September 12th found us driving from St. Charles, MO, to Jefferson City. My previous trip to Missouri had been on the edges: driving from Baton Rouge to St. Paul, MN, (that goes along the eastern edge of Missouri), stopping to see the St. Louis Arch, a business trip to Anheuser-Bush in St. Louis, a trip to the SWE conference in Kansas City, and driving from Houston to Iowa (this goes through Kansas City and just a bit of northern Missour). Visiting Jefferson City was my first trip to the interior of Missouri.

They have a strange obsession with Lewis and Clark in Missouri:

The water in this monument contains water from all 21 waterways Lewis and Clark crossed on their way to the Pacific.

Did I mention that I took this stage of the Tour of Missouri?

Ok, not really, but I did get to stand on the podium which was pretty cool.

After seeing the sights, we settled in to watch the finish of the stage:

Yes, I’m in that picture, although it is a bit “Where’s Waldo”. Notice the incline of the street. That’s about 100 meters from the finish line, and the riders did a circuit around the capitol building three times. That’s a pretty killer way to end 100 miles of bike riding!
This is what the race looks like when it goes by:

Seriously, if it isn’t a mountain stage, you get to see the riders for about 10 seconds, so it was nice to have them go by three times!
I managed to get this picture with a couple of big name riders in the middle. Trust me, they’re there.

Getting a flat tire at this stage of the race really sucks – there’s no way to catch back up to the front in time.

It is required to be as noisy as possible when the race goes by, so cowbells and clappers are given out before hand:

After the race, we got to see the Govenor of Missouri (the guy with the microphone), the dude in red is the Lieutenant Govenor, who helped organize the race:

I thought I’d never seen the Texas govenor in person, but I have – he rode at the end of the MS150 a couple of years ago.
Here is a picture of all the race leaders together:

Christian Vande Velde is in yellow, and he goes on to win the race. Mark Cavendish is in green and is winning the sprint competition. The guy in the white jersey is winning the best young rider competition, the guy in red was voted most aggressive rider for the day, and the guy in blue is the King of the Moutains. So there are many ways to “win” a bike race. Also, none of these guys won the stage that day.

On Saturday, the race was ending in St. Charles, mere miles from the hotel where the Needlework Market was. So, we got everything set up and then went and explored St. Charles.
We spotted this in the window of Stitches, Etc.

An actual stitched model of “Ribbons” spotted in the wild! Very exciting!
We also saw this:

Which is at a dog bakery – I’m presuming they make treats for dogs and don’t actually bake the dogs, since we didn’t go inside.
Mark Cavendish won the stage, although George Hincapie made a break for it late to try and take the overall lead from Christian Vane Velde. Winning the stage meant that Cavendish kept the green jersy overall. That probably sounds like a bunch of nonsense if you don’t follow bike racing, but just imagine someone talking about baseball players, football or NASCAR and you get the idea.

I spent the rest of the weekend trying to convince shop owners that Cross Eyed Kat designs are awesome:

I also tried to keep tabs on what was happening in Houston due to the hurricane and I did some stitching on a new design. That new design is part of a new series, and I’m very excited about it. I’m hoping to come out with the first two parts in February. Currently I’m about 25% done with backstitching the border (it has a very intricate border), and I’m probably about 70% overall done with the stitching. I really should keep track of when I start these things – I think I started stitching it in early August, and I’ve had a few interruptions, so it is going much faster than I origianlly thought. Here’s a blurry sneak preview:

Ok, I hope everyone joining from the Needlework Show enjoyed looking at the new designs in the show!

The “something” turned out to be Ike. I tried telling it to go away, and it listened for a while, but then turned back toward Houston. We hemmed and hawed about whether or not to go, but finally decided to get out of Dodge. We flew out Thursday night and landed safely in Missouri. While we were gone, we had friends who were under a mandatory evacuation evacuate to our house before heading further inland.

While we were in Missouri, we had planned to see the Tour of Missouri, since it would be ending in St. Charles the day the Market started. Who could ignore this confluence of stitching and bicycling that seemed made for us? By going up Thursday, we were able to see the stage 5 finish in Jefferson City.

I’ll post some more pictures of the Tour when I get them off the camera – this was taken with my phone. The tour was fun – we walked all around the capitol building, had lunch at a little cafe, watched a looping criterium, and then got to watch the end of the Tour stage three times, since it went in a small circuit around the buildings. We stayed to watch the awards ceremony (something we didn’t get to do in Georgia), so we saw the Governor and some other state officials.

Saturday, we got the room ready for Market, then headed off to downtown St. Charles. This is a quaint section of the old town just off the Missouri River with restraunts and shops – including this dog bakery.

We had lunch at an outdoor cafe, then wandered up and down the Main street. There was a cross-stitch store and they had a stitched model of “Ribbons” in the window! The Tour went by in blur – it was a bunch sprint to the finish and Mark Cavendish won, keeping his lead in the green jersey!

Saturday night, Sunday and Monday were the Market, so we were busy with that, along with keeping tabs on what was going on back home. We couldn’t completely relax with the hurricane happening. Here’s what part of the room looked like for Market:

Luckily, the airline started flying into Houston again by the time we were due back. We went to the grocery store, since our power had been out for three days and we’d have to clean out the fridge and freezer. It was mostly stocked, although a few areas looked like this:

So no milk, eggs, tortillas, or prepackaged breakfast pastries. Part of our fence blew down, so we got that propped up, and are working on cleaning up all the branches and pine cones in the yard. This morning I passed the Walmart, and I didn’t see a line at the gas station for the first time in a week!

Mocha came through the storm fine – she was boarded at her vet’s office and they staffed the building through the storm and had a generator for the power outage.

Things are slowly getting back to normal, at least in our part of the city; there still 60% of the area without power. Also, the destruction on Galveston and the surrounding areas is just heartbreaking.

This is a set of three ornaments. The ornaments are four squares made up of a single motif; the sides are then folded in and stitched together to make a three-dimensional ornament. Easy finishing!
Origami Ornaments

Here is proof of my Celtic kick that started this spring. This tree goes with the Celtic Biscornu, but shows the whole tree.
Celtic Tree

This design has been in my head for a long time and evolved a bit over that time. I love how it came out though. The design uses two layers of blackwork to provide shading effects. It is also kind of a yin-yang design. Since I used an overdyed silk, I stitched this using a backstitching technique rather than traditional blackwork techniques.
Cuddly Cats

If you like them, please request them from your favorite needlework shop!

This past weekend, we kept an eye out on Gustav. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that my folks all live in Baton Rouge, so with east Texas to west Florida in the intial cone of uncertainty, we were all watching out. The good news is that they came through the storm fine, the bad news is that the power is still out and phones are spotty. Sometimes it is amazing how much we rely on modern convienences.

The weekend before this one, DH and I took a little jaunt up to Wichita Falls for the Hotter ‘n Hell Hundred. He rides his bike 100 miles in the heat, while I find places with A/C to hang out until he comes in. I saw this while wandering in the “Fun Zone” by the finish line:

It is hard to ride a bike with a wheel like that (also the back wheel was missing). The guy holding the bike was in the professional race that preceded the general ride and apparently ran into someone else who had crashed (everyone was okay).

Here I am knitting at the finish line (I was still working on my Olympic knitting):

For the record, I was the only one knitting with wool in the 100 degree heat. The scarf is now done, except for the tassels.

I was busy this Labor Day weekend as well. A model arrived last week, and I didn’t like a couple of the colors on it, so I ended up restitching it. That’s all my fault for not doing the test stitching. Luckily it was small, one of a set of three Christmas Ornaments, so I got it done by Monday. I ironed and stretched the other models and spent last night framing them. Stay tuned for preview pictures! Oh, yeah, and I ran 10K in the Nike “Human Race”, so it was a busy weekend. The Fall market is only a week away and the Fall online show falls close on the heels of that, so it time to go crazy!

The first person to email me the names of the five new designs and the color of fabric used for each one will win a set of all five new designs.

Happy hunting!

Tomorrow I’m participating in the Walk to Win breast cancer walk, so still no sleeping in for me! I’ll try to post pictures of the booth tomorrow, but the internet connection is slow right now.

Anyway, I reported the story of how the stitching went to a high school graduation over the weekend:


Wow – graduating class of 2008! Now I do feel old. Also, everything is bigger in Texas, so there were over 660 in this graduating class (mine in Louisiana had 203).

In stitching news, I am very nearly ready for the Columbus TNNA tradeshow. Tonight I have to pack, put fluff on my Sample It! packs and figure out if I’m forgetting anything. I can’t believe I’m not running around town frantically, or running the printer late at night! I even played a video game last night and stitched!

I went through the model stack last night and found three models that are most in need of re-matting (how I frame for shows). Two are more likely to be done, as the third needs a circular cut in the matt and it is a pain to do. I also put my cross stitch Sample It! packages together last night, just some fluff to add to them. I have to print a catalogue sheet of the canvases before packing those up.

Other than that, the most important thing to get done is to get everything ready for the class I’m teaching. I’m teaching a class on Artist Trading Cards, which I’d heard of and seen at Quilt Market, but hadn’t turned my brain to until Jen suggested the class. Guess what I discovered? Making ATC’s is totally fun! Imagine stitching within a size of 2.5×3.5 inches! To me, this means free reign for experimentation with a small stitching investment. I’ll post my ATC gallery when I get back, so stay tuned!

I am going crazy getting ready – although it isn’t half as bad as last year! I’m actually ahead of where I usually am. I have four new charts ready for the Sample It! event, and I hope to actually be showing five new designs. I now have seven (!) different handpainted canvas designs, so I hope to meet some needlepoint shops and expand in that direction. I have half of my catalogues ready, although I need to pick up my price lists from Kinko’s. I still have to wrap up my class information, though. I’m teaching the same thing that I taught at the January tradeshow – a class on Artist Trading Cards and how to do them with cross stitch/embroidery. However, I’m the only teacher this time instead of teaching the class with four other designers. And I need to re-mat several of the models – guess I’ll be busy this weekend!

I’m getting excited about the show, too. It will be exciting to debut the HPC (Hand Painted Canvas) line as well as network with other designers and shop owners. We’re having some great online debates right now about how to bring more stitchers to stitching.

Pictures of the new designs will be shown sometime after June 5th. As a courtesy to shopowners who take the time to visit the tradeshow, I let them get first peek.

I hope to post about our visit to Georgia sometime soon. I finally got the pictures prepped that I want to show, and it was such an awesome trip, I want to share it. Plus, a new design went on the trip (the same one that went to Germany), so that design has been to some interesting places!

I taught two classes: the Fiber Artist Trading Cards, which was spear headed by Jen Funk-Weber and was totally awesome and with 3 other fabulous designers. I also taught “Mixed Media Embroidery”, which is the concept of doing funky things with existing designs.
Karen

and Monika

took the Mixed Media class. By a strange coincidence, Monika had model stitched for me in the early days, before moving and having a busier life. She now works at a shop in Colorado! Sorry about the bad picture Monika – I only had my phone with me!

Thursday night was Sample It! where shops get to buy a sample of stuff to take back. I had one person come by and ask if they could have one of my packages, I said, “For $X”. I mean, really, the concept of Sample It! is not SWAG, and that’s inventory I can take back and sell, not give away!

I spent some time during the show looking at the booths around me: Just Another Button Co. was just across the way, and I met some nice needlepoint people and yarn, including Caya Colour Yarn from Colorado.

This is what a trade show looks like all packed away:

Luckily, my hotel had a scale in the bathroom so that I could double check my weight distribution.

Flying away in the plane, I was able to spot Long Beach in the LA metroplex:

Last night, I was finally able to unpack my suitcases. All the paperwork still has to be sorted through so that I can mail out orders this weekend!

Here’s how the tradeshow went:

I arrived Wednesday night, and it was dark, so I didn’t get to see much of LA. Thursday, I hauled my 100 pounds of tradeshow “stuff” down to the Long Beach convention center. It was very pretty:

However, at this point I was more concerned with just finding the exhibition floor and being able to stop hauling the “stuff”.

I find my spot on the next to the last aisle:

Then add the backdrop:

Then add tables:

Then add stitched models!

Luckily, it doesn’t take very long! I also taught a class on Thursday, prepped my bags for the Sample It! event, and participated in Sample It! When that was done, I was very happy to get some dinner, then head back to the hotel and crash!

I’ll tell more about the show tomorrow, but for now, here’s a look at the two new designs that were released!
“Amore”

and “Ad Astra”

These are motif-type samplers and each block is sized for Artist Trading Cards (more on that later, too).

Finally, a stitcher sent me a link to her very neat-o “Jolly Roger Cat“; I just love the look of the variegated thread in this design!