A Work in Progress

The last few months have been especially busy.  I posted about our brief trip in the middle of October to see our daughter in western Massachusetts right after the retreat in Ocean City.  Two weeks after the trip to the Berkshires, my husband and I went to Hawaii for twelve days.  We spent three and a half days on Oahu where the highlights were seeing Pearl Harbor, Shangrila (Doris Duke's house) and spending an evening with our daughter's college roommate and her family.  The rest of the trip was spent on the big island, Hawaii, which was fascinating.  We learned that it has eleven microclimates and were surprised to see cacti as well as pastures full of cows.  There was active lava flow when we were there, but it was at least 100 miles away from us.  We both enjoyed seeing Volcano National Park as well as touring a coffee plantation.  It felt as if we had barely recovered from the long flights when we took off again for Baton Rouge to see our y...

Thanks to the Delaware Valley Historical Sampler Guild's retreat in Ocean City, Maryland at the end of April, I have lots of progress to show you this month.  The piece above is Carriage House Samplings  Alphabet.  I spent quite of bit of the retreat stitching those black boxes, and there was no frogging involved!  I have the separate patterns for each alphabet letter and most of them call for using Sampler Threads Bittersweet for the fill-in at the bottom of the block.  I was never crazy about the color (probably one of the reasons this piece has been in the WIP pile for so long) and while I was at the retreat, I auditioned a couple of different colors.  Sampler Threads Antique Rose won and I'm happy with the choice.  I also started this piece at the retreat.  I threw this in my bag at the last minute just in case I needed something with a large count when my eyes got tired.  I started it on Sunday morning before we left and eventually...