RAK'ed and Reading

I was RAK'ed.....by lovely Michele of Just Another Stitching Blog! And her partner in crime was Monique who designed this lovely stitch holder and sent it along to me. How awesome to get a surprise gift in the mail like this! It certainly was a surprise and such a warm feeling to think that someone thought of me, to send me such a sweet gift. Thank you so much, Michele, you really made my day for me :-D

For stitching news, Love is back on the scene. I frogged what seemed to be a huge section and I'm back on track. The wedding is 3 months away (September 27th) so I'm in good time for getting this finished and framed for display at the reception. Three months away....where has the time gone?

And I'm been in a reading craze recently. I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, a really great story about the relationship between 2 women in Afghanistan. I hate to say, its not as good as The Kite Runner, but still very enjoyable.
And after that it was on to The Birth House by Ami McKay, a wonderful story about a young midwife in Nova Scotia, set during World War I. I love how this dates how women lived at the time, in a rural area, and what men's attitudes towards women were like at the time. It was a really great read, I highly recommend it!

I've just started a new book called Sister of My Heart, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. This one was recommended by Margaret, so I ordered it at the library and it came in just as I was finishing The Birth House. Keep those book recommendations coming...I can't seem to get enough these days!

The Sisterhood draw is coming close and I have a nice long list of names for the next round! Sorry no dress to see yet.....

Just a peek now

....at the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pattern. I don't want to divulge my dress colour just yet!


Its coming along nicely and I should be finished with the pattern next week. Make sure you get your name in for the next drawing of this fabulous design. I'm collecting names and already have quite a few.

Last night I finished up Mindi's piece for the Quaker Friendship Round Robin. This is a great pattern for a round robin. The sections are not overly big and get finished fairly quickly. And I love, love, love Mindi's fabric and floss choices. They look great together. The fabric is Silkweaver Days Gone by 36 ct and the floss is by Vicki Clayton, Raisin Wine is the main colour and the accent is Old Maid of the Sail. Hmmm, the silk floss really likes to knot very easily though, has anyone else found that with VC silk?
The kids are officially finished school and Nick is to start a construction job this morning...but he's not out of bed yet. We'll see how long this lasts!

Have a great day!

The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pattern

Lucky me, I am the next one to receive this wonderful chart, My Needle and My Floss, They Comfort Me or is it has now become known The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pattern!

Harmien started the Sisterhood when she offered up her pattern to someone who wanted to stitch it. I'm not sure where it went after that but its been making the rounds and travelling the world of stitchers.

Anna drew my name after she finished stitching her lovely lady and it just arrived on my doorstep in the mail. Considering how far this pattern has now travelled....from The Netherlands, France, Malayasia, United States (a couple of times), and Australia, it has now safely arrived here in Canada and with such careful packaging, its in amazingly great shape.

I can't wait to get started stitching and I'm a little undecided about the dress colour. I think I'll have to pull my GAST threads and see which ones jumps out.

And I couldn't resist taking a scan of the some of the signatures - everyone who has stitched it thus far has signed and dated it. How cool!!!
But until I can get started, I have Mindi's piece for the Quaker Friendship RR to work on. I've made a nice little start. I love her fabric, its perfect for an antique style sampler and she chose lovely variegated silks in reds/browns. Donna has already stitched her section in the lower right hand corner and I have started the motifs in the upper right. Pretty huh!

I hope to have The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pattern stitched and finished in the next couple of weeks. Let me know if you want your name put in the draw for the pattern when she is ready to fly to new places!

L is for Lion

Its been quite a while so this poor little WIP was calling out to me ~ CHS Alphabet. I spent the past few evenings on it and finished up L is for Lion, and then started outlining some more of the blocks. I think I was hoping to pick this up and get one letter accomplished each week...and that was months ago!

We've had some wild weather this weekend, with several thunderstorms since Friday. I was online early Friday evening when one huge bolt of lightning hit, and the computer flared at me and our house alarm went off! Amazingly enough we didn't lose power. But our network router went as did the network cards in my computers and in Kristy's. Lucky for us, hubby is a computer pro. But we'll have to get the alarm people in to fix up the problem with that, as its not functioning at all (psst, don't tell anyone!)
On Saturday, there was a family bridal shower for Carrie and J-F at my sister's home. It was a gorgeous day and held outside. Carrie got an amazing amount of great gifts, lucky girl, but she is hoping to pack them away until they buy their first home.

The kids are in their final week of school......oh no!

Thanks for dropping by!

A fresh start and needing a fresh start

Thank you for all your comments on my LHN finish! I really love working on these sweet designs.I needed to pick something else up to do at the cottage over the weekend...where there is no magnifier...and I decided on Blackbird Designs Sunflower House. I have loved this one for along time but since it was 'retired', I was so thrilled to find it for sale by another stitcher. The pattern came with this gorgeous blue linen. I'm not sure if its the called for fabric which is called Friendship Blue, but it looks wonderful with the floss colours.
I didn't get too much done however, as a book grabbed all my attention. Its not too often that I start a book that I just can't put down. This one was called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I only started reading it on Thursday night, and finished it Sunday morning. What an amazing story! Luckily I have another one book by the same author ~ A Thousand Splendid Suns ~ waiting for me at home to start.

And on to Love with a Capital L~
I really think I need to put this away for a little while. I have made so many little mistakes with this piece recently, including the large motif on the lower left, well not such a little mistake maybe since the entire thing is about 4 rows too high. And of course I didn't discover this until it was pretty much finished. Counting threads on 40 ct fabric really seems to unravel me, uh no pun intended there. So I haven't decided yet if its time to frog, I started working on the next row of flowers and thought I would better be able to tell if I could fit the wording in without too much trouble, until another mistake became apparent last night. Yup, I definitely think its time to work on something else for a while and look at Love again with fresh eyes.

Thanks for visiting!

An LHN finish

I finished up this little Watermelon square the other night, just a bit of a break from the 40 ct fabrics. These work up so quickly and are so fun to do. The backing fabric and ribbon came with the little kit that I had ordered from Mary Kathryn (Ehandcrafts). I think I"ll use the fabric to make borders for the square and then make it into a little pillow ornament.

And has everyone seen this new design from Little House Needleworks? Its the first in the Little Women series. I couldn't resist and put my name in for an automatic shipment for these.....

Our weather forecast is so crazy - the temperature is going up to 30 degrees C today, with a humidex of 42 C. Good thing we are headed to the cottage first thing tomorrow morning. We would be going tonight but Nick is headed to the Brooklin Fair with his girlfriend. May be I can drag hubby there too :-D

Have a great weekend!

A quilt finish

Thank you for the anniversary good wishes! I really love reading comments and I am so appreciate of the time each person takes out of their busy lives to leave a few words behind for me ~ Thank you!!!

Hubby and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the David Duncan House in Toronto, actually one of his favourite places to go. Of course he gets there far more often than I do, since its so close to his office, which means a favourite spot for business lunches. We had hoped to go to the new Indiana Jones movie, but the time we wanted was sold out and to have to wait for the later show, meant I probably would have fallen asleep and we wouldn't be home in time to pick Kristy up from work.
Hopefully we can get in to see it soon!

On Saturday I worked away and finally finished the machine quilting on 1 my Lucky Stars quilt, although I think the name should be Long Stars quilt. This one has been 5 years in the making. I have no excuse why, I absolutely love the blue/purple batiks that I used in this, but it just seemed to fall to the bottom of the pile of quilting that I kept adding on. That's a terrible fault of mine that I keep seeing new projects that I want to do and start, and forget about finishing off the numerous starts that I have made. But I do get around to them eventually :-D]

Happy Monday!

I finished up Karen's RR and its ready to get into the mail. I decided to add a turkey and pumpkins to the right hand side and another tree. Her theme is country so I didn't want to get too many farm critters in there. But since I love Autumn, I couldn't resist adding a touch of fall-ish colour to this one. I hope Karen likes it. Her neighbourhood is really taking shape with 6 houses now on it!


Tomorrow is hubby and my 28th wedding anniversary. We are planning to celebrate with dinner in Toronto and a movie. Yup, that's about our speed these days. And we each bought ourselves our own anniversary gifts - he got a new 'walking' lawnmower and I bought a new sewing machine. So it looks like we'll both be studying manuals to figure out how to put these things together and make them work.

Have a great weekend!

Love Progress!

Some goodies bought at yard sales this weekend....2 Omni grid rulers, both looking brand new, and for only 25 cents each! That's a whale of a bargain! And some more wooden spools to add to my collection.
I have managed to get some good stitching time on the Love Sampler the past few days - enough so that even I can see some progress. I'm about halfway through the third set of pages, after that only one more set....I think I might get this done in time for the September wedding!
Meanwhile machine quilting has come to a dead stop. My wonderful little Janome machine has never honestly done well with free motion quilting but now its putting up such a fuss, that I'm ready to throw in the towel. I haved tried numerous different types of needles, but still the thread keeps breaking or the needle skips several stitches, not to mention the tension on the back is awful. No amount of playing with different settings seems to make any difference. So my Lucky Stars quilt sits with half the stars stippled and the other half barren. I've been checking the want ads thinking to buy an older used machine for simple machine quilting.
And I think I think some lessons in photography..... :-(

A cold holiday weekend

It was a holiday weekend for us with Victoria Day yesterday and as usual, our first weekend at the cottage....and as usual it was cold cold cold.....and rainy! It doesn't make for the most fun, although we did get in a lovely walk through the woods on Sunday morning. And hubby's Aunt's birthday party was a great time. There must have been 80 people who attended. It was wonderful to catch up with people we hadn't seen for quite a while.

It seems most of my stitching projects are on 40 ct linens and I can't stitch on these any more without a magnifier, so I took along LHN's Watermelon and got a nice start on that. Poor little blackbird - he is beakless at the moment!

Yesterday afternoon I got back to working on my latest RR, this one is Karen's and she requested a country feel for her neighbourhood. I decided to use The Prairie Schooler's A Farmer's Almanac. Its may be a little more woodsy looking but I thought this fit for me.
I'm in the process of stitching in some hens and chicks at the bottom before I fill in the grassy bits, but I'm still undecided what to do with the right hand side. Some more trees maybe?

Thanks for stopping by!

Some updates

Finally....a chance to update my blog! I feel like I have been in a whirlwind since we got back from Charlotte last week. Carrie and I had a wonderful time visiting with Kelly and Chris. We did a lot of shopping, lots of eating, and even had a chance to visit Carrie's bridesmaid Erin who lives about an hour from Kelly. I managed to find shoes for the wedding and a handbag, as well as some gorgeous new sandals for summer, and some clothes to add to my disgraceful wardrobe.

Since I've been home, I put together a McKenna Ryan wallhanging. Its a present for hubby's dear aunt who is turning 75 this weekend. She is an avid gardener and although I tend to forget the names of most flowers, the purple coneflower I do remember being plentiful in her garden so I thought this wallhanging was perfect for her. All that's left to do is handsew the rest of the binding on and its finished.

And I finished up Donna's round robin for the Quaker Friendship Round Robin. Just in time too I think because the next mailing date is fast approaching.
Sorry for the darkish picture! Donna chose NPI silk in a gorgeous deep green for her piece and it looks amazing in RL.

And a finish for me - A Stitcher's Prayer by Little House Needleworks. I had to admit that I was glad to get this one done, I made so many mistakes and frogged so many sections, even using the completely wrong colour floss in the house. Why do designers use symbols that are so similar? Or is it just my eyesight that needs some help? So when I realized, half way through, that there was a huge error in counting in the bottom line of design, I left it as is....kind of fits with the prayer that way I think.

Thanks for stopping by!

I'm leaving!

And we're off! Tomorrow, that is, to Charlotte, North Carolina to visit my daughter Kelly for a few days. I was surprised with an early Mother's Day gift from Carrie with 2 airplane tickets, one for each of us. I'm so excited to be going away and visiting with Kelly and Chris. And of course , we'll have to manage to get in a little shopping here and there :-D

I have to add in a stitching update, although I still don't feel like I'm making much progress on anything. I guess that's what happens when you in the middle of a honking big project like this one. Sorry no photos, its a dark gloomy day and I have several lights on in the house even though its morning.

Here is Love with a Capital L, 7 weeks after starting.
Its coming though and I have to remind myself I'm almost at the halfway point! And I am enjoying stitching this, I love not changing floss colours over and over again.

Have a great weekend! I'll be back at the end of next week.

Spring House Exchange

I received a package from Joan with my Spring House exchange. And what a great package it was, filled with goodies, several of which she made. For the spring house theme, Joan stitched a design from Cottage Country Needleworks called Rose Cottage and made this into a lovely pinkeep. Her finishing skills are awesome!

She also made the lovely gift card, a project bag, a wee chicken pin cushion, and thread drop floss holders. And if that wasn't all enough, Joan included a design from LHN called 'ABC 123', fabric, DMC floss, fat 1/4 of finishing fabric, pins, and a tin of York mints. Wow - a truly incredible package! I feel thoroughly spoiled by Joan!!!
Thanks for stopping by!

Family Time

Sorry, no stitching pics to show. It was family time the past few days. My daughter Kelly surprised me by flying into Toronto for a few days. We had a wonderful time, lots of shopping and the weather graced us with gorgeous spring days...actually even a little too hot!

Here are some pictures from Sunday when we enjoyed a wonderful long walk along Lake Ontario. Below are Nick and J-F with Kelsey.

And here is Kelly, me and Nick together. Hubby had gone to the cottage for the morning to start the huge amount of ground work that needs to be done every year. Carrie was off to visit her bridesmaid, who also was in for the weekend from North Carolina. And Kristy was out of town with friends for the weekend.
And Miss Diva, reclining in the car after her long walk.

The time went by too quickly and Kelly is already back home in North Carolina this morning. I'm back to work and today I start at Curves, which as you can see in my picture above, is much much needed! Why doesn't stitching burn more calories?

A prize package

Look at the amazing haul I received from Monique (Inside Number Twenty). She held a blog contest for her 3rd anniversary of My Mark Designs, and I was one of the lucky winners. I opened up a wonderful package from her yesterday, filled with goodies~ 3 of her designs, 2 pieces of linen, finishing forms, and at the back is a cute crafting tote, with lots of zippered compartment to hold all our treasures. Wow ~ Monique, thank you so much for your generosity!

I really do need some lessons in picture taking - this one is so dark :-(

I finished off my second bookmark ~ it really does look so much better with the B/S'ing .... and its right side up this time!

So last night I pulled out my Love Sampler and I was excited to get back to work on it. I am really enjoying working on this. There is something about pulling out a length of silk and working it through to the end. Endless colour changes can be for the birds sometimes!

And I better not forget to add the 'e' to 'Rud'! I left the centre of the motif on the right open (there is a matching one on the left side of the piece that I didn't scan) because the designer mentions you can add the couple's initials in this spot and I'm not sure if Carrie and JF want theirs to be stitched in.

Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by!

One down, one to go

I found some stitching time on Saturday night and finished up my first bookmark. Yesterday I started the second one.....which I just realized as I uploaded the photo, appears to be upside down. Rather an indication of how my morning is going.....

These designs really look awful until the backstitching goes in and then it seems to spring to life! Funny how that works and yet other designs don't need any backstitching at all. I'm kind of thinking I prefer designs that don't require backstitching, its has to be one of my least favourite things about stitching. That and realizing that I am missing just that one particular DMC colour that I need. How is it that I have 3 or 4 bobbins of 501, but none of 502?

Ah yes, Monday morning blues....

Thanks for stopping by!

TGIF

Do you ever have those weeks where you are insanely busy but don't feel like you are getting anything accomplished? It must be spring fever!

I finished up stitching for the SBEBB House & Garden exchange, hopefully this weekend I can get it finished-finished and mailed off. And I received 2 RR pieces in the mail this week, one for the Hello Neighbour RR and Donna's piece for the Quaker Friendship RR.

Meanwhile I made a start on the first of 2 bookmarks that I am making for the teachers in the study group I have been attending since last September. These are from the book Tokens of Affection and there is a series of monthly bookmarks. I decided to rechart the names in place of the month. Here is a scan of my first one....its a design that isn't going to look like much until all the backstitching is in place. Yikes, the dreaded backstitching!
Have a great weekend!