IT'S OUT!!!!!!!!!

Bob and Michelle finally got the image of Alternative Reality by Josephine Wall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm pulling floss before I go to bed, printing the chart out tomorrow when I get home from work and then I'll start gridding. :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

I am one superbly happy stitcher this evening.

And on the college football front Arkansas has moved up to #12 with LSU dropping again and sitting at #13. Whoohoo!!!!!!!!!! Bowl game here we come!

WIP updates

Picture post! First up St. Basil's Cathedral. SQ Jamaica Sparkle, 2x1. I love the way this fabric makes the purples pop out. From the model pic, you can't even tell the purples are there. At least to me anyway. I hope to be able to enter it in the 2007 Silkweaver Showcase.



And to the right is my PR Arabesque Alphabet "R". It's being stitched with Vikki Clayton "Blueberry Creme" 2x1 on 20ct Pearl linen. It's a Christmas present to my friend Ria and she's Greek. I picked Blueberry Creme for her letter because it reminded me of the Greek flag. It's nearly done!

I'm home alone right now. That means I have the TV all to myself! and since there's never anything on on Sunday evenings, I plan to watch The Misadventures of Merlin Jones. It's an old Disney flick with Tommy Kirk and Annette. Hilarious!

Eureka!!!!!

Genius strikes at the strangest times. This time it was in the shower.

I'm a book-a-holic. Probably moreso than with stash. More importantly, I'm a series book collector. Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Black Stallion, etc. I haven't bough any in over a year because I quite literally ran out of room. I don't even have room to put them in boxes and stack the boxes up! Next weekend I'm putting a new bookcase in, but by the time I finish putting books on it it'll be nearly full.

I have this unused and wasted wall in my dressing room area. (that's code for the sink is in a seperate room from the tub) It has a marble-topped desk in it. And the marble is cheap, it may not even be real marble. The desk is of no use to me whatsoever and I've been debating for years on whether or not to rip it out and do something else. I finally decided what to do about 4 years ago- turn it into bookshelves! But I kinda ran out of paint before I got to ripping it out and sadly the color my room is painted can no longer be obtained. So the project got shelved. (pun intended!)

Until just now, when I was in the shower. I have remedied the no paint problem! I'm going to paint the whole wall lavender. A very pretty lavender, pulled out of the quilt on my bed. Then I will use a metal shelving system to get the brackets on the wall, and use boards to make the shelves. I'll need a little help taking the desk apart, but after that I can do the project entirely on my own which makes me VERY happy since that tool-handy brother of mine now lives 4 hours away and is busy building his house. The whole thing will be white to match the rest of the trim and bookcases in my room and I think it will be quite lovely on a lavender wall. I've always wanted a lavender wall...

eBay here I come! It's amazing how much you can miss trolling eBay and used book sites looking for that one great find to fill a hole in your collection.

Somebody get me a blender!!!!

That section on my PV that I was complaining about the other day, I had to frog it AGAIN last night!!! New plan of attack- move back to the window where there are nice big blocks of the same color and no dang fractionals.

New Nadia Tate QS's at Heaven and Earth. A new mermaid! I missed it somehow when she painted it. It's Geisha-Fantail Mermaid and she's purple!!! And just about the prettiest thing I've ever seen from Nadia. Once I finish Earth Mermaid I'm going to have to start Irises and this Tate, lol. They're both screaming at the same volume!

I have to work tomorrow, but Allie ok'd me not going in until 10:30 or so, so I'll get to sleep till at least 9:30. This makes me happy. We have a wedding on the grounds tomorrow, and it's a small one so I may be able to leave before 3. That would be nice.

I hate...

Fractionals! Loathe hate despise and abominate the things!!!!! I do love Paula Vaughn's stuff, but I swear I'm going to lose my mind before I finish the dang thing! "The dang thing" is Through A Mother's Eyes. It's for my mom.

For the PR Stitchathon this past weekend I did 2,378 stitches. Not as many as I had hoped for, but more than I thought it was. Saturday turned out to be a bad fibro day and after wrestling with the vacuum cleaner for 45 minutes I didn't have a whole lot of energy left for anything else. My arms hurt that day, it's hard to stitch when you can barely lift them.

As soon as I actually remember to take a picture of my St. Basil's, I'll post it. I'm going to try tomorrow, but since we have 70 1-3rd graders going on tour in the morning I'm not going to hold my breath on making it home with my brain still functioning.

Zoe eats too fast. She's the only cat I've ever known that belches.

I've been tagged!

Kim tagged me for the 7 songs thing that's going around. Here goes!

The rules: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether or not they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to. Mine are:

1. Feeling Good by Michael Buble
2. Far Away by Nickelback
3. Beep by Pussycat Dolls
4. Buttons by PCD
5. If Only from The Little Mermaid Broadway workshop recording (It hits Broadway fall '07)
6. Sing, Sing Sing by any big band except Benny Goodman. His is way too long!
7. String of Pearls by Glenn Miller

Talk about ecelectic there! My tastes range all over the place, lol.

OK, I tag Belinda, Laura, Mrs. Sandie, Michelle of Singular Stitches, Terry, Mr. Todd and my mother!

Adventures in floss

Wow! Venus threads are AMAZING!!!!!! They are so soft and lay so nicely. Very little twisting or slipping around. It's stranded cotton like DMC, except it's only sold in Europe. This makes me very sad as it's very nice and wonderful floss. I'm using them to stitch my Winter Beauty Princess. I started her for the PR Stitchathon going on this weekend. And I'm stitching her on 32ct Enchanted Fabrics Royalty flair.

*insert shameless plug for Lori here* Her fabrics are AMAZING!!!!!

OK, so I'm stuck on the word "amazing" tonight. Chalk it up to lack of sleep and a headache from the bouncing temperatures this week. Today it never topped 70, outside right now it's 50 and tomorrow it's supposed to be nearly 80. Then back down to about 69. My poor head!!! I don't handle temp changes well, throws off my groove. Yet another reason why I will probably never live outside of Louisiana, lol. And I found the coolest things at Hobby Lobby today. Cushions for steel crochet hooks! That aren't humongous and cover the whole dang hook. Will have to try them out next week since I've pulled my coasters back out to work on.

And now this week's SBQ, from Vash.

Which way do you stitch, i.e. do you stitch /// followed by \\\ on
top, or the other way around \\\ followed by ///? Are you left- or
right-handed and do you think that this affects the way that you stitch?

*stops to think* I go /// then go back \\\. I'm right handed, but I have no idea if I stitch right-handed or left-handed. I iron left-handed and crochet right-handed. I do know that I am so dominantly right-handed that I'm convinced I'll never master 2-handed stitching. I've tried several times but it's so frustratingly slow that I just give up.

Random thought. Why is that people in some fan fiction communities give unwanted and unasked for advice then have the nerve to allow their feelings to get hurt when the writer ignores it? And honestly has no idea that what said reviewer said in the first place hurt the writer deeply and she was afraid to write for 2 whole days. (not me, I got good at ignoring people whose opinion doesn't really count a LOOOONG time ago) This critique was not asked for and was really rather rude. I mean really, since when did one college writing course qualify someone to definitively state that someone can't write? And this reviewer is the one who can't write, my friend found her blog somewhere and sent it to me. I've never seen so much unnecessary parenthetical exposition in all my life! Granted it's not a very long life, but I do have a lot of experience in the fan fiction world. And I come from circles where the writing quality is impeccable. Without the help of any kind of degree in writing or English.

Some people.....

SBQ- Brr!

Today's SBQ was suggested by Lee and is:

As we all know, stitching in the winter can really be rough on the
hands. What do you do to treat your hands well in the cold winter
months? Do you have any suggestions for creams or soaps? Or perhaps a
special regimen that you would like to share?

Well, I live in Louisiana. Down here, there's no such thing as winter, lol. So I don't really do anything else special for my hands. It stays very humid (80-110%) year-round, so I don't even use body lotion most of the time.

I've been smoking right along on my first PR Arabesque letter this week. And then today I ran out of silk with a fourth of the stitching left. Woe is me for having to order more Dinky Dyes, lol. So I'll move to the other letter for awhile till the DD's come in. And I have to get more of the other silk color too, the VC Blueberry Creme. And gosh darn it, I'm going to have to order at least 5 other skeins just to make the shipping worth it. Life can be such a hardship for a silk addict, lol. The hard part will be deciding which colors to get!

A cold front is moving through right now, so I'm rather achey and my fingers are getting stiff. I really should put some warmer clothes on and that would help considerably.

Spring Cameo update!

Update time for Spring Cameo! I'm still as in love with this one as I was the moment I saw her in Fudgey's sig, just a few weeks before Michelle signed Deb as an artist. IRL, the grays and browns in her lips don't stand out that much. It flows together beautifully and really defines her lovely mouth. It really is amazing what Michelle can do with color.

I've picked up a few new blinkies I'm going to display on my sidebar. FINALLY found an HAED one that will suffice to use as a hot-linked button.

Belinda is working on a PR BB blinkie, so once that's done I'll have it hot-linked too. And in my BB sig, lol.

So tired!

Tomorrow will be my second Saturday in a row working. This past Sunday I slept till 11! Yes, SLEPT. And I was in bed half asleep at 10:30. And I'm also working the next 5 Saturdays. All in a row. I don't do well with 6 day work weeks. I need that Saturday to recharge my sleep. Right now the only thought getting me through the thought of all those Saturdays is that next Saturday I'm only there till around 2, and then on the 28th I don't have to come in before 10, and I can go by 3:30.

I've made quite a lot of progress on Spring Cameo this last week, in spite of the limited stitching. I was sick of skin tones for the moment so I've done her lips, moved over to the green of the cameo background and stitched some hair tendrils. I switch out to St. Basil's on Sunday, so I'll post a picture then.

It's kinda sad when an online place that you used to consider a safe haven goes sour. After 2 months, I've finally had someone ask me why I'm so scarce. And nobody's ever contacted the admin who left at the same time. Not even her writing partner, who started the whole place. It's even sadder when you know that it was the fault of one person and that one person has been given WAY too much responsibility and soured it for all the old-timers, the ones who made the place what it was prior to August 13th.

I never knew...

There's been a whole big mess at work this last week and I just found out something that I didn't know and almost wish I hadn't found out at all.

One of my co-workers, who was a really good friend of my sister (who I also work with) has been spreading lies about me behind my back. Said co-worker quit yesterday and blamed it on me, even though I really had nothing to do with it and she was going to quit this week anyway. Now I know why. She was presented with a vague opportunity and she jumped on it. A lot of things make sense now that didn't before.

We had a lady come in today with a marked service dog. The past presidents of the board were also having a luncheon on the grounds and we had to walk through all of them to get to the house so I could start the tour. It's a federal offense to refuse to allow a marked service dog to accompany their human. My sister saw us with the dog, went into the gift shop and told my mother (who was helping out today) that I had made a very bad call in allowing a dog to be taken up into the house. My mother looked at her and said "Do you really think she's that stupid?"

It did upset some of the ladies because they couldn't see the dog's badge. But I'm really not that stupid. Pets are not allowed inside the house under any circumstances. It doesn't matter if the pet is dying, they still can't go in!

And then, said co-worker when she came by today to get some more of her stuff had the nerve to tell my mother that she was going to go over to the gift shop and send me back to the office because I'm not good with tourists. WTF????? There is absolutely no telling what sort of slander she has spread about me to our dear Allie and the board members. I was ticked at her before for acting like a child, but now I'm mad. MAD. I have never talked about her behind her back to anyone how DARE she talk about me like that and to my own sister! And often enough and long enough apparently that my sister believed her!

She's been saying "Be nice" to me an awful lot over the last year, at work, come to think of it. In reference to tourists. And it's been bothering me as to why she would say that. I'm not stupid. She knows full well that I'm capable of dealing with all sorts of people without them knowing how I really feel. That's the first skill you learn in a doctor's office. You put on a happy face and you act like you are delighted the tourists have stopped by, even if your feet are killing you. Which I do. Every day. Now I think I know why she's been telling me that. Angel. Spreading lies about me.

I'm pissed. Royally pissed.

SBQ- Mistakes

Still playing catch-up here! This one is 9/28.

Today's SBQ was suggested by Sharon and is:

When you find yourself making a lot of mistakes in various stitching
projects do you find it better to muddle your way through or do you
take a brief break from stitching? If you do take a break, how long do
you take?


I take a brief break. After I've frogged the mistake! If I don't make sure that is taken out, I'll forget where it was and ruin the whole thing, lol. I usually put it down for a day or two. Any longer than that and it'll be months before I pick it up again.



And I have one picture, my letter "L" from the PR Arabesque alphabet. Stitched 2x1 on 20ct Pearl linen with Dinky Dyes silk "Wild Lavendar". I'm planning to finish it off as an ornament. It's not the best pic in the world, but it shows the lovely subtle color variations in the silk.