your work, slide the threader-type piece (bottom of three)through the stitches, take the hook piece to grab the 'tail' of thread through the threader, then pull the threader out of the stitches; Voila!

The actual needle threader that came with my set is pictured in the center above. For those really small stitches - like the ones asked about - you could use the threader since it is tiny.

I hadn't thought of it in a long time, but at Camp Stitchaway I made a mistake while learning hardanger stitches and was trying to fix it. Angel came to my rescue with her Dololly and fixed my mistake. As soon as I got home I went in search of mine, and now it is in my stitching toolkit, again!! While trying to find some evidence of the Dololly's existence, I found that someone else had this dilemma here.

Below is the set I got about five years ago. At the time I wasn't really doing much cross stitch, but a lot of embroidery on Crazy Quilts. Always being a fiber miser, this was just the ticket. It was an eBay item, and I even asked the seller if she sold the pieces separately, but she didn't. Am I ever glad now!! It came with the Dololly, a needle threader, the stitch pins, and the fob that I use for scissors. What a bargain! Someone just told me the last Dololly they saw on the rack in a LNS was $32.

I checked with my LNS yesterday, and she reiterated what's mentioned here. They are no longer in production. She did tell me that she has ordered a similar product to see if it is up to par, but had not received it yet. I think she called it a 'tail tucker' or something similar, but I can't find it.