Then There's This Forsythia

Gram, this one's for you. The sweet lady just couldn't say forsythia without lisping. Which was hysterical to the rest of the family. Maybe that's why she didn't have growing in her yard which was filled with all kinds of flowers.

This is just down the street a couple of blocks. It's a hedge on a corner at an intersection and as you come around and turn down that street, the yellow just smacks you in the face. I love it.

No real progress on stitching for me yesterday. I spent hours and hours outside in the cold being a good parent and attending my son's first crew regatta as a college varsity rower.

Spring is Coming!

I should run back out there right now and take another picture today and see what it looks like two days later.

I Feel the Need

The need for speed.

It's time to speed up my needle.

I thought I had more time to stitch my model. Not my mistake. The designer gave me the incorrect date.

I figure I can maybe finish with the cross stitch part this weekend and then start the backstitching and blackwork.

Meanwhile all those other ideas need to sit quietly in their corner of my brain and wait for me to finish this project.

Looking for Suggestions

'Kay. I just wanted something interesting to look at.

But my question is:

If you were going to start designing and selling your needlework designs, what name would you choose for your company?

It's okay if you want to keep the name that you secretly hope one day to actually use. Give me your second best choice.

I've been having fun playing this game and googling potential names to see what's already in use.

Yoo-Hoo! Over Here...Stop That!

It's been pretty unpleasant being in my house during the day the past few days. Someone nearby is doing some kind of construction that must require a pile driver. It slowly drives me nuts. Glad I don't live near any major bridges in need of construction or I'd have to move. I haven't stayed at home much.

Okay. Who thinks it's funny that when I wanted to learn more about color and color theory, the first thing I did was check out the library and the bookstore? My friend went to google first. I guess I'm showing my age. But wait. She's older than I. LOL Actually, the truth is I was looking for a book or books that I could add to my own personal library.

And speaking of books, I ordered both Lesley Watkins blackwork books at Amazon yesterday. I checked and they were definitely cheaper than Barnes and Noble.

And speaking of blackwork, I saw an advertisement for the new Showtime series, The Tudors. I guess I'll just have to wait for the DVD release.

At least with last weekend's free HBO/Cinemax preview we managed to catch the first 3 John Adams episodes. Which, btw, were terrific. Of course, Abigail is the absolute best. She's the one who should have been running the country.

Blatant Sexism at Work

This is not what you think. From this morning's news:

Researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found some remarkable family connections for the three presidential candidates — Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton, and Republican John McCain.

Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother's side, is also a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, can call six U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, his cousins. McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.

Genealogist Christopher Child said that while the candidates often focus on pointing out differences between them, their ancestry shows they are more alike than they think.

"It shows that lots of different people can be related, people you wouldn't necessarily expect," Child said.

Obama has a prolific presidential lineage that features Democrats and Republicans. His distant cousins include President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. Other Obama cousins include Vice President Dick Cheney, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Civil War General Robert E. Lee.

What the hell? Clinton is paired with female singers and entertainers while Obama gets credit for presidents, generals, and prime ministers!?!?!?

Neck/arm Pain

It comes. It goes. Not bad enough to send me off to a doctor's office. But this is getting to be annoying.

And I have effectively taken my current stitching schedule and twisted it and left myself not so much time for pleasure stitching. But that's alright.

And after saying that, I will say that yesterday's stitching was all about pleasure. It's a project called Crazy Pyramid. I finished the background on Monday and started in on the embellishment phase. Which is so much fun. So far I've created cattails and a bit of blueberry bush. I've started on lily pads. My husband came home while I was in the midst of this and looked at it and said "that's just wrong." He went upstairs to change, came back, looked again, and said "It looks like a quilt."
(YES!) And then started singing Anita's part from West Side Story about sticking to your own kind. Very funny.

Regardless of his opinion, I'm having fun and it will look lovely when completed.

Re: Crescent Colours - I'm amazed at the different experiences that people have with different fibers. I love stitching with them. They don't knot at all for me. But meanwhile, Weeks has done something with the dyeing process - I swear. Certain colors are now so thin and rough feeling to me. And GAST - well - I've been working with it for more than 10 years now. I'm pretty happy with the quality and selection of colors. And I do like the Carrie's Creations - she seems to have figured out a way to richer and more vibrant than anyone else. But at times there are some huge discrepancies is dye lots. Given all this, I think I'm moving back to just DMC or Anchor for designing.

Shoot

All I saw of the Red Sox game was the last pitch. I'm loving my satellite feed right now. Sigh.

In Stitching News:

Spent another day in the demo room at Woodlawn with my partner in crime. We held forth as experts in many aspects of stitching - including blackwork, punchneedle, and canvaswork. Which my friend really is an expert in. We totally enjoyed ourselves.

I am finding it funny that I can tell exactly when I've had enough of the blackwork. All the lines on the pattern just kind of blur together and I have to focus extra hard to understand what I'm supposed to do. So I put down the blackwork and picked up on older canvaswork UFO. Which I'm loving right now.

Stopped by the shop and picked up extra skeins of Crescent Colours - trying to match the ones I'm currently using for the Quaker piece. After stitching one motif, I realized this piece was going to take more fiber than I had forseen. Original was stitched over 1 with silks and I'm stitching it over 2 with overdyed cottons.

For anyone using Crescent Colours, especially, but in reality any overdyed fiber - look at your pattern carefully. Will any of it require more than one skein? Crescent, which I love to work with, seems to have a huge problem with dye lots varying by a huge amount.

%&&#&$$^^&&*!

It's opening day and the Red Sox are playing the A's in Japan this morning.

But I can't watch it.

Because apparently somewhere there is a problem.

No baseball on DirecTv.

No video feed online. No audio feed online.

All I know is that the score is tied 4-4 and I am unhappy.

Okay - Thirty and Counting

I'm 30 posts away from hitting 1,000. That means if I play every day, I'll get there before the end of April. - just a little programming note

I'm off to Woodlawn again today. Unfortunately it is not going to be another bright, sunshiney day.

I need to remember to bring my clip on light. I'd bring my daylight, but I'm not sure there's even an outlet in that room. I know. What kind of house has a room with no electrical outlets? One built in the 1700s.

And yesterday - again an accident with water. It's a good thing I drink water 99% of time and not soda or tea. This time it was my fault. I don't know how it happened, but I reached for my glass and knocked it over onto to blackwork that I had just set down. As these are jewel tone threads, I was extremely happy to find that this particular Anchor floss really is colorfast.

Oh My - Another? Book Meme!

Not my words, but I'll play along. I won't have anything on the list that we own that I haven't read. Because I use the public library. My personal library is filled with poetry, a few classics, cookbooks, needlework books, and gardening books. Oh, and books on writing.

To wit:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users [AVS note: according to someone on the internet; and I can't seem to find this one's origin either. So I don't know if these are still the top 106 unread.] As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.***********

I think it would be interesting to know which ones people also own but have not read since that is the point of this list. If I don't own it, I shouldn't be responsible for reading it, right? How can we mark that? There's nothing left! I'll use a + at the beginning of the title. But then, a lot of these books are one's we own but have been read by the dude; if he buys and reads them, am I responsible for reading them too?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenia
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice* How many times have I read this? Probably one less than Little Women...
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys - Haven't read it, but totally enjoyed hearing the author talk about it at the National Book Festival
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse*
Tess of the D’Urbervilles*
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
The Corrections
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces - arrrgggh - hated it
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Scarlet Letter
The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road* (undergraduate thesis)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Only book on this list that I absolutely couldn't stand was the Confederacy of Dunces. I don't understand why that book got such acclaim. It was unreadable to me and I've read a lot.

If It's Not Thing, It's Another

Unfortunately for me, the other thing in this case is neck pain that has moved on down to my shoulder and is resulting in arm/hand pain.

I wonder if I still have my physical therapy exercise sheet somewhere?

The last time this was a real problem I couldn't even lift my hand to my head. I'm not that bad off now, but stitching for any length of time is obviously wrong because it brings the pain back into focus.

New Magazine Coming Soon!

Antiquesamplerstitcher.com

What I found while playing in the surf of the internet:

Coming soon to a computer near you:

http://antiquesamplerstitcher.com/index.html

Another downloadable stitching magazine.

Lesley Wilkins, the author of several blackwork books is the editor.

The website is up and running and will take advance orders for a subscription, though the magazine doesn't start until June.

Call Me Irresponsible

But I had to answer the call of a certain piece yesterday.

I'm working on a model and yesterday I took a break from that and worked on my blackwork, Betsy, for a bit. But somehow working on the blackwork for any length of time, makes all the lines start to squiggle and refuse to make any sense.

So by 5 p.m. yesterday I had put in barely an hour's worth of stitching time when the lure of Martina Dey's Tsunami Charity sampler started calling my name.

I had purchased extra long scroll rods (28 inches) back in January to accommodate this piece because I'm stitching it over two, not over one.

I managed to get the fabric on the rods and stitch one whole needle's worth of floss before I had to stop to make dinner.

But that officially is now another work in progress. LOLM (LOLmanically)

Sometimes the Gov't Can Be Efficient

Examples:

DD applied for her passport on a Friday - regular, not expedited. Her brand spanking new passport arrived in the mail the following Thursday. A miracle.

Our taxes filed last weekend. There's a US Treasury deposit in our account this morning.

I just like pointing out that sometimes bureaucracies can move fast.

Again. Emphasis on the word sometimes.

And in Stitching News

I've got nothing. Absolutely nothing. Spent yesterday cleaning and doing laundry. Even washed the blankets on our bed.

Ummm?

So I spent part of yesterday designing a baseball biscornu that will never be used for the purpose I intended. I can still stitch it for myself. And will probably be doing so at the Nationals hosting of Stitch N Pitch night on June 20th.

And have decided to go a more generic route.

Like the words to Take Me Out To The Ball Game which was written in 1908. That means the copyright has expired, right?

Woodlawn Plantation Needlework Show

I think that is the official title.

Anyway, my friend and I worked the demo room yesterday and had a terrific time. Which is good. As we will be back there again next Monday.

I brought some of my smallest stitching finished pieces - 2 40 ct. silk gauze pieces, a 40 ct over one linen piece, some beaded bracelets, etc.

I started stitching Indigo Rose's Betsy.

I had a tough time finding a picture of this piece. I'm doing it in the original colors. But my fabric is slightly larger so I'm stitching it with two threads instead of one.

Blackwork is such a nifty little workout for the brain...

Photo Posted

Look at previous post to see picture of my latest creation.

I've got tons of ideas in my head now. Couldn't fall back asleep at 2 a.m. because I was thinking of designs. Oh well.

On the other hand, I told DH I was considering starting to design and needed a name for the "company."

Apparently he took that as some sort of challenge. And while I was browsing in the fabric store and he was sitting in the car listening to Charlie Mingus, he came up with all kinds of ideas.

The best one: if the stitch bitch had progeny, it would be called the Sew Ho.

Apologies. LOL

Wild Irish Rhodes

That's the name of the piece I'm currently stitching. Made up the design out of my own head.

Has four types of Rhodes stitches. And four fibers.

I decided I needed to stitch the background - just tent stitch because I used 24 ct white Congress cloth. I'm about halfway finished with that.

Then I'll have to decide how to turn it into a pin. I've got several options.

And if anyone out there is planning on going to the Woodlawn Needlework exhibit on Monday, I'll be there in the demo room on the second floor. Stop in and say hi!

Today

I got bitten by the designing bug.

It's cute. And nearly finished.

And I'm planning on wearing it on Monday.

Photo to follow.

I Understand, But Still

Red Sox released backup catcher, Doug Mirabelli. It's a sad day. I hope Kevin Cash is better at catching the knuckleball than Josh Bard was.

And speaking of baseball - it's that time of year. Stitch n Pitch. For a list of teams participating this year visit the website.

I'll be at the Washington Nationals game at the new stadium on June 20. I'll be rooting against the Texas Rangers.

Headache

Woke up with it at 4:00 a.m. Still got it. Not happy.

Can't even remember the things I was supposed to do today.

Tried IB and meditation. Maybe now I should go eat something.

argh.

Meme?

What is this "bring it" you speak of?

Not to worry. I've got a great library system here. I've noted these 14 books I seem to have missed and will methodically work my way through them. As soon as Henry VIII and I finish our journey.

Stitching

Okay. I made a mistake on my Gingko leaves project. I didn't find it until two sides met up. Which means there is no way in bloody hell I'm going to frog five hours of stitching. I have checked my parameters and will adjust. But even with this piece being used as the model, I don't think anyone is ever going to be able to tell from the photo and the chart that there is a slight discrepancy. I am frankly surprised that this is the only error I've made so far.

What I Checked Out at the Library

Regular readers probably think I'm going to say those fourteen books that I haven't read.

But no.

Three books on color and color theory.

I'm trying to find out what it is that makes me like or dislike a pattern.

I'm starting with color because that's what attracts me first. Then I go on to actual content and difficulty or lack thereof.

Of course most of these books are aimed at painters. Then there are the ones aimed at designers. Which may be more where I should be looking.

I already know that I love samplers. That parts easy. But after not winning even an honorable mention ribbon at Woodlawn I went through all my sampler patterns to see if there was something that met my criteria for difficulty that also attracted me and made me want to stitch it. I didn't find much. Which is incredible.

Frankly, looking at my two biggest samplers that I have finished and framed, (this is going to sound absolutely stupid) I would not have stitched either one under my current criteria. With the Newburyport sampler it's the colors. Way too pastel for my tastes. But I do love to look at it. See, this has me feeling rather schizophrenic about my stitching.

I do think figuring out why I like something may set me on the path to designing what I like. For myself. Maybe for others.

Next Meme Catch Up

Look at the list of (100) books below. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in. (Movies don’t count.)



1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

I guess that means I should go check out 14 of the 15 I haven't read. I'm not touching Ulysses.

Playing Catch Up with the Memes

This time, I know where the list originated: Poppy Buxom. (And I got it from the Stitch Bitch)

I'm Amazed Nobody Ever Made Me Read

The Iliad
The Odyssey
Doesn't mean I haven't read them...

I've Never Been Interested in Reading

Um. I confess. I'll read anything. Cereal boxes and warnings on prescription medication included.

I Never Managed to Finish

War and Peace

That's it. Confesses another English major with a tremendous love of reading...

Books I Finished and Liked Quite a Bit, Although Going Into It, I Felt Extremely Wary

Finnegan's Wake
Moby Dick

Wouldn't have read if it wasn't for this UU minister who did a sermon based on Moby Dick every year.


Books for which the quip "Kill me. Now." was invented

This is easy. Island of the Blue Dolphin. Only book I have ever maliciously destroyed.
And all the books my male misogynist sophomore teacher made us read so now I hate:
The Ox-Bow Incident and All Quiet on the Western Front and I've blocked out the remainder of them

I’ll add: Books they made me read so often I hated both the books and them

Great Expectations
There must be more in this category that I'm not remembering
I know they tried to kill the Great Gatsby for me, but I still enjoy it having reread parts while kid had to read it in school

Many Happy Returns

What was most important the day my daughter turned 21?

Nope. Not the flowers.

Definitely not the plate with the peas behind the flowers.

Not even the bottle of scotch.

Try the box of tissues and the yellow pad of paper. Her nose was running and she was writing instead of talking.

She's better now. But I bet she'd like a do-over.

Seems like she just got here, but she's leaving tomorrow morning.

We're going to try to go see The Other Boelyn Girl today.

We watched No Reservations with Ms. Zeta-Jones the other night. Why did they attempt to market this movie as a comedy. It was not funny.

Walter Reed

Picked DH up at the airport, had lunch, and went to Walter Reed to visit our friend. He's extremely fortunate to be alive. His companion has a severe brain injury and is in a coma.

The good news is that they will medivac him to the hospital at West Point next week - which is where he lives and he'll continue his recovery there. I can personally vouch for the orthopedists and physical therapists at West Point.

DD said visiting was a humbling experience. And she's right.

Fox Forest

Here's DD's 21st birthday present that I stitched for her. She's got a thing about foxes.

The problem is when I say foxes, my DH goes right into the Steve Martin/Dan Akroyd routine...sigh.

Fox Forest - The Workbasket.

Hug Your Family

Yesterday right before DH got on a plane bound for Denver, we found out that a good friend of ours had been injured by an IED and was now at Walter Reed Hospital.

What was he doing in Iraq? His tour should have been over, but he extended. He was overseeing the rebuilding of the Childrens' Hospital in Basra.

We have heard that he's no longer critical, but serious.

Visiting Walter Reed has now jumped to the top of our list of things to do.

3/3

Yesterday was 3/3. That's a date we don't get to forget in our family as it is DD's birthday. And yesterday she turned 21!

Which means I can confess that one of her presents was this design by the Workbasket - Fox Forest. I didn't get a good photo yet. Today I will try again. I finished it by mounting it on foam care, wrapping the edge in a ribbon and putting it in a shadow box.

The poor girl is sick. Sore throat, laryngitis. But to at least get her out of the house on her birthday, we went to the bookstore and grocery store so she could purchase her first bottle of champagne.

While at the bookstore I got to peruse this - Stitch Graffiti -
by the Monsterbubbles designer. Was interesting. I didn't realize it was hers until this morning. I didn't buy it. There was an intriguing idea of stitching bracelets on nylon screening.

Instead I bought the current issue of Antiques magazine which has a sampler article on samplers from around Bedford, MA.

Woodlawn on Saturday

We stopped by on Saturday so I could drop off some EGA rack cards for our chapter. Unfortunately I did not get a ribbon. Not even an honorable mention. I am disappointed, but came home vowing to find a project that is worthy.

Lots and lots of beautiful things. They didn't have the show booklet finished, so I don't have a list. Made it difficult to figure out exactly who won in which categories. I am hopeful that they will have one the next time I'm there.

I wish the judges provided critiques. I would love to know if it was just the couching on the chenille thread that brought me down.

I'm not obsessed. Don't worry.

Not me.

But I have gone through my entire stash of projects, patterns, and magazines. I found a candidate or two. But I think it's easiest to win with an original design. Oh woe.

Was great that there were two versions of Nova. One was matted in blue and one in red. It was amazing how different that made them look.

Am truly disappointed that my friend, E.B., didn't get a ribbon for her crewel piece by Elsa Williams. She did this at age 78 and it's fantastic.