A Work in Progress

Postcard for Paradise (Blue Ribbon Designs) is done! When I started this a year and a half ago, I thought it would be so easy to do three of the squares a day and knock this out in a month. Wrong! But it was a fun stitch--until I did the border all the way to the bottom right corner and realized it wouldn't meet. That's when I went back and found out I was supposed to be doing that herringbone stitch over three threads and not four. I wondered why I wasn't getting good coverage. . . Since I had done some of the top and some of the left side correctly, I decided to frog. It was a pain, but I like the result so much better. So this goes in my to-be-framed pile. I have a great framer, but I haven't given her much business this year. It seems I can't get myself motivated to prepare things to take in (you know, clipping threads on the back, doing a final check to be sure every stitch is crossed). I think I'll make it a New Year's resolution to get c...

Our empty nest is filling up once again as our three children arrive home for the Thanksgiving holiday. The first to arrive was our middle son whose Tuesday afternoon biology lab was cancelled, allowing him to snag a ride home with a fellow student. Our middle child usually comes home with a large bag of laundry and a shaggy mop of dark hair (just like my husband used to have before he went white. Thank goodness all my kids inherited his thick hair, and not the fine, thin, superstraight locks that are bane of my existence. But I digress.) Since he is such a creature of habit, he didn't disappoint on either the laundry or the shaggy front, but he has added a full beard to the mix. This may take some getting used to. It does make him look more mature, but please don't tell him I said that. Our daughter arrived from DC on Amtrak about 15 minutes later than scheduled. Which was a good thing as I had crawled east on the Schuykill Expressway, (also known as the "Sure...

Last weekend, I participated in a local Shop Hop for the first time. It was an event that I was greatly anticipating and my goal was to explore some new shops and do a bit of stash enhancement. I started out from work around 4:00 and pointed the car east to the first shop. It was one I had been to several times before and didn't expect to be wowed by the merchandise so I wasn't disappointed when I didn't find much there. I was a little discouraged at Shops 2 and 3 when I didn't see any "must have" fabrics in them either. I began to doubt my wisdom in embarking on the adventure especially since I was driving around at night in unfamiliar territory and had already gotten lost between both Shops 1 and 2 and Shops 2 and 3. But Shop 4 was a real gem since that's where I found these yummy Civil War fabrics that I'll use to make the blocks I collected at each establishment. I arrived at Shop 5, my LQS, about 10 minutes before closing. After a quick stop to p...

or maybe you just know you're crazy when go on a shop hop on Saturday morning and choose a pattern for a quilt, gather the fat quarters and fabric for border and background at one shop, purchase the backing at another, begin cutting immediately after completing another quilt and work on it until 11:00, get up at 6:30 and sew all day in your pajamas until 20 minutes before it's time to take said quilt to the LQS where you have an appointment with the longarm quilter so the quilt can be done in time to cover your oldest son on Christmas morning. I didn't stop to eat (and if you knew me in real life, you'd realize how obsessed I must have been) and only took time to brush my teeth, get dressed, comb my hair and put on a little mascara before heading to the shop. On the way there, I realized I had forgotten my camera so I don't even have a picture to show you until the quilt comes back to me. By the way, the other quilt I finished yesterday was for my daughter's Chr...

My readers of a certain age will remember the commercial that portrayed the long wait for (supposedly) rich, thick ketchup while the Carly Simon song "Anticipation" played. Well, that's sort of how I've felt this week. I'm anticipating my first shop hop beginning tomorrow afternoon. This is something I've wanted to do since I began quilting a few years ago but it wasn't possible while our daughter was still a high school student. My husband is going away for a conference this weekend and my time will truly be my own for the next few days. I'm planning my route, printing maps, looking at patterns, making lists of things to look for and just generally looking forward to the whole experience. My lesson plans are done for next week so I'll be able to walk out the door at 3:45 and be on my way to the first shop. Oh, the anticipation!

As I've written several times before, my work life has been pretty crazy this fall. When I've had time to stitch, I've been drawn to projects are made up of lots of small squares, like Postcard from Paradise and Rainforest Crunch, a needlepoint design I found while stalk-stitching Coni on her Spinster Stitcher blog. There's something so satisfying about completing each one of those little squares. Who knows, if this work situation continues, Nova * may come off the WIP pile and get finished. *(No affliation with this shop, just a good picture of the design.)

Aaah. . . That deep sigh you hear is my house thanking me for staying home and cleaning this weeked. Honestly, with all the traveling we did in October, things were getting a mite grimy around here. I spent nearly all of yesterday at home scrubbing, dusting and vacumming and now we can pass the health inspection. I was the lector at the early church service this morning and had to go back to help count the money after the late service (I find it highly amusing that I'm tapped to do anything remotely connected with math, but the chairman of the finance committee begged me). In between, I attacked the mountain of ironing that was on the back of the chair next to my sewing machine. Of course, I had an ulterior motive for doing so since it was geting difficult to actually sit on the chair to sew. Then my afternoon was free to work on the quilt I'm planning to give my daughter for Christmas. Made good progress on it and should have a finished top by the end of the week. I ...

A few years ago, my local needlepoint shop offered a "club" for a series of Faberge eggs. One a month for the entire year. Thought these would be a great decoration for the fireplace mantle in the living room. I made a start on January's and that's as far as I got. Until a group of us on a bulletin board I visit decided to work on a UFO every Thursday night. My job issues are starting to ease up and I can finally sit down to sew at night a few times a week. Plus Big Bang Theory is on at 8 and since it's one of the very few shows I watch on a regular basis, I try not to miss it. (It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm fascinated that someone can portray a person with Aspergers/high functioning autism so well. And it is a pretty funny show, too, although I'm sure there are physics jokes that I just don't get.) But to remain on topic, I decided to work on this piece since it's small. It's way outside my comfort zone with the stit...

It's been a while since my last post. My husband and I have been on the move the past few weekends, spending time with each of our children. I went out to Gettysburg, PA, in the middle of October to watch our second son run in a cross country meet. The course is actually laid out on part of the land you see in the picture here. This the third time I've made the trip to this particular meet and it's become a favorite--an easy drive, lovely fall foliage and a course where I can see a lot of the race. This year, the race fell on the Saturday of my son's fall break, so I brought him home with me. During the break, he had surgery to remove the pin that was inserted when he broke a bone in his hand last summer. The surgery was delayed a bit when he lost consciousness as the IV was inserted. His heart rate is really low due to running and also to a medication he takes. The plan had been for my husband to drive him back to school in the early afernoon, but we ended up taking h...