Labor Day, Lee, and 2 Weeks' Worth of Updates

 

Yep, it's Labor Day, and we have TS Lee keeping it cloudy, and actually giving us some rain. Though Texas needs it a LOT more than we do - but I'll take it. And I am glad that Irene didn't turn out worse than it did - bad enough there in the northeast, but it could have been worse. Now we just have to wait & see what Katia does...

My trip to Ohio was great - the wedding was wonderful, and of course, my niece Devon made a beautiful bride! It was a great weekend, and good to see family & friends again. I actually took virtually no photos at the wedding - there was a host of pros all over the place, and there just wasn't a good spot to stay out of their way. I do have a couple of group shots from before, with my sister and mother and the bride's brothers, as well as the groom & groomsmen:

(pictured from front to back: my mother, my sister Deb (Mother of the Bride), my nephew (Brother of the Bride))

 
The Groom is seated on the left, and those standing and seated are groomsmen, friends, family - the Bride's other brother is the one standing far right.

The weather was wonderful the whole trip, though, as predicted, it wasn't 100, so I was freezing my ass off most of the time, in the upper 70s, lower 80s with low humidity; don't know how to breathe in air like that :) Some other photos around OH start here, with clouds at 30K feet and higher, and the bickering hummingbirds at my sister's house, as well as some gorgeous flowers around the wedding venue.

As for stitching the last couple of weeks, there hasn't been a lot. I did work on Birds of a Feather for a night or two before I left, and did MORE leaves. Sure thought I'd have this done by now...

And then, I caved and had an impulse start - the Tree of Stitches, designed by Abi Gurden in the Yahoo group The Stitch Specialists. I got the idea in my head that I wanted to keep it dark, subtle, and then I remembered a piece of black opalescent fabric that I had gotten as an RAK from Anita; and I dug through the floss drawers, and came up with three dark jewel tones from the Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe, which were a gift from Nancy :) It's dark, even for me, but I like it. AND, of course, I have beads to match (if you enlarge the photo, you should see purple ones already). I got parts 1-3 done the night before I left and the next afternoon, while waiting to leave for the airport. I finished through part 6 yesterday. I'm not sure these dark flosses show off the specialty stitches to their best advantage, but then, I've been too close to it, so maybe after I put it away for a bit, they'll stand out to me more...

And lastly, I took my small Patricia Ann project with me, the sampler section I am doing for The Stitcher's Village, and got some progress on it; the main part is done, just have the outer corners to do, and then whatever I do to personalize it, and I can send that off to Patty Hurwitz. Ignore the hoop marks - all my small Qs are tied up with other projects, so I'm going old-school on this (and it's more travel-friendly).

And that's the progress for the last couple of weeks. I am currently getting my fair entries ready; I'm having issues getting Starry Nights framed, due to the frame I ordered being cut wrong TWICE - I'm going to call it a one-time glitch, since my favorite online frame shop did the rest of my order to perfection. So we're trying to cobble something together and get it painted - a slight PITA, but since I work much better under pressure...? The photos I'm submitting are currently being printed - fingers crossed that they turn out decently! As for this week's stitching, I'm going to keep plugging away on the TSV project, and I might get Knotgarden out instead of BoaF - they are both green, so not sure if maybe I ought to just do something else entirely? LOL So who knows? Or, there's even the possibility that if my JCS Halloween edition AND the Special Edition Halloween book EVER get here from Utah (I think the mail has a kink in it between here & there), I may be forced to start 12-30 of those things - have you seen the IC Mandala in the book yet??? It's AWESOME!!!!

Check back next week and see what happens! Happy stitching to everyone!

 

Oh, yeah - I forgot to mention that I ALSO finished that damn book, War & Peace. I stopped with 35 to go - why he needed to spend 40 pages on WHY history is written, I have NO IDEA, nor do I care - so long as it IS written. And we all know that history is written by the victor, so so long as you read it with that in mind, the WHY shouldn't enter into it, IMO.

There's 6 months of my life I'll never get back... Now I'm reading something light & fluffy - White Queen by P. Gregory, about the War of the Roses. MUCH better :)