For quite a while in my elementary and middle school years, I was really into counted cross-stitch. It had been years since I last worked on a cross-stitch project, but a year or so ago I had the urge to try it again. The next time I went to my parents’ house, I picked up my bag of embroidery floss, needles, pattern books, and Aida cloth – a woven cloth designed for cross-stitch.
one of my favorite parts: all the pretty colors of floss
All of my earlier projects I stitched on Aida cloth. It produces very neat stitches, but is kind of useless unless you put it in a frame and hang it on the wall. I wanted to make something that could actually be used and enjoyed around my house. Looking through a cross-stitch pattern book, I read about waste canvas – a grid of threads held together with water-soluble glue. Probably most serious cross-stitchers know about this, but somehow this had totally passed me by! After loosely stitching the waste canvas onto any fabric you want, you can use the grid to place your stitches. Once complete, you dampen the entire design, and use tweezers to pull the grid threads out.
My first waste-canvas-enabled project: veggie napkins!
Posted in Family, Photos
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If only I had a video camera to capture this – this rocket launches fast (the 3 pictures above were all taken within one second). Ryder built it out of PVC pipe and a 2 liter bottle for our church’s VBS program. The short story of how it works: slide a half-full 2 liter bottle on the end of a PVC pipe. Hook up a bike pump to the other end of the pipe. Pump until highly pressurized. Pull string to release bottle. Get wet. Over the 4th of July, we took it out on the river with Ryder’s family and had a blast (ha ha ha) with it.
Posted in Family, Fun, Photos
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Ryder made this wooden clock using our scroll saw, and then wood-burned the detail onto it. The only part I don’t like is that this was a birthday gift for his brother, so we only got to enjoy it for a few days.
Posted in Creative, Family
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A few months ago, Zoo Atlanta had a “special” Tech day at the zoo – admission was $1 less than the normal student rate. Woo hoo. We took advantage of the “deal” and braved the sweltering heat to see some animals. We ended at the Budgie house:
This pairing was probably the smallest gathering – in the small budgie area there were hundreds upon hundreds of budgies. You could buy little sticks of food to feed them with, but we quickly discovered that the end of the afternoon was not the best time to try to entice them. We had expected them to fly down to the food, but after hundreds of little food sticks, they seem to have realized flying was not necessary. The only way they’d eat the food was if you stuck the stick right in front of where they were already perched.
More zoo pictures
Posted in Friends, Photos
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Cacti at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.
I was trying to think of something clever to say, but I have nothing. I posted a few more photos of our trip to the gardens over in my photos.
Posted in Photos, Random
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Wee! I finally have a domain that matches my name. I’ve moved my photos & blog over here to emilywinck.com, hopefully without breaking too many things. Let me know if you see anything not working, and I’ll try to fix it. This move took me many months of working on it a bit at a time, which is part of the reason I haven’t posted anything in ages. That and I usually don’t post very often, but I’m going to try to remedy that now that I have a spiffy new web site!
With some silly people in the foreground. For a sense of scale.
more pictures of Dave & Cherith’s visit over in the photos section.
Posted in Family, Photos
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Last night, as the clouds and the storm rolled in, Ryder called me to the window to look at the sky. And I saw the purple before the storm.
