About Me

My photo
West Virginia
When I started my retirement travels in 2009, I wanted a way to share it with family and friends as it was happening. Hence, "My Travel Journal". However I realized I wouldn't always be on a trip and wondered what to do with the blog in between times. My daughter pointed out, wisely, that travels can also include trips to the kitchen to try a new recipe, trips to visit family, trips to my neighborhood Starbucks, or a fun day trip with a friend. You're welcome to join me on any of these journeys! I've set up individual pages for each of my major trips (see tabs above).

Also, I have an Etsy shop where my current needlework resides. The last pieces I posted here were in 2013! So if you'd like to see what I have accomplished recently, go to (and I apologize for having to copy and paste):

www.etsy.com/shop/thedollhouseneedle

I recently added an "Italian Word a Day" thingie which shows up at the bottom of every page. You see the word and can click to hear it pronounced. I've been enjoying it and I think my accent is improving as time goes by.

October 08, 2011

I'm All A-Twitter...

Silly, I know...but I just found out a member of Etsy made up a Treasury List and included my Christmas tree quilt in it!  That's a first for me and it just made me real happy. :)

(A few days later)...

I started this early this week and instead of doing a new post will just add to it. And it will be about my addiction to Etsy. :)

I've discovered that I love making Treasury Lists myself. I suppose everyone is familiar with Etsy, but it was all new to me and if it's new to you too, a Treasury List is something you create by doing a search for most anything - a color, a holiday, a word, whatever, and selecting from what comes up for your search. You can choose up to 16 items (and there are usually thousands) and you enter them, rearrange them to hopefully make a pleasing arrangement (some lists are truly beautiful) and then post it. There are a couple of rules - you're not to put in anything from your own shop and you're only supposed to have one item from any one shop and that's the hard part. Sometimes it's tempting to put in more than one if the shop is really relevant to your theme. There's something you do to make the lists get tons of hits - I saw one today with three thousand some but I don't know what it is, nor do I really care; I just enjoy doing the searching and putting them together. So, I'm going to put links here to the lists I've created so far. And just so you know, I'm spiraling...I already have collected three sets of items for three more lists!!

My first list was Itsy Bitsies and was, of course, all dollhouse miniatures.

Next, was Autumn in a Miniature World, again all miniatures.

Then, branching out, Ah, Bella Italia...Ah, Pottery which covers (as my readers know) two of my other loves.

I forget what inspired my It's Almost Time for Oktoberfest" list, maybe because I had come across a miniature beer mug.

Weather inspired A Cold, Rainy Day and a Pot of Tea and this and the Itsy Bitsies are probably my favorites.

And last, just a couple of days ago, I posted A Squadron of Sock Monkeys because I had just finished stitching and listing a cross stitched sock monkey dressed up as a pirate for Halloween. While working on it, I got to wondering if there were very many sock monkeys on Etsy, so did a search and, of course, thousands! This was an exciting one, because I posted it and about 3 minutes later, I got a message that someone had added it to their list of favorite treasury lists (which I didn't even know you could do).

Here's my little sock monkey pirate:

And...more excitement...in addition to the Christmas Tree quilt being included on someone's treasury list, this week two other treasury lists used an item of mine.  Don't ask me why this tickles me so much...but I somehow find it more exciting than actually selling something! :)

And since you're probably really hoping I'll post the links to those three treasury lists so you can pick out my items, here they are:

A Little Bit of Red, A Little Bit of Green" for my Christmas tree quilt.

Christmas Quilting mine is the only tiny thing on the list.




And I'm just all filled up with ideas for stitching I want to do.  I have an old sampler that my mother stitched that hung on the dining room wall of the house I grew up in.  In emptying out the closet after my "flood" (would you believe nothing has been done about any of that yet?!) there it was and I looked at the back of it and discovered that she had stitched it in 1937!!  Which means, if I have my dates right, she probably had only been married for a year or less.  And I decided I would try and get it down to miniature size.  I've finished charting it into my cross stitch program and it will be a large miniature, but I'm real excited about that.  And I have a few "primitive" samplers I want to stitch that should go pretty quickly; I want to make some smaller, decorated Christmas tree quilts (like the one on my quilts page) that could be used as dollhouse wallhangings or as Christmas tree ornaments in "real life"; and I've picked out a few Christmas cross stitch patterns that will adapt well to miniature stitching, so I'm just having a great time with it all.

I think that's about all for now.  Anything else I would have to report would all be bad news - no work on the water damage, a speed-trap speeding ticket on my way home from my NYC trip (and we just won't talk about the dollar amount), "Occupy Wall Street" protestors (noisy!) on the busy intersection that is less than 1/2 a block away from my bedroom, etc.  So isn't it nice I have found a new obsession? :)

The weather here right now is pretty much fabulous and I hope it is for at least most, if not all, of my readers.  Tomorrow is supposed to be another one, so a pleasant Sunday to all.

4 comments:

Chinch said...

Dear merciful heaven.... How do you do it?!? My mind is boggled. They are all quite wonderful lists (and you don't even like beer!!). I think maybe I liked the Cold, Rainy Day best because of the Scrabble tile and Momma's Hummel piece. Must confess I'd never heard of painting Scrabble tiles, nor of sock monkeys. Read ML's blog and learn. :) xoxo

Christopher said...

Well, that's all pretty fascinating! I can totally see how those treasuries would be somewhat addictive... so many fascinating, creative things being made/offered by people out there. And your work certainly belongs on treasury lists, so it is nice to see that happen. Sounds like you'll be a stitchin' machine pretty soon... (And how weird that the Occupy Wall Street protest has spilled over into Huntington! ;)

Mary Lynne said...

Chinch - can't remember if you say my miniature Hummel of the children under the umbrella when you were here. I have it sitting on the base of Mama's. And I think the Scrabble tiles are decoupaged - I saw some in our local artisan's shop yesterday and they were. And, of course, when you turn them over, there's the Scrabble letter. Such a neat idea I think now that I see it, but who would ever have thought of it in the first place? That's what always boggles my mind.

xo

Mary Lynne said...

And yeah, Chris - not only weird but pretty darned annoying too. If I ever organized a protest, I think I'd try to actually accomplish something besides making noise. I've been pondering protesting the protesters, but probably won't. :)

xo

Italian Word Word of the Day

My Trusty Followers

Blog Archive