Some gift making and a sorry looking sock

Hello!  Yes, it has only been a week since our last post!  We hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving (or Thursday) last week.  We had the opportunity to spend the day with Lee's family, playing board and card games, and enjoying a delicious feast.

Cross-stitch:
Stacey finished the Alice in Wonderland block in the 2015 Story Time Sampler pattern from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery and began working on the frame for the Wizard of Oz block.

Knitting:
Stacey went forward with a plan to pick up the stitches in the extra heel wedge in her Knit One, Crochet Too Ty-Dy Socks in colorway Cherry Cola 1233 sock and cut a stitch from the center of it, then unraveling the stitches and grafting the remaining sections together.  This of course, did not go as planned, as there are now long sections of unknit yarn and a few dropped stitches.  The sock is once again in time-out.

Sewing:
On Thanksgiving day we had played a few rounds of Uno with our six year old niece, who was struggling with her cards and kept dropping them on the floor.  In an effort to make game time easier for her until she's able to easily hold the cards in her hand, Stacey sewed up a Card Kitty from sewcanshe.com.

The steps were a bit vague on sewing things right or wrong sides together, but the photos were able to clear that up in each step.  She did align the bottom of the first pocket pouch one inch below the line, and apparently its supposed to be the top of the first pocket one inch below the line.  By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late, so the interfacing sizes were adjusted and the remainder of the sewing was completed.

She did follow the advice of one commenter to use a glue stick to hold the velcro in place before stitching instead of pinning.  This worked really well.  Another thing to note, though it didn't come into play for this make, if you make this card holder and use cardboard or another really thick interfacing that might not go through your machine well, you should add the velcro to the top of the back piece (about half an inch down) before stitching the front and back together.  An alternative would be to use iron-on velcro.

Woodworking:
Lee created a desk-side cup holder for his dads birthday. His dad has trouble keeping his cup on his desk. We thought a cup holder that he could attach to the side of his desk would help. It is made out of some walnut that was laying around in the garage. It looks way bigger than is necessary, but we did sneak into his house to measure the cup he normally uses. The cup holder was finished with some Tung Oil.

He also made progress on the bottom section of a bookshelf. All of the boards have been sanded up to 120 grit and had pocket holes and shelf pin holes drilled.

Lee also got a new tool. He ordered it back in May and it finally showed up. The tool for those who don't do much wood working or are just interested in learning is called a jointer. 

The point of a jointer is to give you a clean flat surface that you can reference against to do further work on the piece of wood. The picture on the left is what the wood looked like before running it through the jointer and the picture on the right is the after. Once a board has a nice flat surface on it you can run it through a surface planer to make the other side flat and parallel. 

While we were out shopping we stopped into the Woodcraft store. They have some really nice lumber in that store. We picked up some padauk which has a distinctive orange color to it and a couple pieces of hard maple. The plan is to create a couple cutting boards or wooden wallets with the lumber.