Day and Night

I have read on several blogs about "rotating" projects to be stitched on different days. I am positive that the rotation thing won't work for me. I seem to bounce from one project to the next without any specific themes or goals. It has worked pretty well for me over these past 35 years or so of stitching, but I have found one thing has changed. My eye sight! I started a new project last week. Goode Huswife's "Black Forest", a beautiful design that I have wanted to stitch for a while (thank you Nicole). The bad thing about it is that it's stitched on some torturous piece of 32 count black linen. I love the look of linen and the results it produces in finished products. I am insanely jealous of those of you who can stitch endlessly on this tiny little stuff. Those of you who are gifted enough to stitch "over-one" .....well, jealousy doesn't even begin to describe my emotions on that topic. As you can see from the close-up photo the lovely reindeer has been severely abused by my lack of talent in linen stitching. He is 'off' by one thread on the left of the body and it has thrown the whole thing into quite a mess. I have traced my mistake to my own "cheating". Trying to map out the design by skipping all over the place in order to pre-determine the dimensions of the finished piece, I went off by one on the lower green motif at the center bottom. I just continued blindly on; blindly being a key word here. I just can not work on this piece at night. So I have set up a pseudo-rotation thingy where I have daytime and nighttime pieces to work on. My new nighttime piece is a gymnast design on friendly 14 count Aida. I haven't made a gymnast in ages. I have tons of photos and partially drawn up charts just waiting to be stitched. I finally got on to starting this design of American gymnast Shawn Johnson on the Bars. Now bars is not my favorite event as a stitcher, athlete or coach. The angles are odd and the body is hard to capture in photos or stitchery. I won't even get in to the intricacies of catching a gymnast on such a piece of equipment. I bruise just thinking about it. But I love the colors and design of this Olympic leotard.

On the theme of "Day and Night" the weather has changed that quickly too. Thursday and Friday it was warm....OK, 54 degrees F isn't really warm, but after the temperatures in the Teens and Twenties it was a welcome change. This may have helped our ongoing plumbing situation. Apparently the leak in the laundry room over our Christmas vacation was the least of our worries. We got the water bill last week and it was the cost of the entire year of water usage. It seems there was a leak under our kitchen sink where the garden hose attaches to the outside of the house. With the bitter cold weather and an ongoing leak for over a month our house is now sitting on top of the Polar Ice Cap! This caused the bathroom to freeze up. The water still worked, but both the tub and bathroom sink would fill up with water and not drain properly. Suddenly the water drained from the tub after my shower on Monday and I felt a great relief....until I stepped out of the tub to find that same water covering the entire bathroom floor. Wonderful, patient Joe has solved all the problems with minimal financial damage, but the water bill still looms. The meter reader came out again Friday and said it was running normally with below average usage, so the leaks are fixed.

The frozen tundra inspired me to finally finish this old Christmas sampler...a design from Better Homes & Gardens in the early 80's, stitched with ThreadworX "Joy Noel".

I was lucky enough to find the perfect frame in the attic (9 x 12).

Pet snap of the day is Coal showing Roy the joys of looking out the window on a cold day. The kittens Roy and Carmella are such fun. They have recently discovered the wonders of watching the birds at the feeder outside the window.