We have an ear!

I know, 2 updates in a 4 day stretch? Whoda thunk.

This is my progress as of today. I finished Mama's ear this morning. She truly is a mama now, with eyes to watch over her baby, and ears to hear him with. It was sheer bliss to have all the time I had this weekend to stitch. Other than my no-sew adventure, this was all I did. Of course, other tasks are being left undone so this gets finished, but SO likes takeout and he does the laundry anyway. If I can just get this finished this week, it will be a huge weight off my shoulders.

It's getting to that time

The crunch is on for the fair.

Yesterday, SO and I went over to Michael's to get a frame. SO has never been to that particular store, but he went because I told him I needed his help to pick out a frame. I think he realized that, if this hangs in the house, I need a frame he likes too. So he went.

And he was good. He perked up when we got to the model car section. I didn't even know Michaels had a model car section, did you? He looked at them so longingly. I told him if he wanted one, he should get it. He said no, because he didn't have a place to display it. I have to find him a shelf, and then get him a model. We could craft together. We discussed the merits of the pirate bowling set (for his sister's kids, not for us). He said it wasn't very well made. I told him this was probably good; the last thing anyone needs is small children chunking non-foam balls at things inside the house, since we already have to childproof when they visit (can you imagine if they got into my sewing room?--it would be like a low-rent Disney vacation, with scissors).

We wandered down the frame aisle. One thing I have always liked about SO is that he gets me. We speak the same language, in a wierd way. So, when I said, "I want an African frame", he knew just what I wanted. And we found it. A really pretty frame that looks rough-hewn, but in a good way. And, because, SO is a perfectionist, he wanted the "perfect" frame, he sat himself on the floor and went through every one of the frames they had in that style to find the one with the least number of dinks and knots in it. It must be love if he was willing to sit on the floor for me. I wouldn't sit on the floor at Michaels. But I think this frame is going to look great! I feel a little bit bad about taking it to my LNS for framing, but they will still make the money off the stretching and mounting, and I just can't afford to have all my stitching custom-framed. Maybe by next year . . .

Mom came over to make no-sew fleece blankets for kids on Saturday. My house is a little better suited for this because I have room to cut, and the pets aren't doing their darnedest to lie on the fleece, like they do at her house. They're so easy to make and don't take that much time, if you are doing kid-sized ones. We did one with scottie dogs on it, and a paw print back, and the other one was bugs on the front and a blue back. Mom has more, but it was a long drive and we didn't have time to do all of them. She'll end up giving these to one of the local charities at Christmas, which I really admire her for.

Late night stitching

I got some good progress on this one last night, totally by accident. I got home at 9 and we ate dinner, then I picked up the lions and started stitching. We watched TV for a while, but I asked SO if we could watch a movie, thinking it would be midnight when it was over.

I should have known something was up when I started yawning. And SO yawned. And we couldn't stop.

It was 2 when the movie was over. I had stitched for 4 hours. I haven't had 4 stitching hours in two weeks. I didn't even notice it was that long.

Why doesn't 4 hours at work go this quickly.

These are due at the framers on the 20th. I have to step to it.

Why there are no pictures this week

I have the best of intentions on putting pictures on here. I swear. Life interferes.

Last night, I got home at a fairly reasonable time. I would have been home sooner, but they closed the road through town for the fireman's carnival parade, and I had to go around. The road they wanted us to use would have put me waaaaaaayyyyy away from the house, and I am not that comfortable with running the backroads in this county. I got out on some Sunday due to an accident closing down the road, and one was unpaved. I didn't know there were still unpaved roads in this state, LOL. My car is a "citified" car, I guess, because it didn't handle the gravel very well, so I am going to try to keep my off-roading to a minimum in it. That, along with the prevalence of deer and the fact that I've already been hit by one, makes me a little hesitant to go road-running. So I took the back way into the neighborhood.

It was nice to hear the parade. I didn't go because the dogs needed tending to, but I did enjoy sitting on the bench, watching them eat, listening to the marching band. I realized they were playing some rock song by Finger 11. Their last big hit. When I was in high school, our marching band could only play "Louie Louie" and the 1812 Overture? We could have never played a song about being in a club. But then again, it was the 90s, we were in the back country, without Internet or cable; such things were a mystery to us.

By the time I got the dogs taken care of and ate dinner, it started to storm, so I had to bring the dogs in. And that was pretty much the end of the chance to post photos; I am not booting the computer up in a thunderstorm. And it DUMPED last night. SO had been down in Southern Maryland, racing, but they only got to run 3 cars before they called off the meet. He was home by 10, and, from when he got the truck door open to running up the front stairs, he was SOAKED. I couldn't believe it.


My pansies are loving all the wet weather we've been having. They're growing like crazy. I know I have to take them out of the planter, because it's getting too warm for them and I want to put in some summer flowers, but I feel bad about it. I'm just enjoying them for now. My mom is coming over on Saturday to work on some no-sew fleece blankets. I think I'll end up letting her take them out. That way, she actually killed them, not me.

Where did your journey begin?

Someone else shared the start of their love for cross stitch, and I thought it would be fun to share where I started, and learn how everyone else got into this hobby.

I learned to stitch when I was 12. My mother had always stitched while on vacation. She only did it on vacation, and I loved it. She stitched Told in A Garden designs that she bought at the old LNS in Virginia Beach, VA. She had a lot of them; somewhere in my mother's house is a treasure trove of these patterns, all unfinished. And gosh, how I wanted to learn. There was something hypnotic and beautiful in those tidy little stitches. But it was one of those things that they didn't want me to do because I was the kind of child who flitted from thing to thing, never really focusing on anything. Probably today, with a different mother, I would be diagnosed with ADD. But it was the late 80s, my mother is "old school" and they just didn't get things like that for me.

But I pestered. I'm the queen of pestering. And of guilt trips. And my mother relented. She brought me home a no-count kit of a little sunbonnet girl facing a sheep. And my brother commenced to teach me to stitch. Note I said my brother. But he's a good stitcher, he just stitches the opposite way I do. He actually took my little kit and worked on it after I went to bed that night. All opposite. I never picked it out. It's my bubba and I's masterpiece.

I was happy with no-count for a year or so, finished another big project, and, oh, how I loved when my Daddy would take me to MJDesigns (remember that store? They closed in 1999, or, rather Michaels took them over, but they were THE BEST. Long aisles of stitchery. Sigh) for a new kit. And then I realized it still wasn't counted work.

Vacation rolled around, and we went to my aunt's house. I remember pretty vividly,at the end of vacation, Mom and my aunt went off to the cross stitch store(what was that place?), and I wasn't allowed to go. They had to go get gas because Iraq invaded Kuwait, and gas was going up in price, probably all the way up to 75 cents a gallon, which was scandalous. They came back with a kit for me and taught me to do counted. It was a teddy bear, and I wrecked it. And flung it aside and never finished it. But it wasn't so much that I didn't want to stitch, that maybe that wasn't the kit for me. I've always done better when I've picked the project. Daddy took me to the craft store a few months later, I picked up my first real project, a horse's head that was way beyond my skillset, screwed that up, and worked my way through it. I entered that in the fair, won 2nd prize, the first of many second prizes I was to get at the fair--I had a fairly long streak of second place finishes at the fair in the 4-H division, but the girl that won was really good, so I never grudged her. And I was hooked.

Lost in a sea of browns

I spent a good portion of my free time yesterday stitching on the lions. There is something rather depressing about looking at a baby lion with a headless mama, so I am trying to fill her in. She has a gorgeous nose now, and her chin is slowly filling in. So we'll see. I don't work this weekend, but we're putting a new deck on the house and I suspect we'll be off to Lowes to look at wood and tools. I'm not fussing, though. Our deck is not large enough for the table and the blow-up pool, which has to be up there because, if it were in the yard, the pittybulls would be in it all the time, and would probably pop it. And I am so looking forward to coming home from work on some muggy July day when I'm annoyed and need to relax, and getting in the pool.

But I am to the point that I want this piece finished. I'm tired of the browns. I want to stitch smalls. I want to stitch something summery. And patriotic. And . . . not brown. I'm already planning my follow up projects.

I did finally decide which ornament I am going to enter in the fair. The heartstruck Quaker snowman I did last fall. I am pretty sure I have fabric for it; if not, there's a quilt store next to my LNS that will have something that will match. I'll have to take it to my LNS to get finished. If the judges don't like it, then that's on them. I think I did a good job on it. We'll have to see, though.

S.E.X. and the beach!

I had a good day yesterday. Pretty good anyway.

Our company doesn't give out bonuses, but they do give days off you can win through a drawing. I won the drawing for last month because I had the most perfect attendance for April. Someone up above must have been watching out for me, because I've been so stressed out lately that I really needed a day off to feel normal. And that day was yesterday. And, what better place for a suffering Scorpio to readjust than at the beach? So, I stumbled out the house at 6:30, went and picked up my mom, and off we went

This is where we went. Breezy Point beach. I think I've talked about it before, right? Anyway. It was nice to go there in the morning. On a weekday when there weren't 900 people there. It was warm yesterday, but not too hot. Not even a greenhead fly. Even the water wasn't too cold. It was a good day. It's the best beach for fossil-hunting, and it didn't disappoint. I added at least 60 shark teeth, some petrified wood, and some dental plates from rays to my collection (kept in a box with a cross stitch motif on it, LOL--I join my passions). And that was just in two hours, most of which I wasn't really looking that hard.

It was nice to have time to be with my mom and just talk and relax, and remember how we went to New Jersey when I was young. She laughed a little about how my father wanted them to buy a beach house up there, and she said no because she didn't think they could afford the whopping price tag of $75K, and she thought they would lose their shirt. She asked me if I remembered those days and I do. I can remember seeing Annie up there and Fox and the Hound, which is still one of my two favorite Disney movies. And how we'd walk through town and get Irish Potato candy from a store where the A/C unit was up in the air and it would drip on you (funny what you remember). And there was a guy who, everyday, would do these beautiful, intricate sandcarvings, and he would decorate them with bits of shell. And we'd eat cornflakes with blueberries in them and think that was Heaven. Mom said she was so glad she instilled a love of the ocean in me; I'm glad she did, too.

I was trying to get home at a reasonable time to eat dinner with SO, so we left at a little before noon, and, after a drive through the coastal communities there--Mom realized she knew where we were, because, before us, she and my father had a boat and they kept it docked in Deale, just up the road (please note, they did not have that boat when I was young. They had kids and became land-locked. My parents lost their cool factor, I guess.)--we went to my LNS. It's been MONTHS since I've been there, and it was kinda bizarre to step in. Normally, I just walk in and know where to go. But yesterday, I just wandered around. I didn't buy much. The monthly supply kit for the freebie, the one for last month, a Bent Creek Photobooth of a pig and a Chicken, and a leaflet of ornaments for my mom, along with the new At Home with Needlework. That's a really good, not to miss issue. I'm normally ambivalent about it, but it was a pleasant surprise.

They did have a trunk show of BOAF needepoint canvases. I drooled over those for a while. A lot of them were the same as their cross stitch charts, but there were some I hadn't seen. A Toile Rabbit--was that ever released as a chart? Anyone know? And a Red Riding Hood. I seriously thought about purchasing those too. Even though I have no real experience in needlepoint. But then I remembered I have a room of unfinished cross stitch, and no experience, and a tight budget, and I thought better. I can always go back and get them, right?