Of pumpkins and bikes

I've really been dragging my feet on posting the tutorial on the coiled pumpkin pins........

Here is enough to start you out and then I'll post the rest of the instructions tomorrow or the next day.

Supplies needed: worms......wool worms that is!

Pick out something suitable for a pumpkin......remember, they come in different colors these days....orange, white, blue, green....for this I'm sticking with your basic orange...but jazzing it up with a checked fabric.

Now, just take that puppy and roll it into a nice little round shape like this.....
See....wasn't that easy? Now run and go get your needle and thread......something that half-way coordinates is a good idea....I'm using brown. It's rare that I have a calling for orange thread.....hey, if you sew a lot it could happen. ME, yeah, I don't sew a lot!

Now, here is where you have to pay attention....don't poke yourself while you are threading that needle....hmmmm, better go get my reading glasses to thread that dude!

Okay....now that it's threaded let's get busy! Make a knot in your thread....I know it sounds obvious, but I HAVE forgotten before. Put your needle in about two rows back and come up through the little end of the tail....as shown below.....draw your needle through until the knot catches.

Did I mention that my freshman English teacher tried to convince me to be a technical writer?

Now take your needle and go back and come up in the center. My picture shows me being on the totally opposite side of the tail.....OOOPS! Your starting out right there by the tail and then coming up in the middle. Making sense?

You continue to do this in a spoke like fashion.....like this.....

You end up coming up in the middle and knotting off. If you want your pumpkin to be more squatty (or as Kenny, my husband, calls them.....Cinderella pumpkins) then pull tighter where you want them to squash in.

Later on....tomorrow or the next day I'll show you how I made the stem (needle felting with yarn scraps....old dried vines of some sort would look way cool, but things aren't dry enough here to find any of those yet), vine (another worm) and leaves....just cut them out of scraps of wool as well.

Speaking of spokes....

Today (okay....it's 3am here, so I guess that means yesterday....Wednesday....my day off work) we went downtown to watch the Tour of Missouri come through town.

We went down to hang out at one of our favorite eateries...Mille's

You can dine indoors or out....we were outside on the covered patio to watch the bikers come by, but Mille's did a great job of setting up extra tables outside in their parking lot to accomadate all of the folks who came to cheer on the athletes. Funny, it looks like Kenny is in jail!

This event was a pretty big deal....they shut down city streets for probably an hour for the racers to come through. My pictures are not too bad considering how fast they came by. There were 120 bikers....including the guy who won the 2007 Tour de France!

This is the guy who won todays segment of the race...it's 600 miles in 6 days across the state of Missouri....his name is George Hincapie of the Discovery Channel Team.

I'll be updating this everyday with race information.....just because now that I've been and watched these guys in action I'm a little addicted!!!

Go forth and be creative,

Tammy