Being Productive!

I didn't get a lot of stitching done yesterday but I pulled out my basket of finished (but unframed) pieces and decided to start working on them again! I got Glad Tidings by BBD framed. I took several pictures and unfortunately, the only one that wasn't fuzzy had a glare! I hope to get at least one more framed over the weekend!

I hope everyone has a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by!

Is it Wednesday Already?

Those long holiday weekends really mess up my mental calendar! Ok, I know I mentioned that I had some designs in my stash calling my name but I also have a couple of unfinished pieces that are begging for some attention! I really need to work on them a bit also!

I have added a few new blogs to my sidebar list! There are so many I already enjoy and I am always finding new ones that keep me captivated so in looking on down the road, I may end up having to start a blog for my list of blogs! LOL.

I recently went to a pottery store to pass some time. I saw all kinds of wonderful things that I normally would have loved to bring home but I had so many other things on my mind that I just passed by most of it without blinking an eye. I did see a cute little sheep stack that tugged at my heart enough to put in the shopping cart. Then I saw a wonderful cement duck for my garden area. It had a burnished look to it and looked very rustic. When I got to the checkout, I noticed some black smudges on my shirt. I set the duck down and my hands were solid black! That duck had been burnished with charcoal and it was rubbing off all over me! Yuck! What a mess! I paid for the cute sheep stack and told the checkout gal that she could just keep that duck 'cause I sure wasn't bringing it home with me now!

On a good news note, my Dad came home from the hospital yesterday! Two days ahead of what the doctors had said would happen while I was visiting! Yea Dad! Once he began improving, he really took off but I will never forget that horrible scare he gave us all!

Until next time - stay safe, stay happy and stay well!

Getting Back on Track

I hope everyone had a safe and fun holiday weekend! Thank you to everyone who sent their best wishes to me and for my father! It certainly means a lot to know my friends are thinking of us!

Each day I talk with my Dad and I am just thrilled at his progress! The dr. decided he was ready for something other than broth and is letting him begin some soft solid foods! I had to poke some fun with him though and tell him that he never let me have ice cream for breakfast! LOL. I just love hearing him sound better and more like himself each day. Of course, I am getting very antsy to get back up there and see him again! All in good time, I know!

I did manage to pull out Bird in the Bower to work on a bit in the evenings. There are several designs in my stash that are calling my name and I may be giving in to temptation sooner than I would like. I also decided I needed a little bit of pampering so I treated myself to some new floss for now.

I have been rather proud of how I have managed to cut back on my stash purchases lately. I consider floss and fabrics necessities so are never really a part of my stash diets. Of course I made a few purchases last month but I didn't go crazy like I usually do and I have very good since then. I can't make any promises about how much longer this dry spell will last though because I am constantly drooling over all these new designs that keep coming out!

Hopefully I can begin to get my life back into some recognizable order now and do more of things I need and especially enjoy! I hope everyone has a great day! Thanks for stopping by!

A Very Long Week!

It was another short week of blogging and stitching. I had to make an emergency trip to see my father who is in the hospital. It was a very emotional week that left me pretty well drained once again but I am happy to be able to report that when I left to come back home, he was beginning to show signs of a slow but steady improvement. He is finally feeling up to phone calls so I have been keeping tabs while I am not there by calling him daily but I hope to get back up there sometime this week!

A few years ago, they joined the Arbor Day Foundation and got 10 very very small free trees (like twigs). Several died almost immediately but a few survived. One in particular was a Washington Hawthorn which had been potted and set on the patio. It is now a very good size compared to the original twig but no longer wanted so I have been chosen as the new owner since I love Hawthorns. I have the perfect place for it since we have a big bare space from the recent tree removal. I will be bringing it home on one of my upcoming visits.

I have no new stitching progress or starts to report right now. I hope to do even just a little bit before I make my next trip to see my Dad! After I got back home, I had tons of laundry to catch up on and I decided to use some of this nervous energy from the week's emotional ride to really clean around the house then plant a few pretties outside!

There really isn't any fun news to share right now but I did want to report that I am still around and have not fallen off the face of the planet! LOL. As promised several times previously, I will plan to have another giveaway as soon as things begin to settle down a bit around here.

I will leave you with a picture of one of the flowers I planted when I got home and I hope everyone has a safe and fun holiday weekend!

No Green Thumb

Brrr! The past couple of days have been downright chilly! The temps have stayed in mid 60's but the cool wind has made it feel more like it has been in the 50's. It is supposed to get back up into the mid to high 70's for the rest of the week now but the rain is coming back according to the weather forecast! Our yard has not been completely dried out since around January. There have been several times when the top of the ground dried out enough to give us hope that all the muddy spots would be close behind! Then the rain would come again!

These are the plants we picked up on Sunday. I got 3 butterfly bushes in pink, purple and very dark purple (almost black). I also got a purple verbena, 2 red verbenas and a pink salvia. Harold chose some tomato plants to put out and I slipped in an heirloom tomato plant I have been wanting to try. I still want to get several more pretties for the 'new' area and I'm sure I will add more as time goes on. Each year I say "no more plants" and each year I give in to the gardening bug! LOL. I certainly didn't inherit my grandma's green thumb but I sure love to get out there and give it my all!

I worked on Bird in the Bower a bit last night. I can't figure out if it's going so slow because of me or the design. Maybe it's a combination of both. I know I was going at a pretty good pace until I got to these trees! To coin a phrase from the 70's - "Keep on Truckin'!" LOL.

Thank you all for stopping by! I always enjoy your visits. Stay safe, stay happy and stay well!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

What a mess of a weekend this was! It was so physcially and emotionally drainging. I just really want to erase it all from my mind!

The Good. This weekend the tree guys finally came out to remove that giant sweet gum I had mentioned in an earlier post. They had constantly postponed with one reason or another but this weekend they called and were ready to "take her down"!

The Bad. Everything started out just fine and I had shown them all the areas to avoid and be careful of. One guy was up top cutting off some of the larger branches while my neighbor and I enjoyed the nice weather outside. Suddenly we both heard a bang and crash and looked up, scared that he had fallen. He was fine but shortly after Harold came out and told me we had no power. I went to check and one side of our house had power while the other side did not. The side without included the stove, the computer, microwave, coffeemaker, refrigerator, washer, dryer, AC unit and some lights. It seems as though that big bang had turned out to be a huge branch that hit the transformer and really damaged it! Thus the mess of a day began!

The power company came out but had to make more than one trip to access the damage and then get what they needed to repair it all. It was definitely not a minor fix. The whole transformer box had to be replaced leaving our neighbors without power during this time as well! By the time the power finally came back on around 9pm, I was exhausted, took my shower and hit the bed!

The Ugly. Luckily the tree company was insured but those guys knew that someone was going to get a big reprimand and wanted to hurry up and leave the scene of their crime thus leaving us with a bigger mess than they should have! Of course, the big power truck that back into our yard didn't help matters and only made the mess a lot bigger (but that was basically the tree company's fault as well)! You can see part of the big mess under the big power truck! It will take forever to clean up especially with all the rain and mud around here lately! Yuck!

On the good side, I have more space for planting and a lot of loose soil just waiting for some new shrubs! To help myself feel better, I bought some new plants yesterday and plan to get some more this week for that new bare area! I will leave those for a later post this week!

I am still pretty exhausted from it all and have just noticed I am using the word "thus" a whole lot in this post! Last week was a real bummer as far as stitching and blogging goes! I wasn't really in the mood for either and it showed and I certainly didn't get much done over the weekend! I guess a little break every now and then is better than pushing myself to the brink of just being sick of it all! LOL.

Until next time - stay safe, stay happy and stay well!

Slow days

I worked on Bird in the Bower again but for some reason I feel like I am stuck on the first tree! I know I am not working on it as much as usual because I have been taking advantage of the lovely weather for gardening and there is also the fact that I just haven't felt like doing much stitching lately. Hmmmm. I don't reasons like the latter!

We have started tearing down our old deck so that we can begin working on a new one. Nothing different. Pretty much the same design and the same size. The old one lasted 20 years so if this next one will last that long, I'm happy!

I will only be feeding my backyard birds to the first week in June. As many of you know I only feed the birds from Halloween to the first week of June. This allows for cold weather and nesting season. During the winter, I only use the big feeder but when nesting season arrives I use all the feeders. We always have a lot of Cardinals around our yard but there seem to be a lot more than usual this year along with an extra helping of woodpeckers!

It has been a slow week around here for blogging so until next time - have a wonderful weekend, stay safe, stay happy and stay well!

Mother Nature's Green Thumb

Good Morning to all. I am sorry I was MIA yesterday but I just needed a break. I hope that all the mothers and everyone who visited their mother had a lovely blessed Mother's Day. Sunday was the first day in 4 days that we did not have some kind of rain and the past two days we did not have severe storms with tornado watches. I used the beautiful weather on Mother's Day to walk around the yard admiring my plants and trimming alot of them up! I will have lots and lots of blueberries very soon!

It was a regular weekend with errands and grocery shopping. One nice thing happened though. As we were checking out, the woman behind the register seemed to know my name and it turned out to be our niece who we had not seen in quite a few years! What a pleasant surprise!

I worked on Bird in the Bower a little bit but not as much as I would have liked. Maybe I can do that this week since the rain seems to back with us again for awhile!

I am so grateful for each of my readers and I always look forward to your visits! Until next time - stay safe, stay happy and stay well!

The Weekend Nears

So far I have only been stitching on the word portion of Bird in the Bower. It will begin to look more interesting when I get to the pictorial part of the design.

Warm weather brings out the raccoons and possums and unless I toss out some day old rolls or baked potatoes into the very back section of our yard they will come right up to the house and go through the trashcans. We have gone outside to find 3 or 4 huddled around the area looking for scraps and our neighbor has had to chase them out of their screened porch area! I love nature but not quite this much!

I have been shopping around to get a couple of thimbles for my collection. I only buy several a year so it isn't growing very fast but I am still happy with it. I have been thinking about starting a scissor collection as well. My main problem is my boys. Even though they are in their 20's, they are still like 6 year olds in the fact that they have to touch, pick up, move and play with everything that belongs to mommy! My thimble case has a glass door which sort of says "Keep Out" so there has been no problem with those yet. But scissors on an open shelf could present too much temptation for them. Maybe I could keep them in a jar inside a cabinet with glass doors! LOL.

Stitching and Stashing

I have been rather bad about my blogging lately. Either there hasn't been much happening, too much happening and keeping me extremely busy or my hands have been giving me an awful fit! I just hate how weak my hands feel when I have to open a new jar of mayonnaise (for instance)! I usually let one of my sons do it for me while they roll their eyes in the "Good Grief, how pitiful is she" way.

I still plan to have a give a way this month! I haven't forgotten! Speaking of giveaways, Edgar is having a blogiversary giveaway so check it out!

The tree is still standing for now. The guys who were going to remove it got behind on a few jobs and then we had some serious thunder storms with lots of rain so hopefully it will be our turn soon.

I pulled out Rubie Owl's Sampler by Plum Street Samplers, got everything ready and decided to start on Bird in the Bower by PSS instead. Since I stitch on Aida (because of eye strain) and not all designs are Aida friendly, I usually do a quick scan over the pattern to make sure I don't get 3/4 finished then whammo, I run into a road block (so to speak). Everything looks fine on Rubie Owl's except for maybe the owl's eyes. I am not too worried about these though. I love the colors of Rubie Owl's so much that I just don't know if I can hold off on it much longer no matter what!

I know that linen is "the" fabric to use now but there are still plenty of us Aida stitchers left. As I said before, most designs are Aida friendly but it would be very helpful if designers would make a statement on the cover of the design to let the buyer know before getting it home, opened and even started if the design is Aida friendly or totally designed to be used with linen. Just a thought.

I have been doing some online window shopping for stitching fabrics lately. I have a large container full but I probably need more! LOL. I also have a list of designs I want to get! I never got to the fabric store last weekend for the rest of my quilting fabrics so hopefully that can be taken care of next time we are out and down that way of town.

Goals and Recap

We had another extra long weekend. I am getting spoiled! I just love having Harold home! Thursday looked very overcast and gloomy the first part of the day and I had ANOTHER doctor appointment! The skies were having a hard time making of their mind between overcast and sunny the remainder of the weekend.

It's May! Time for a re-cap of April's goals and a new list of goals for this month! This may just be the month for another give-a-way since I haven't done one in awhile so keep watching!

APRIL GOALS

1. Start new stitch - YES
2. Remain smoke free - YES
3. Eat Healthy - Well, we all have our weaknesses!
4. Exercise - YES
5. Buy frames - YES
6. Weed around backyard islands - YES
7. Plant sunflower seeds - NO
8. Follow my rotation schedule better - Not really
9. Keep birdfeeders full - YES
10. Put out several new birdhouses - NO
11. Finish two pieces - No but I did finish one
12. Buy and put out grape vines - YES
13. Place order - YES
14. Add to thread stash - YES
15. Add to Aida stash - NO
16. Ok! Ok! Start on Spring Cleaning - YES
17. Put out tomato plants - NO
18. Make appointment for our eye exams - NOT YET

Focus Pieces
1. This is the Day
2. Lauren's Voice

MAY

1. Add to thread stash
2. Add to Aida stash
3. Finish at least one piece
4. Finish off at least one completed piece
5. Keep birdfeeders full this last month
6. Frame pieces and add to wall
7. Buy frames
8. Exercise
9. Remain smoke free
10. Eat Healthy
11. Weed around islands
12. Add to fabric stash for quilt top
13. Begin cutting and piecing for quilt top
14. Plant sunflower seeds
15. Begin a new stitching design
16. Make eye appointment
17. Work on This is the Day
18. Work on Lauren's Voice
19. Place stitching order

Focus Pieces
1. Quilt top
2. This is the Day

Sorry, but no pictures today! Thank you so much for dropping by. I just love your visits! Until next time - stay safe, stay happy and stay well!