A Work in Progress

I've been silent on my blog for awhile, but good things have been happening during the past few months. My daughter was seated among these graduates on May 10th in Washington, D.C.  We were so proud to see her walk across the stage and to celebrate a very successful college career.  The boys were with us for the weekend, too, so it was a special family time.  Although, as I told several of my friends, who knew that when I became a mother, I would also become a travel agent.  The boys were flying in from Baton Rouge and from Austin (where the older one had been for work the week before graduation).  I ended up helping them coordinate flight times to arrive in Philadelphia at approximately the same time, and then making sure we got one to the Philadelphia airport on time for the return to Baton Rouge and the other on a train back to New York.  It all worked out and my daughter came home from DC a few days later.  Just enough time to see a couple...

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 hopin...

Last March, my husband accompanied me to the needlework show at Woodlawn and was very patient while I closely inspected the entries.  Afterward, we went to a nearby needlework store where he spied a stitched model of Ink Circles "99 Bottles" on the wall.  While I would have glanced at it and wandered away, he was quite taken with the design.  As you can see, the chart came home with us.  I put a few stitches in and went back to other projects.  Soon, there were questions about when the bottles were going to be finished, and soon after that, pointed questions about how many bottles were done.  So I am currently stitching one bottle a day with the goal of being finished by the end of March.  This is actually turning out to be quite colorful and it's fun to have a little finish every day. (And aren't you glad I didn't title this post, 99 Bottles, so you don't have that song stuck in your head?)