Progress!

Although I've been absent from blogland for awhile, I've been plugging away at a few of my projects.  The picture above shows my progress on Harvest Time, a counted canvas piece by Laura J. Perin.  It was offered as a three week class (ha!) last year, but became a UFO and one of my pieces for the duClay EGA yearly challenge.  I'm skipping around on it a lot because I don't enjoy working with the metallic ribbon.  I do love the grapes as they are a padded stitch and that gives them a bit more texture 

 

I'm now at 73 bottles and  counting on Ink Circles 99 Bottles.  I didn't meet my self-imposed deadline of finishing by March, but the end is in sight.  This is another one of my EGA challenge pieces.  Last year I finished four out of ten pieces for the challenge and one of those was just under the wire.  So I feel I'm a bit farther ahead this year. 

 

Piecing continues on Toes in the Sand and I'm hoping for a finish in early May.  I've been filling a lot of my time with reading as I won several books in giveaways.  Some of my favorite authors have new books out and I have a small backlog of library books to read as well.  Currently, I'm enjoying the new Laura Lippman book, After I'm Gone.

 

We traveled quite a bit during March and I felt as if I was becoming a resident of Washington, DC as I was through there four times.  I went to the needlework exhibit at Woodlawn with a friend--she's always good company and the exhibit was good.  My husband and I went to Asheville, NC to watch my son run a marathon (2nd in his age group behind his college cross country teammate!) and tour the Biltmore estate.  Gorgeous house that is four acres--now there's a lot of space to hang needlework!  On the way back, we were routed through DC and then at the end of the same week, we went back to DC to visit our daughter.  I got lots of background stitching done on a couple of needlepoint pieces while riding in the car, but I'll wait to show them until the pieces are finished.

 

I'll be heading to Ocean City, Maryland on Thursday for my sampler guild's retreat.  I spent some time in the stash over the last month or so, pulling projects and culling a few that I'm no longer interested in.  I came up with twelve possible new starts for retreat.  Twelve!!  Do you think I have too much stash?  Is that even possible?  Three of the projects made the cut and will be in my retreat bag.  Hopefully, I'll have some progress to show you next week on at least one of them. 

 

And in a final bit of news, we have a den of foxes living under our gazebo.  There are five kits who provide us with hours of entertainment.  We consulted the people at a nature center who told us that the foxes would be gone by mid-summer.  We're thinking that once we are out on the deck more and the lawn mowers start that the mother will relocate them sooner.  So we're enjoying their antics while we can, and loving that the squirrels no longer bother our bird feeders. 

 

I hope you're also enjoying spring!