like candy.

This one is for you, friendy.

I finally went onto the Linda Farrow Vintage website this

morning and it is full of amazing.

Linda Farrow is back in action producing her beautiful

sunglasses that she first made famous in the seventies.

We all know her from the slatted glasses image

of Kanye that overstayed its welcome over the

last two years, but she is so much more and

doing some very impressive collaborations with

some wonderful brands and designers.

Linda Farrow sunglasses are like, well, candy.

Above fabulousness from the Linda Farrow Luxe line.

The more important question is.. where can we get these

beautifully wacky designer collaborations?

for Bernhard Willhelm.

For Charles Anastase.

For Jeremy Scott.

For Sophia Kokosalaki.

And LF uses her projects collaborations to pair with some of our

faves.. Rodarte(above), House of Holland, and Opening Ceremony.

And, if you need more diamonds in your life(i do), there are always

these hot mamas.

from Linda Farrow Fine Jewelry Collection.

I am loving my new sunglasses.

Success!

Embroidered success!

Good work team.

See you in January for some new craftiness.

I will update the blog link when the new craft class

details come out.

The 'i've still got 20 minutes at the end of class' pencil case.

Sorry buddy. But the homemade tie dye looked amazing!

home grown holiday

Let's jog our memories back to April,

when I made clear my obsession for the

miniature Fungi farms from

Far West Fungi.

My fascination with the mini fungi garden is a long running

one that started about 8 years ago with trips to

the Ferry building in S.F.

How pretty are these mushrooms?

See their mushroom forest in the forefront?

Gorgeous! Effortless! Like a terrarium, but better.

So much better.

Thanks to Melvin, I received my very own Fungi farm over the summer.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have named him. Would that have

made him feel more nurtured?

At any rate, I ran out and purchased a large glass cloche,

the only one I could find was from Pottery Barn,

and gave him a nice, comfy and trés chic home.

And of course, I haven't mentioned him since.

Shattered dreams.

Halloween came and still nothing.

He did appear to be some groovy science experiment,

which helped the spooky decor some.

Our main problem here, so we think, was that it was still

80 degrees in October in Southern California.

Like the lagomorphs, shroomy likes a nice crisp 60

degrees. Lucky for him, the month of November has created

a buns-chilling atmosphere in our guest bathroom.

And that is where we moved him. The rabbits are so jealous.

And, wouldn't you know it, he responded.

Growth and more growth.

Shroomy checking himself out in the mirror..

(he's so vain)

New larger growth..

Original mini growth from the great hot spell of 2009.

New large growth next to old whimpy growth.. see the difference?

Even a few shroomy heads.

Well, I have been butt dragging on this post and this was a shot

of the shroomy heads on Friday..

This was shroomy head MADNESS on Sunday..

Finger high!

Shroomy reaching for the sky on Monday..

And mondo Alice in Wonderland shroomy status this morning.

I am totally a mushroom farmer. So my three shroom heads don't

really resemble the beauty of the Far West Fungi sample.

That's ok.

I have a strong desire to incorporate them into my

Thanksgiving cooking. Yet, somehow, I am not sure I have the

confidence to serve guest a fungus that I have grown in my

guest bathroom, that has been witness to lord knows what.

But, maybe I do.

Finishing up.

And now for the last step of this darned embroidery.

The last stitch is the 'spiderweb' stitch and what is so

great about it is that it actually involves very little stitching.

Here is where we were at the last time we were

doing this.. one weekend and 6 glasses of wine ago.

You can use whatever colors you want for this stitch.

The pattern calls out for your stem color, dark green,

and the middle knot color.. medium purple.

Start with your dark green color for the base of the web.

So, Bring your needle through the middle of the little star drawing;

you want to be at one of the inside ends of one of the little lines.

Working outward, stitch in each of the lines. Try to make them as

even as possible. The more even the lines are, the easier

things are for you later.

one stitch.

two.

Eventually, you have a whole wheel.. the bones of the web.

Knot off your first color and cut.

Sorry, mine looks a little wonky because I fixed one of my sides

that was too short. Try to disregard the wonkiness.

Now we switch to our Purple thread.

Start by bringing your needle up between two of the stitch lines,

as close to the top as you can get them.

see..

Then, you take your needle and run it under the stitch lines

to the right and the left of your thread, wrapping the right stitch line

with the new thread. If you ever did camp, think God's eye. yumm.

Continue this process by wrapping the needle around the stitch line

to the right of your new loose thread and putting your needle

under that stitch line and the next.

You have just wrapped

another line. Brilliant.

Keep up this process, running the needle under the stitch line

to the right and left of your floss...

Continually push the already wrapped floss up toward the middle

so it is nice and tight together.

In mere minutes, you will have gone all the way around the wheel.

What do you do now? Oh yes, keep wrapping.

And, wrapping.

Eventually, this mother will be the most beautiful God's eye you

have ever seen.

No, you are not done. See that little knot in the upper left corner?

It needs two friends. If you thought you were done knotting,

you were wrong.

Take your trio of purples and get going. Just like the first knots,

you need 4 threads and your bow tying finger.

You will make one knot in each color.

Ok, now you are done. Nice work!

Don't be afraid to hand wash your work when you are done to

get rid of pencil marks. Use a small dab of detergent.

I dry with a warm iron.

Holiday gift time! Make it happen!

What's it all about

Sweetie sent me this today from Steven Burke,

who has been known to do a few T shirt designs

for Ambiguous.

This truly could be our life story.. I hope we

stop working soon!

So perfect!

Although, these days there is not even

time for dreaming!! Happy weekend!

Buy Ambiguous tees here.

In the home stretch..

Let's finish this mother up! Well, almost.

Get out your scrap for a few practice stitches.

just in case you can't identify the stitch we are getting started

with due to my overcrowded scrapadoodle,

it is the dark green one in the middle with my needle right next to it.

Yes, for the next two stitches we are going back to

the two colors from our beloved beanie.. in my case,

those are dark green and light green.

Let's start with the 'Stem' stitch.

Start by making a nice stitch of decent length.

The next stitch will start in the middle - on the right(or left) side

of what you are doing. It depends on which direction

you are stitching in, and I will explain later.

For this stitch practice, though, lets bring our needle up

on the right side of the stitch.

Which side?

The right side. Definitely.

Here's where shiz gets crazy.

from the right side, reach under the previous stitch and

yank it over to where your needle came up.

*Notice that now your stitch in on the LEFT side.

yep.

From there, make another decent sized stitch.

Notice how they are kind of hugging together. Aww.

The next stitch will come up right above the first stitch on the

right side..

So, keep up the switcheroo and you will end up with

a nice twisty donut looking stitch. Yum.

The Stem stitch is king of a fun, more stylized version

of a basic split stitch. We use it when we want to be

'Fancy'.

And, if you are like me, you want to be fancy often, almost always.

Our next stitch is the 'Leaf' stitch. I know, these names are

very original. Perhaps the most creative names ever.

For this guy, we have to draw a practice leaf on our scrap.

Make sure your leaf is nice and round. I ran into the problem

of making some ugly leaf tracings on my Poppy and, well,

my leaves are just not as fantastic as they could be.

Oh well.

So, you have your leaf. Brava to me and this fab drawing.

Ok. Start on one side of the bottom.. left or right, whatever

suits you best. So many choices.

For me, I chose left, so this explanation will follow that.

The next stitch will go up and to the right.. slightly angled.

The next stitch will start on the other side.. making a little

inverse V with the stitch( and a big V, really ).

This stitch will follow the first, in the opposite direction.

Next, we are going to get crazy again. Crazy embroiderers.

Your stitch will come up in the middle and do our

favorite bob and weave with the left side thread.

Note how the thread starts in the middle..

then gets crazy with the swoosh and grab of the left thread.

This stitch will be sewn in above your first stitch on the

right side, with

a small space between the two.

Next, your needle will come up on the right side between the

two threads. Keep the needle very close to the middle. We want

the little backbone of our leaf skeleton here to be nice and tightly

braided.

The next stitch will go to the left. Notice how that stitch seems a

bit saggy and definitely not the strong straight stitch we need

for our leaf skeleton perfection. Don't despair. This is where the

'Bend and Snap' comes in. Ok, that doesn't really apply.

But, I love saying it.

This is where our little duck under stitch grab comes in again.

repeat.

Look at this gorgeous leaf.

Notice the tiny braid back bone.

Time to apply what we've learned.

The 'Stem' stitch is for well, the stem.

And, the leaf stitch? Uh huh.

The only snag that I can come up with here is

when you stitch the stem stitch on a curve, make sure

your needle is popping out at the top of the stitch and you

are digging under the stitch and pulling it upwards.

Gravity is already against you, so you want to

pull the stitch upwards.

Finished stem and leaves.

You can play with the colors any way you want.

I put a little doodle at the end of my middle stem and

I don't know why. I guess I was in the moment.

Notice the far right leaf.. there are some pencil

marks lefts over as I tried to correct that

beastly leaf drawing.

Luckily, Pencil marks will wash out.

We can discuss this later.

Let's bring it home tomorrow with the final stitch

and stop this insanity.. for now.

pretty princess crown.

Where were we?

Ok, so now you have these lonely petals.

Let's finish off the top of the flower,

aka the crown.

Here is what we have so far.

For the rest of the flower, you will need two more sets of

monochromatic colors. It was suggested in class that

I really enjoyed saying the word monochromatic. Well,

I do. And lucky for me, I will use it again and again.

So, like I said, you need two sets of monochromatic colors

that fade from dark to light. For the actual crown, you will need

two colors. I used green : light and dark olive, to be exact.

The area below the crown will require 3 monochromatic

colors. Yes, that is FOUR times I have said it.

In my case, I used purple, light, medium, and dark.

You are welcome to pick your own color combo..

this is your craft, afterall.

The first stitch we are using here is 'padded satin'.

You will recall we used the satin last time on the ends

of the petals. You create a satin stitch by stitching from

one side to the next, with the stitches falling right next to

each other.

We are going to take this stitch to the next level, though..

the 'Padded' level. It will be padded. And, puffy.

Start with your darker of the two colors you have selected.

Split the Skein into 3 and 3 again and thread your needle,

knotting the bottom.

We are starting at the top of our little flower beanie, here.

Start on whichever side you are most comfortable with and make

a stitch across the top of the beanie.

Follow that with another stitch across, directly below

the first.

And then, another below that.

And so on, and so forth..

Once you have completed this process, you will have satin

stitched the entire crown, horizontally.

Congrats, you satin stitched. You did it.

Here is where we go crazy. Here is where we get 'Padded'.

Booyah.

We are now going to satin stitch vertically starting at the

bottom middle of the crown.

Pick on side and satin stitch over your originally

horizontal stitch.. only one side,

as this beanie is going to be two colors, split down the middle.

Start with one vertical stitch..

The second stitch will follow, directly next to the first.

The next stitches will follow suit

until you have this half puffy satin masterpiece.

The other half of the puffy satin will be your other color.

That is, the other half of the monochromatic

color wheel of greens. I said it.

So, get your needle back to the middle and make

light green puffy satin(or whatever color you

choose, no pressure)!

Voila! Beautiful crown of two toned

'puffy satin'.

Remember to tie off and clip the ends of each

color you finish..

To finish off the top of the flower,

you need one more monochromatic gradient of color.

You will need three colors in this case and in my case,

I chose purple.

Behold the insanity that is my threads.

File this image into the 'what not to do' folder.

So, for the first part of our new color wheel of

stitching, you will need to split your yarn skein

into 4 and 2.

If I was less lazy, I would tell you that the first part(the split

stitch) would be better with a three yarn and the

second part(french knot) would be better with a four yarn.

However, I am lazy. So, I did everything here with a four yarn

your level of precision here is entirely up to you.

We are going to start by giving the beanie a little outline

using split stitch. If split stitch slips your mind,

refresh here.

So, We split stitch around

and up the middle..

When we are done with this.. we are going to poke our needle

out at the top middle of our beanie and go ahead and give our

beanie a little poof on top with a french knot.

Simply make a knot at the base of the thread ( I say simple

but somehow it was not simple during class. My best advice here

would be to hold the knot down with one finger like you were

tying a bow on a package, and pull slowly. See the next step

for a picture of me doing just that.)

Once you have your knot, pull the needle back through the fabric

right next to where your knot is.

In this case, you are trying to pull your knot as close to the

beanie as possible, so, insert your needle below the knot.

I give you beanie with poof.

And we still have that whole middle portion to fill.

If you like making knots, you just struck it so rich.

Start on whichever side makes you comfortable and knot

from one side to the other. We are still using our darkest color

with 4 threads here.

Here is a slo mo pic of me tying a knot and using my finger.

Please, for both our sakes, use that finger.

Perhaps you should practice a few knots on your

embroidery shag before committing yourself to serious

knot making. Knots are one of those tricky things;

either you have it or you don't.

You tricky knot!

Fast forward 10 minutes (if you've got 'it')

and you have your first row of knots..

made with the darkest color of your new color grouping.

Now onto the next lightest color and the next row of knots..

And the third row of knots in the lightest color..

Hot!

We are done with our flower.. only three more stitches to go!

And for you who are scared of the embroidery,

I give you some bday photos of me and the girls. Loves it.

Did I ever tell you that I got this?

Well I did and it is amazing.

And, it is criminal to try to steal it's thunder with

a giant patent leather red belt. Bad!

And the new sexy heirloom treasure in my office;

lights up my Tony Gwynn pennant real nice.

See you tomorrow! Do your homework!