Oct 22/06

Part of one Christmas present is complete! My brother is a soldier in the Canadian army and I have his name for our family Christmas present exchange. I found this pattern on this site and stitched it on some plastic canvas that I had in my heap. He loves to read so I think that it will make an awesome book mark.


So, that makes finish #9. Only 41 more to go!

Oct 19/06

Some more Christmas card finishes:


As you can see, I have been practising some of my hardanger skills (or lack thereof) that I learned recently! There are actually two of the heart shaped, Emie Bishop designed cards that I have completed, but I could not fit all three cards into the scanner so you will just have to believe that I have truly completed projects #6, #7 and #8! The nordic design is a combination of part of a sampler pattern I found in a magazine that I bought at the Rotary book sale and me playing around with some hardanger stitches.

I think that I am going to concentrate on Christmas cards and small projects until the New Year. There are several large patterns that I have collected over the past few years, but I have not decided when I will do them and in what order. Doing the small projects is giving me some time to play around with different things and perhaps this playing around will point me in some sort of direction. Seeing the stash lists that other people have posted makes me feel less quilty about the stuff I have amassed over the years because there are others out there with much more stuff!

Oct 15/06

A little bit of mea culpa here. While I am diligently stitching away at my 50 project challenge as I attempt to reduce the madness also known as my cross-stitching stash while not buying anymore patterns, I kind of succumbed a little bit. My Rotary club held its annual booksale this past weekend and someone had donated a stack of cross-stitch magazines. Yup! You see where this going. At 25 cents a piece, it was hard to pass up so I came home with 7 new-to-me magazines. It was a moment of cheap weakness as I just could not pass up such a great deal! In my defence, there were several really cool patterns that I had noticed at Michaels when I was there last and after standing in front of them long enough that the staff was giving me the "potential shoplifter" eyeball, I walked away emptyhanded.

Also yesterday, I met with most of the team that is going to El Salvador on the HfH program. Everyone seems very interesting and well travelled. This being New Brunswick, it turns out that one of the other women is someone I graduated from high school with! One of the other women had a huge back of soccer balls donated to her so I have to figure out how to deflate three of them and tuck them into my backpack along with all of the other stuff I have to pack before I even think about clothing!

As I type this, the news is on and they have just reported the names of the two soldiers killed yesterday in Afghanistan. My brother is graduating from ROTC this December and is that much closer to being posted overseas so this kind of news makes me so sad. I believe in the work that our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan, but the thought of my brother possibly paying the ultimate price is too difficult to even begin trying to digest. To do what I can, I have a yellow ribbon decal on my car and I wear red on Fridays to show my support for our soldiers.

Well, I should get out into the beautiful day we are having to tackle some of my autumn yard work that needs to be done before it is too late and things get buried under snow.

Oct 8/06

Oops! I started out with the wrong date because a peak at the clock tells me that it is now past midnight. My body clock is a little awry because I am sleeping 10 hours a night to regain any energy at all as I recover from bronchitis.

As part of my long weekend sloth session, I worked on some projects and finished 3 cross stitch Christmas cards:





Apparently, I have a little to learn about uploading photos because something is not lining up correctly, but you get the idea. So, that means that now I have completed #3, #4 and #5. Only 45 projects to go. Already this is excruciating because I found a magazine at work that is chockful of great wintry designs. The magazine is hidden in my stash at work so that one of my siblings can buy it for me after we do the Christmas present name draw this weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving! gobble, gobble!

Oct 5/06

Well, it is hard to believe, but in 23 days I will be well on my way to San Salvador, El Salvador to participate in a Habitat for Humanity program. How cool is that? It all still feels very surreal to me even at this stage of the game as I pile up stuff I need to cart with me and make arrangements for malaria prophylaxis. Here is a link that the HfH group sent us volunteers to check out some of the places we will be.

As always, I hope to check out pharmacies and the needle work of the region as I do on every trip.

My own needlework and running and everything else that I enjoy doing in my spare time came to a screeching halt for the past couple of weeks as I battled the stomach flu which morphed into bronchitis. Today, I wheezed out 3km as I finally felt well enough to even put my sneakers on my feet. Now that I can actually come home from work and not pass out cold from exhaustion, I shall pick up the threads of my life again (pun intended!).