Busy weekend not as much stitching but some dyeing

I had a very busy weekend but wasn't able to do near as much stitching as I would like. Most of my weekend involved gardening. I have lived in north central Florida for a long time and I never knew that each year local nurseries get together and have a native plant sale. Well, by chance I saw an add for this earlier this week when I took Mom to her doctors. We decided to go and it was fun. The event is in Gainesville, FL at the Morningside Nature Center. Mom had a blast. I had to keep reminding her that we were driving her Fusion and that the plant numbers were adding up. We were there for about 2 1/2 hours and drove away with over 50 plants. The plants were in the trunk and in the backseat. 

Needless to say this meant that I was up at the crack of dawn on Sunday planting. It took me over four hours to get all of her plants in (okay I bought about a dozen of them). I was exhausted at the end. I should have taken some pictures, to show you some before and after shots.  As far as I'm concerned, we should consider this done. Apparently there is another Master Gardener sale in May that Mom wants to go to, so I don't think she thinks we are done. 

All of this meant that I didn't get a lot of stitching done. I did manage my one strands on the Monkey Wrench and will update that photo page. I need to re-look at how I have that page set up because it is becoming cumbersome. I also worked on holiday stitching. I finished the Liberty Star on Thursday but was still going to have enough time in the week to work on another 4th of July theme. The one I decided to do is from Trail Creek Farm and is called Love My Land. 

The pattern calls for red fabric. I don't normally concern myself with fabric colors and basically stitch on the fabric that I think it will look best on. In this case, it needs to be stitched on red. I, for some reason, do not have any red fabric. I decided to try and hand dye the fabric. First, I took a piece of 16 count Aida and tea dyed it. I began this on Friday morning. I let it sit in its tea bath all day. This is the result of the tea bath:

After that I decided to use cherry Kool-Aid for the red dye. You might wander why in the world would I chose that. Well, I found it in the cupboard recently. My grandkids will not drink it so it just laid there. Have you ever mixed up Kool-Aid and then got your finger dyed a different color because of it? Well, with that in mind, I mixed up 3 bags in about 1 quart of water and let the fabric sit in the Kool-Aid over night and most of the day on Saturday. This is what it looked like right out of the Kool-Aid bath:

I took it outside and used the hose spayer to mist out the remaining Kool-Aid. Yes it was very, very cherry smelling. I then let it set out in the Florida sun to dry for several hours. This is what it looked like after sun bathing:

I always knew that I would not be able to get this to be a dark or even bright red which is why I started with a tea bath. I was hoping that at the end of the endeavor it would have more of the look of a piece of red fabric that had been washed many, many times and had lost most of its color. Since the pattern incorporates a flag, I decided to go with an old Americana look. This meant that I would need to change the pattern colors up. The pattern calls for Silk-n-Colors although it charts for DMC and Anchor also. I decided to go with over dyed cotton and picked WDW Chamomile for the flower stems, WDW White Wash for the white background, GA Sampler Threads Midnight for the blue and GA Simply Shaker Weathered Barn for the red. I was only able to get the "L" stitched and I think I'm going to like this when it is done. This picture washed out the color a bit but I am stitching on the bottom half of the fabric where the color is darker. 

Sunday came and the holiday stitching switched to Christmas. I will put picture up on the HoHo page but just like with the OSADS page, it has become cumbersome and I need to rethink how to format that page. 

Throughout the weekend I did get a wee bit of stitching completed on my BAP-T, maybe about 200 stitches.On Sunday I didn't get a lot of stitching done, mainly because I was exhausted. I was able to force myself to stay awake to watch Game of Thrones and then I was done and in bed by 10:00pm. I'm hoping to get more work done on Toreador this week but have resigned myself to fact that this project is going to give me fits and starts. Parts of the chart are full of color changes and it takes forever and then other parts have sections where there are more consistent blocks of color which makes stitching go faster. 

Here's hoping for a productive week!