Hello stitching friends,

We announced a toll-free number in the newsletter last month but — oops! The number in the newsletter was correct but the number on our contact page was wrong. If you tried to call us and couldn't get through, we apologize. The correct number is there now.

We have a pattern award this month! Melanie in Idaho was the first to suggest Yellow Irises by Claude Monet (see below). This makes a nice companion to Monet's Irises (showing purple irises) — they are the same height and nearly the same width.

You CAN take it with you!

It's getting to be vacation time (at least in the northern hemisphere) and that means figuring out how to include your stitching in your travel plans, or suffer stitching withdrawal! Fortunately there are some good options. Here are two approaches.

Method 1.  Select a very small project such as a bookmark, needle case, or chatelaine. Take a small box with a tight-fitting lid (such as an empty Altoids or Sucrets box), clean it out, and line the inside top and bottom with adhesive-backed felt (from Wal-Mart or a crafts store). (The felt makes it easier to grab the needles.) Put the floss bobbins in the box with folding scissors, a couple of needles (yes, more than one &mdash what if you lose your needle at 35,000 feet?), and perhaps a needle threader. If you don't usually use bobbins, take some extra business cards, cut to fit in the box, notch the tops and bottoms, and wind the floss on them. Put your little box, a small hoop, fabric and chart in a large zip-loc bag and you're ready to go!

Method 2.  You can travel with our smaller patterns (though even we don't recommend travelling with the larger ones!) and here's how. Get the floss labels that go with the pattern — they make a great checklist for the floss. Gather your floss and label the bobbins for the solids and the blends. When all the labels are gone, you know you have all the bobbins you're supposed to have. (If you don't want to use the labels for the solid colors that don't have a symbol, still peel the label off the sheet so that you know you have a bobbin for that color.)

Put the floss into sandwich size zip-loc bags by color family: one bag each for blues, greens, yellows, browns, reds, gray-black-white, etc. (If one or two colors really dominate, you might split the blue bag, for example, into light blues and dark blues.) As you do this, write the color family next to the number on the symbol cross reference. For example, as you put 3799 in the "grays" bag, write "gray" next to 3799 on the symbol cross reference. Then when you're keeping your elbows to yourself in your coach seat, to find 3799 you look in the symbol cross reference, see that it's a gray, and you only need to look through the baggie with grays to find it. You can start with one baggie for empty blend bobbins, and as you use them, file them with the appropriate color family. Store all the floss baggies in a large zip-loc bag. It can be squashed into any number of places where a bobbin box would not go. Keep your fabric, hoop, and chart in another large zip-loc bag. The little box as described above can be handy here too, and it goes in the second zip-loc bag. When you cut floss, run it the length of the large zip-loc twice to measure 24 inches. Even if you usually blend only two strands at a time at home, it's helpful when you're travelling to cut the two colors for the blend, take one strand from each, and store the remaining five strands of the two colors on the blend bobbin. This will save you a lot of fishing for the solid color bobbins when you need a new length of the blend.

You may as well face the fact that work you take travelling is going to get dirty. We recommend that you leave at home anything you might not feel comfortable washing after it's finished. If you use a magnifier at home, take along a good strong pair of reading glasses. (Or, if you wear bifocals or graduated lenses, your optician can make you a pair of glasses in your close-up prescription to use when you're only doing close work — like stitching!)

New patterns! Clink any picture for a closer look.

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