2005-Stitching Year in Review

Shortest Day of the Year

So why does it seem like the longest?

The kids have been out of school less than two days and the whining and "I'm boreds" have already started. This does not paint a pretty picture for the rest of Christmas break.

We're going to bake cookies tomorrow. Maybe even attempt a gingerbread house. That will kill, oh say, 5 minutes and then I'll be doing it all by myself. The 10 yr old gets bored with the whole baking thing. He prefers the eating thing.

The 10 yr old also informed me that instead of turkey for Christmas dinner he wants Hawaiian Chicken on the grill. Since we live in the Sunshine State grilling outside in December isn't a horrible thing. Don't get me wrong it's a bit nippy around here but nothing compared to what's north of us. So maybe we'll have a late Turkey dinner and Hawaiian chicken for lunch. Then again DS#1 says he wants a Ham for Christmas dinner. I see that maybe for Christmas Eve instead. Only because I haven't even bought a turkey yet so it's no where near thawed as it's still in my grocer's freezer, I'll need the extra day to thaw the stupid turkey.

Today I called my mother and told her that I'd drive the 8-10 hours to Tennessee tomorrow and bring her down here on Friday so she can spend Christmas with us. She turned me down. My brother is going with his family to see my SIL's family in Mexico so my mom will be alone. I think Christmas with us scares my mom. She said something about bad weather and not being able to get back home, but I think we are too loud, too rowdy and basically just too wild for her. It's a loud house, ok. We like it that way. We are so loud that we are constantly asking neighbors if they hear us and begging them to tell us if they do. We tend to crank up the music, the tv, so that causes us to have to talk very loudly to each other because we can never find the remote to turn the tv down. I meant it when I told her I'd drive up there and get her and bring her back. I've got cabin fever at the moment with everyone home, but she turned me down and the oldest son and the husband were very relieved. I guess I should be insulted because I'm 99% sure that if it were my brother offering to bring her to his home however many miles away she'd jump at the chance but it's ok. I did the right thing and if she's alone it's her own fault.

In the area of stitching I've done absolutely no stitching in the last week. Time to get back in the habit. I miss it, but have just been too overwhelmed to drag something out to work on. Too many other things to do. Winter basketball has started for DS#2, the kids had exams all last week, the house looks like Christmas on top of a landfill, my grandmother is in the hospital in Tennessee and no one is really sure at this point what to do with her. She keeps falling for no apparent reason. It's to the point where she can't live alone any more. This is one of the times I hate being 8 hours+ from home. My mother is going to be alone for the holidays and my dad's wife is sick again which means he's stressing big time having a wife and a mother that aren't doing well.

BAH HUMBUG!

Solstice: The View From Florida

Easily Amused

A friend sent me this link:

Holiday Snowglobe

And I find myself wasting quite a bit of time......

Another nice, ok not really nice, but fun:

SCARED OF SANTA GALLERY: Tis the season to be scared witless

Countdown YIKES!

Well it appears that Christmas is truly right around the corner. YIKES! I'm not ready. Honestly I'm never ready. I'm closer than normal at this time but I could use an extra week or two.

A shout out to Carol of the comments: Yes we still have the surburban. Can't seem to part with the thing. The DH is planning to paint it himself, we may go really artsy with it. We were thinking clouds might be a nice alternative to the rust on the roof. We do love it. Wish we had some extra money to really invest in it. DH's buds love it when he drives it for the carpool. They can all stretch out, have room for all their stuff. Of course with gas prices what they are these days he can only afford to drive it once or twice a week. We're going to get some new seat covers after the holidays since our upholstry has seen better days.

To Kiwi Jo, did you really have to mention Peppermint Mocha coffeemate on your blog? I had no idea it existed. I'm an Organic Valley Half & Half girl. Since reading about this on your blog I've been on a tricounty search for that tasty concoction and found one, ONE, at a local grocery. It's so good. Now when I find it I plan to hoard it up to get me through the first of the year. I wish Coffemate would add this to their line of regular flavors.

We had a busy weekend, took the kids to see King Kong. What a great movie!

Yesterday I started pulling out some thisclose to finished cross stitch projects to try and figure out why they are thisclose to finished and have been left to linger in Rubbermaid buckets. I found my Dimple's Designs Garner Dragonfly, Wee Beasties 5
Three wings are stitched and a good part of the body. So why I wondered to myself did I not finish this? Well it appears that I've lost a page of the chart. The page of the chart with the unfinished wing. ARRGGHHHH! I have no clue where it could be. I dumped out the bucket I had it stored in and found the chart with that page missing. I'm going to resume my search later today but I can't imagine why the chart wasn't all together in the same spot, I have the partially stitched design, the bag of floss, the chart, makes no sense why it wouldn't all be together. I'm scatterbrained and can be careless but I'm usually very good where my stitching stuff is concerned.

Then I ran across a kit I had started several years ago. It's a special kit by BrightNeedle that I bought at Expressions in Needleart in Canadaigua, NY at my very first stitching retreat. It's a sweet design. The verse reads, "My needle doth dance o'er the linen." The title of the design is Lake Country Spring and is a tribute to the Finger Lakes region of NY state that they both love. I picked it up and started working on it again and immediately knew why I haven't finished this quickie design. I dislike the linen included in the kit a lot! I'm too cheap to replace it so will work on it here and there and should get it finished in a timely manner. I don't hate the linen so much that I would start the design over but the holes are hard to see, it's almost like stitching on clothing linen. (Don't ask me how I know the difference in stitching linen and clothing linen--sometimes I get a little creative where fabric is concerned and I have no money). It's 32ct so it really shouldn't be a problem but this is a really tightly woven linen.

So it appears that my plans to zip through the Dragonfly and Lake Country Spring designs before the end of 2005 are on hold for the time being. That's what I get for being cocky and thinking I could just whip these finishes out and start 2006 with two less projects in the pile of UFOs I have here.

All Kinds of Stuff

Last night while on my way home from going to see the midwife with my pregnant neighbor and her family--I'm invited to participate in the birth--I was talking to my best friend Cassie on the phone. Her mother is one of the artsiest people I know. When we were growing up she would go through phases, cross stitching, crewel, making pillows, teddy bears, porcelian dolls, baking extravagantly decorated cakes, homebaked bread, sketching plants. You name it she did it. It was always fun hanging out at Cassie's house because you never knew what her mother would be doing on that particular day. Last night Cassie told me that her mother had taken up sketching portraits and that she was sketching pictures of all the family. Very cool. She also told me that right now her house was pretty much an art gallery displaying all her mother's artwork. Is that not the coolest thing or what? One of my goals with my home is to not have the same stuff on my walls as everyone else. I have a print or two, but for the most part the stuff on our walls are things I've stitched, photos we've taken or family has sent us, and I'm working on the DH to do a few paintings for me. I've seen some great paintings in Coastal Living on other people's walls and I think he could create a reasonable facsimile for me. If I could paint like my husband I'd have an easel set up in the living room all the time, drop cloths over the floor and furniture. Yes, I would. But he only makes time to paint when football season is over and softball hasn't started yet. Ok, back to Cassie's mom, I think she was the one that opened my eyes to the art of cross stitch. Sure my neighbor stitched shop models and had some awesome Paula Vaughn's on her walls that she had stitched but Cassie's mom always made it feel like art instead of needlework. I guess I notice the difference in her feelings about it and my aunt's. My aunt loves to sew, she teaches it at the high school level, but she never understood the attraction to handwork when she could create some pretty awesome artwork using fabric and applique on her sewing machine in a fraction of the time it takes to cross stitch something. Cassie's mom on the other hand just embraced the act of cross stitching, saw it as art and it'd get finished when it got finished. It wasn't a race to get it finished and up on the wall, it was a process, and when it was finished, then she'd decide what to do with it. She's one of those people that embraces her hobbies, her art, as obsessively as I embrace cross stitching. I stitch because I can't not cross stitch. It's a huge part of me. So much a part of me that even people that know don't know me that well but know my husband know that I stitch. Kind of freaked me out the first time one of his coworkers who I know but don't really "know" mentioned my stitching to me. So either my DH can't think of anything to say about me to his friends other than I stitch or he thinks it's pretty cool. I was so glad I called Cassie yesterday, I needed to be inspired and whenever I hear what her mom is doing, I get motivated to start working on my own stuff again.

The last few days have been busy with holiday stuff, cleaning up a flooded bathroom(that seems to be a continuing theme around here, 2005: The Year of the Constantly Flooded Bathroom), going to see a midwife, and having not one, but two Starbuck's Peppermint Mocha coffees. Are those things to die for or what? Those are definitely worth $4 a cup. Tastes just like an Andes after dinner mint. Fortunately for me there are no Starbucks within a 15 mile radius so I only get to treat myself to those when I venture into the big city, but then I treat myself on the way to where ever I might be going and then again on the way home.

We woke up this morning to a flat on the car, let me tell ya how fortunate I feel that this did not happen when I was cruising along the scenic highway in Pensacola yesterday about 6 pm. YIKES! Then the truck wouldn't start this morning so the DH missed his carpool and had to drive the Improbability Drive(85 Surburban and we've been calling it the Improbability Drive since the early 90s. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy long before it was a movie.) all the way to work, $20 worth of gas barely got him there. So instead of more cleaning today, a goal and yes I used the "g" word is to have a clean house by Christmas Eve and keep it that way through the end of 2006, 2 0 0 6! All the clutter is stifling my creativity. I don't need that right now but I digress, I'll be at the store that we shall not name getting a new tire put on the car. What a waste of $100 right here at the holidays. Oh and to add to my loser image at the moment I completely forgot to get a teacher gift or anything for the bus driver. The kids have school on Monday so I hope to get something together for DS#3's teacher over the weekend.

Guilt Free January

Well Guilt Free January is just around the corner and I have big plans. For those of you not familiar with Guilt Free January, I believe the concept comes from the TWBBhttp://www.ezboard.com. Not sure if that's where the idea originated but that's where I discovered it. The idea is that in January a stitcher can start as many projects as she/he wants guilt free. No worrying about finishing any of them or all those other WIP sitting around the house. It's a new year, start as many projects as you want. I believe one year I started a new project almost every day. I have the piles and piles of WIP to prove it but that's a story for another day. Anyway this year my main big huge project is By the Bay's 13th Colony Harbor Parts 1-3 all stitched on one piece of fabric. Below you can see the individual designs. Aren't they going to ROCK all stitched together? When this is finished it will hang on my honkin' big kitchen wall. I'll take a picture of that wall and the one piddly little picture hanging there right now and you'll understand my excitement over this new project.





The inspiration for stitching these designs comes from this Lenox accent plate that I love:

Here's hoping that picture shows up, I forgot to upload it to the photobucket album before I started writing this post. If not I'll figure it out later. Anyway, I'd love to design my kitchen around that plate. If we ever win the lotto my first major purchase is the whole set of the Lenox British Colonial Tradewind china. Having three sons, there aren't a lot of china patterns out there that they might want to inherit so anything girlie might just find itself a yard sale bargain one day but these dishes, the boys might actually fight over. So I'm hoping the new year find's me starting this project and it's one of those I will finish and that's all there is to it. Write it down, Melissa WILL finish this cross stitch piece in a timely manner so I can get it on my wall and my reward will be the purchase of a couple of those accent plates. Then I get to start working on TW Tradewinds again.