“This Is the Day” Finish

 Here is what I have been working on while grounded. This piece is straight off the Q-snap frame and has yet to be pressed, but I am super excited to share it with you. This photo did crop a bit of the image at the top. It’s This Is the Day by Plum Street Samplers. It has been my sole Sunday stitch for the past two years, and amazing but true . . . it was started on April 22, 2022, and I finished it yesterday April 21, 2024, just one day short of two years. When I recorded this finish in my cross stitch journal, I was amazed at the dates!

This brick house took a long time to stitch, but I love it.

It was stitched on 16 count White Chocolate Aida. If you are familiar with the pattern, you will notice a few changes that I made. I left out the goat in the top left corner over the flowers. It just didn’t make sense to me, so I stitched two bees instead. (It’s beyond me why the designer had a ram in the sky.) I also left out the stack of animals and long legged bird on the right side of the house and replaced them instead with flowers. I did use all the floss listed on the chart.

One of the first things I am going to do when I am no longer grounded is take this to be framed. I cannot wait to see this on my wall!!! :-)

No Retreat for Me

 

I should be on my way to Maine right now to attend a cross stitching retreat in Augusta. My bag had been packed, my cross stitch pieces packed, and Emma’s bag had been packed for a stay at her home away  from home. (I’m blessed to have friends whom Emma loves and who welcome her when I go away.) My plan was to leave this morning and take my time heading up the coast. I was going to stop at Portland Head Light to do some photography. Unfortunately, a foot issue will keep me from attending. As you know if you follow my blog, because of a foot issue, I recently had to cancel attending a guild quilting retreat on the Cape. Things had been healing well, and I was really looking forward to this retreat, but it was not to be. Yesterday there was a problem which means no retreat for me. Yes, I will be off my foot again for at least a week until an infection clears and things heal once again. :-(

I’m super grateful that it happened while I was home and not while I was away. So, it means time again to just sit and stitch and read. I had preordered and received yesterday Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book An Unfinished Love Story - A Personal History of the 1960s, which I know will be a fascinating read. 

I’m also grateful that I had a visit with my cousin Kristin and her girls (the Ladies Lunch group) on Tuesday. It was a perfect day for outdoor dining and our destination was Tony’s along Wollaston Beach. Tony’s is the place if you love lobster rolls which I do, but the other day I was in the mood for a whole belly fried clam plate . . . Yum! Yum! Yum! 

The cross stitch piece above by designer Priscilla Blain of Stitching with the Housewives was completed last year, but I wasn’t crazy about how I had finished it. When I saw this display piece on the Paisleys and Polka Dots website, I knew it would be perfect for this piece. Paisleys and Polka Dots sells kits that you paint and then assemble. I glued a magnet to the wood  piece and a washer on the back of the cross stitch, so that I will be able to use it to display other pieces.

Lastly, here’s a look at the table mat that I had made for the retreat. The small green wool square is where I could park my needle and next to it is a place for my scissors. The little Campbell Kids lunch box was a thrifting find, and it contains my other stitching accessories. 

Well, that’s it. I have a jigsaw puzzle on the sunporch, and if it isn’t too cool, I may work on it for a while. Sit, stitch, read, puzzle . . . decisions . .  decisions . . . decisions. :-)

The Eclipse, an Amaryllis, and Breaking Resolutions

 Did you view the eclipse? It was indeed pretty cool!!! My friend Marilyn had given me two pairs of the special glasses, so I invited my friend Edith to join me in my special viewing area. Okay, we viewed it from the middle of my backyard. We had 93.4 eclipse coverage in our area, so it didn’t get dark or even dusk like, but it did get progressively cooler. 

I usually pick up a couple of amaryllis bulbs during the holiday season. The red one bloomed beautifully around Christmas, but this bulb was still in the box and, frankly, forgotten on a shelf in the cellar. I’m glad I came across it while searching for something else. :-) 

It’s April. How have you done keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Craft wise the results for me have been mixed. I haven’t accomplished as much as I had hoped to by this time. On the plus side, I have been quilting strictly from stash, but Saturday afternoon found me at The Quilted Crow in Bolton where I purchased a pattern and a few pieces of wool for a new wool applique project. Had I finished all the other wool projects waiting in the queue? Well, no, but I just couldn’t help myself. :-) This will be a spring themed piece, and I am looking forward to starting it.

Have a lovely week.

Happy Spring!

 Hello! It has been a minute. . . make that more than a month since my last post. I had been grounded for a few weeks with a foot issue, so there wasn’t much to write about. It was three weeks of sitting and stitching and sitting and reading . . . you get the picture. Things have improved, and on Friday I had a lovely trip to the grocery store. (I must say Stop and Shop home delivery has been great, but it was good to push a shopping cart again. :-),

It did give me time to stitch “Easter Tree “ by designer Shannon Christine. Though the piece is not that large it took quite a while to stitch due to all the color changes. If you know the pattern, you will realize that I left a few things out at the bottom. I also made great progress on a large piece which should be finished some time this week. I can’t wait to see it framed and hanging on the wall.

As for reading, I finished two novels both by William Martin. If you enjoy historical fiction, he is definitely an author to check out. As the title suggests, the first  deals with the California Gold Rush. Both are Peter Fallon novels. I finished the second in the wee hours of Saturday night. I was so close to the end that I could not put City of Dreams down. It begins with protagonist Peter Fallon receiving a text message asking if he is interested in saving America and a search is soon on for a mahogany box filled with twenty bonds from1780. This is the third William Martin book that I have read in the past two months, so I may choose to read something lighter next, but then I think I will go back and reread some of his other novels. Yes, he is that good! I can only hope that he is working on another Peter Fallon novel.

So, what have you been reading???

I received two beautiful flower arrangements for Easter; one from my godchild and her family and the other from her sister and her family who joined me for Easter dinner along with a friend. Bonus: My young cousin Des who is a Lego fanatic gave me a very lengthy, detailed explanation of the video game Brawlers. Am I ready to play? Did I understand it all? Not a clue, but it sure was fun listening to his enthusiastic, detailed explanation!

Last thing, did you know that this is the 50th anniversary of the tv series Little House on the Prairie based on the books by Laura Ingles Wilder? Nope, I don’t feel old . . . well maybe just a bit. :-) The television series is currently being broadcast in forty-six countries worldwide.

That’s it. Have a wonderful week. Wear protective lenses to view tomorrow’s eclipse, and don’t worry if you miss this one as there will be another total eclipse viewable in the USA on Aug. 23, 2044!!!

Fire Engine Quilt

 Good Sunday Morning! This is just a quick post to show you my latest quilt finish which I will be donating at a guild meeting on Tuesday. The center panel was purchased on a shop hop quite a few years ago. The yardage I purchased had four small fire engine sections. I had used one of the small panels in a piece which I donated last year. 

I’ve been busy kitting up a few cross stitch pieces. Since Christmas I have been focusing on just two projects but have decided that I would like a bit more variety in my daily stitching. 

The weather continues to hint of spring. This February will go down as one of the warmest on record, but we all know that March and even April may have some stormy surprises.

So, that’s all, short and sweet. This afternoon I’ll be with family celebrating my cousin twelfth birthday. 

Hope you all have a lovely, creative, wonderful week. :-)

“Snow Magical” and “Winter Cardinal Etching” - Two Cross Stitch Finishes

This piece is “Snow Magical” by designer Brenda Gervais. If you follow any flosstube channels on Youtube, you will know that this has been a very popular piece to stitch. The cute sweater and snow took a l-o-n-g time to stitch. Since Christmas, I have been working on this and one other larger piece, and I am glad to have finally finished this snowman. I chose a frame from Hobby Lobby to fully finish this piece.

Speaking of snow . . . in my previous post I wrote of an approaching snowstorm. Schools, meetings,  events, etc. were cancelled the day before, but then the forecast kept changing. The big snowstorm was a no show in my area although on parts of Cape Cod they received heavy snow. My friend Laurel sent this along which speaks to the difficulties of being a meteorologist in our area. If you don’t like our weather, just wait a minute.

Laurel also sent along a few photos that she had taken at the start of the lighthouse restoration project which I wrote about in a previous post.

Boy! I wish I had been there that day. :-)

I stitched this small piece, “Winter Cardinal Etching” by Cecelia Turner, this past week. The chart came from the 2020 Christmas/Winter issue of Punch Needle and Primitive Stitcher magazine. I stitched it for a gift when it first came out and always planned to stitch it again for myself. It took a few years to get around to it. I did change the floss used for the cardinal to DMC321 rather than the called for floss on the pattern. Cardinals in my area are bright red and the called for floss was a bit too dark.

On Wednesday, I received this sweet Valentine’s Day surprise from my godchild’s family. I can already see it displayed next year with the back filled with tiny Valentine cross stitch pillows. :-)

That’s it for now. Have a good week.

The Lincoln Letter and Snow Is Coming

 Today we honor and remember our 16th president who was born on February 12, 1809. It’s appropriate that I have just finished reading The Lincoln Letter, A Petter Fallon Novel by William Martin. It is one of the best books that I have read in the last few years. Martin is a brilliant story teller, and though I have read many books about this bloody period in our history, I came away with a deeper understanding of what life was like for the people who lived in our nation’s capitol during those turbulent times. 

When I reflect on it, I believe my interest in this period stems from knowing about my dad’s paternal grandfather who was an Irish emigrant. He was a gardener who enlisted at the age of forty. The Massachusetts Volunteer Militia was made up of Irishmen and men of Irish descent who answered Lincoln’s call. I have a copy passed down of the History of the Ninth Massachusetts Militia which documents the forming and service of this group. In the back of the book, a few lines are written about each man in  each company. If you were to see this book and examine Company E, you would find a  a small slip of faded pink paper on which in school girl handwriting,  I once wrote “My Great Grandfather” and his name to mark the page. When I was older, before sites like Ancestry came along, I sent away for and received his military records. They contained his enlistment papers, service records, and even the pension request forms from his widow. His first wife had died while he was in service, and after the war was over, he met and married a much younger woman, my great grandmother and then raised a second family.

Why am I telling you this? His last assignment before being released from duty and mustered out was due to serious health issues incurred from long hours of sentry duty along the Potomac. In this novel, the crowded hospitals for soldiers and the city of Washington are a backdrop for the story. 

If you enjoy historical fiction, I highly, highly recommend this suspense filled novel. 

SNOW IS COMING!!!

For the last three or four days, we have been experiencing  near spring-like weather. It even hit sixty degrees on Saturday. Glorious! BUT. . . we, New Englanders, are not easily fooled. I knew that touch of spring was a set up, all part of Mother Nature’s plan. So while I enjoyed taking Emma for walks each day, I waited for the other shoe to drop, and it has as we have a snowstorm moving in over night. Our guild meeting scheduled for tomorrow has been cancelled as have all schools in the area. Along with the snow, we can expect high winds, just a typical nor’easter. It’s supposed to be a quick moving storm, so we will just have to see how much snow Mother Nature brings us.

Bundle up and keep your shovel handy. :-)