TUSAL and Baby Record

Today, I'll be showing you my TUSAL jar, as well as my newest project. :)

A bird's eye view

For those of you who are unfamiliar with a TUSAL jar, lemme explain. TUSAL stands for "Totally Useless Stitch A-Long". The point is to keep your thread (or yarn) ends and put them in a jar, and then share the result each new moon of the month. I thought this would be a neat idea to help decorate my apartment and I could put them in my curio cabinet, but my husband thought it was kinda silly. So, he talked me into doing a yearly TUSAL jar instead. So, I have one "big" jar which I'm going to collect all my thread ends into, and I'll share it with you guys from time to time. Just something interesting to see how many colors I use in a month and all that jazz.

Everything I've collected since Saturday

Onto the baby record. Two of my good friends from camp are expecting their first child together and I decided that since I've gotten back into cross stitching, to make them a baby record. The baby is due in May, so I've got a good bit of time, and I've gotten quite a bit done already.

The first challenge for this, was they're wanting to be surprised by the gender of the baby. Now, that  makes things difficult when I'm trying to find a pattern. I knew they were decorating the room in Winnie the Pooh things (if I'm remembering correctly), so I found this pattern of a teddy bear (not Winnie) and some other things. It leans kinda sorta to the more girly style, but I think it's pretty gender neutral enough for a newborn, right? I mean, it has both pinks and blues as well as some other pastely colors.

All this done in 2 days. :)

I'm thinking that when all is said and done, I'll put it in a white wooden frame, if I can find one that matches what I'm thinking about. The finished size is going to be 5x7 so it's not that big.

To finish this project, I'm setting aside my super secret project for now. Perhaps in the future I'll show you glimpses of what I'm working on, but it can't be anything too big.

So, I'll leave you all that for now. Remember to keep your needle threaded!