Just stopping in...

with a couple of updates.

News from Utah. The condo complex manager thinks the condo might be ready in time for DH's trip in February. The wallboard people have set a date. We're trying to think good thoughts. If they can finish the work by DH's trip in February, then we might STILL be able to get some rental $$$ from it (judging by the temps and snowfall so far it may be a nice, long ski season in Northern Utah.)

No, I didn't really lost 10.5 pounds this week. I ate so much crap this winter break that I assumed (based on how my clothes are fitting) that I had gained back all the weight I had lost before. Weighed in this morning and was thrilled to note that I had not gained much at all, but I was not going to change the ticker.

More goodies arrived yesterday (how much did I order, anyway?)

I ordered a handful of patterns from Crabapple Hill. This is my favorite - a pumpkin pin cushion.

Also tracked down the Victoria Sampler Heirloom Family chart I fell in love with on Calina's blog. While I was there I also fell for the Jingle Bells Xmas Tree Farm chart, both of which are now in my possession (fast service from Canada.)

And then there's this beauty.

No, I didn't order this. This is my Christmas present from my youngest. He bought something on Ebay well before Christmas and was very upset when it didn't arrive in time. He assures me it's "really cool, Mom." He's been fretting over it for weeks now, wondering if it would ever come and, if not, what kind of fight he would have to get his money back. I suspect he posted a negative comment about the seller, which prompted the seller to send the package (finally). Here is is, two weeks after Christmas. I didn't mind (I had plenty of goodies for Christmas and was really just enjoying his company), but I hated to watch him suffer this frustration on top of several others at the end of the year.

So, it's here now and I have to wait until the weekend when he will have some time off and will be able to watch me open it.

Happy Anniversary...

TO ME!

I can hardly believe that I've been blogging for TWO YEARS!

Today is my anniversary, though, and I have the presents (to myself) to prove it!

In yesterday's mail came the fabric for La Balancoire by Nimue (the baby arrived a few days ago. I ordered the fabric from some folks - Picture This, Plus! in Kansas - that I had met at the last CATS Stitching Festival held in California. I wasn't sure what color to order. I didn't want linen or Aida, and I wanted something close to the color on the chart picture. But, sometimes colors, especially of hand-dyed, just don't show true on the computer, do they? So, I emailed the shop and included a picture of the pattern. I asked them to recommend something, and they recommended their Lugana color "Woodland." I don't think I could get any closer!

I'm still resting my sore wrist, then will finish the other fairy, THEN start this one. There are some specialty threads that I need to find first, so there's no rush.

As if that wasn't enough, TODAY my mailbox had my set of Butterfly Garden patterns from Treasured Threads in Iowa. Talk about fast service! And check out this pattern:

I fell in love with this quilt by Leanne Beasley the first time I saw its picture, and as I've waited for my order to arrive I've been trying to figure out how the ten blocks were used. That is, I knew the BOM set included ten patterns, so I've been studying the quilt top to figure out how they were used, but I could never make sense out of it. Today I learned why. This has to be one of the biggest bargains in quiltdom. Each of the first NINE patterns is for one block (the quilt is made of nine blocks). Each BLOCK is made up of NINE mini-blocks! Some of the mini-blocks are repeated (the little four patch, the heart, the daisy) but a whole bunch of them are unique to just one block. And even the ones that are repeated are "tweaked" a bit so that they don't look like repeats. I need to choose a couple of fabrics to use throughout the quilt (for a consistent look) but otherwise can be scrappy about it. Can't wait to get started!

Unfortunately, I have a LOT of neglected housework to do this week. Still have to take down the Christmas decorations, then have to get into the two spare rooms and "organize" the stuff that's in there. One we are using as a storage room. DS2's drums are in there, some of our boxes ready to move (whenever that happens) and a whole bunch of empty packing boxes. All of it has to be pulled away from the walls. In the other room, I have to sort through the stuff I brought down from the attic, decide what to keep and what to "bless" onto someone else, then move everything in there away from the walls. I'm not sure, but I think a defective electrical outlet may have been smouldering over the holiday. When I unplugged the lamps that were plugged into it the weird smell went away. Understandably DH wants to bring in an electrician to inspect and repair all the outlets that need to be fixed (before we burn to the ground?) but first I have to create a space for an electrician to work in. That's this week's job.

DH has an incredibly busy month ahead of him. He's been hired by his union to coordinate the campaign for one of the ballot initiatives so will be out several evenings a week managing phone banks. In addition to his responsibilities as president of the county's community college district's board of trustees. In addition to taking a group of emancipated foster youth up to Sacramento for training as lobbyists. He'll be gone quite a bit, so I'm going to try to make good use of my alone time. I'll spend the weekend he's away at my Mom's. I'm going to take her to a couple of quilt shops, then the next day she, my SIL and I will sew all day. (SIL wants to learn to hand applique so I think I'll try to start on the butterflies that weekend.)

2008 has gotten off to a good start for my family. My kids don't like me sharing all the details of their lives here but I don't think they'd mind if I say that some good things are coming together for them. Here's hoping the good karma holds!

Needle Arm

HaHaHaHaHa!

I built the deck behind our house. I designed, dug and planted the pond in our back yard. I built four raised beds in our backyard. I stacked blocks for another raised bed in the side yard outside my office window. I built two, 4' x 9' latticed trellis' and have planted and replanted hundreds of plants over the last thirty-five years. And never have I had a muscle as sore as the teeny little one I've pulled in the last two days from cross-stitching. And I've never strained a joint as I have apparently strained my wrist doing the same.

We are in hysterics imagining what I will tell the physical therapist when she wants to know how I injured myself.

I'm just going to take an ibuprophen and hope it goes away without medical attention.

I don't want to be a laughing stock.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

I'm back to work tomorrow and wanted to share my progress on the Nimue fairy. Her wing is almost finished (one more color of backstitching.) Chiloe, I'm still working with my new scanner so the colors aren't showing quite right here. Like you, I used two over instead of one. This Aida is not quite so yellow as it is showing here. DMC color #3861 (first stripe in from where the body will be) is a kind of taupe-y brown with a slight lavender cast but not quite as lavender as is showing here. The other two stripes are primarily DMC color #3864 which is a much lighter step in the same colorway but comes across much less lavender, almost more yellow than is coming across here. There are orange highlights (DMC #407) that are popping more orange than this picture shows. If you click on the picture to the larger version, it is closer to the real thing. I'm hoping I can figure out all the settings to get the color right on these scans by the time I finish the body.

No, I didn't use the brown Mohair Marron that the design calls for. I'd never even heard of it so did a Google search for it and it appears to be a very French commodity (meaning all the sites where the words popped in my search were French sites.) There was a site that had a picture of the fiber and it seemed to be VERY fuzzy (long fibers off a central core fiber). When I first read "mohair" I thought it might give that spot the soft, velvety look of a real butterfly wing, but the fibers in the picture I saw were so long that I thought it might look more like a shag rug so I decided to give up the search.

Overall, I'm satisfied with how this is turning out, although I may not be so pleased with the dress. We'll see.

Chiloe asked about my blog titled "For Yumiko" so I thought I'd explain my other blogs. "Debi 101" will eventually be my list of lifetime goals. Travel and experiences, charts and patterns, WIPs and UFOs. Mostly just a place for me to go to remind myself that napping through football games on television is not a life. "Debi Stitches a Home" is intended to be the journal of the building of our retirement home in Utah, which is at a dead stop (and yes, there is a rant in that blog now ) because of our horrible American economy and housing mortgage disaster. "Debi Stitches a Family History" is where I put the occasional family story in hopes that someone out there will recognize a connection and share helpful information.

"For Yumiko" is a very special blog. Two years ago yesterday my older son married a wonderful woman from Japan. They met eight years ago when they were both college students in Fullerton, CA. They shared a house for a while in Fullerton, then in New York while my son finished university (even went through 9/11 together), but most of their relationship was maintained long-distance. My DIL became a fluent English speaker while she lived in the US, but the rest of her family speaks very little English and I speak even less Japanese. Yumiko is my DIL's mother, and she and I have been frustrated and more than a little sad that we cannot speak with each other. I can't even write a thank-you note when she sends a gift (which she very generously does from time to time). Then, after Thanksgiving, it dawned on me that maybe I could "speak" to her through photos in a simple blog. I post something, email DIL who emails her brother who opens it all up for their mother to read. (BTW, Yumiko is a fashion designer in Japan.) If anyone knows of a wonderful translator for Japanese/English I'd appreciate the reference. We've tried Babelfish and my DIL tells me the translation is dangerously garbled.

One of the highlights of this winter break has been having the extra time to spend here. I've enjoyed visiting new blogs and updating my posts here. Since my resolutions for 2008 include spending more time getting healthy with more (some?) exercise, better meal planning and preparation and more scheduled crafting time, I will not be lurking here at every opportunity so my posting will be sketchier. Please don't give up on me. I enjoy your visits!

Fairy Update

I don't know if I'll finish her before I run out of winter break or not (two more days). I can probably finish the wing tomorrow but don't know if I can finish her body on Sunday or not. Probably not 'cause work (shudder) starts again Monday and I do have a few chores to do around here (like laundry and maybe starting to take the Christmas decorations down).

Want a laugh? I did so much stitching yesterday that I woke up with a tiny little muscle sore in my upper arm and sore joints on both sides of my wrist (from twisting my hand funny around the q-snap). In the future on small pieces I'm going to have to leave lots of fabric around the design so that I can use a larger frame and avoid that funny crook of the wrist.

It's storming today. DH and I tucked in under warming lap robes (rather than heat the house we're trying these) for the evening. Fire crackling, audio books, stitching away...

This is the life I want to lead with a little time in the morning for the garden and a walk, some kind of daily housekeeping chores so the place doesn't fall apart and time for quilting and scrapbooking, too.

Sigh.

Sorry for the Confusion...

...about my "Woot!"

When I started this blog (almost two years ago now, wow!) it was as a place to post pictures of my stitching for the xstitchinprogress yahoo group. Very quickly, though, it became more of a journal than I've ever been able to maintain before, and from time to time I have used the space for my very blue, very left-wing-liberal-union-goon rants.

I'm a teacher. I teach eighth-grade history, and in California that means I get to introduce kids to the Constitution. I love my country and I love the Constitution. And as a lover of my country and my Constitution, I celebrate every person's right to believe in what they believe and support the causes they believe are the right causes.

As long as those causes are moving us continually toward achieving the ideals upon which our country was founded.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Government exists, according to the founders, only for the purpose of ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for ALL. Somehow, we've moved away from these ideals. Our leadership seems to believe that these rights only exist for "right thinking" people ("right thinking" being people who agree with them.) We need new leadership to help us get back on that right path, the path of ensuring that ALL people are secure in their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Last night in Iowa, Barack Obama won, by a significant margin, the Democratic caucus In Iowa. More importantly, the Dems nearly DOUBLED participation in the caucus process over the previous caucus, itself a record-setting turnout. And the numbers came mostly from the participation of younger voters.

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote of Obama's victory in Iowa,

Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience.

Iowa is, of course, only the first of the opportunities for Americans to have a say in who will lead us. At this point it is WAY too early to tell who the candidates will be on November's ballot. And at this point, I'm not even sure who I will vote for in California's primary next month. But I am excited about the Obama victory last night.

"They" said that Obama wouldn't win in Iowa because he is African-American and Iowa only has 2.9% African-American population.

I was in New Orleans just two months before Katrina. The neglect of the poor, black population that still suffers there does not suprise me; the pervasive racism in the city did.

So this is what excites me about Obama's victory last night. A consistently conservative, mostly white population has thrown its support behind a man with a message of change and FINALLY, he is being "not ... judged by the color of [his] skin but by the content of [his] character."

In 1989 a man found what he thought was a reproduction of one of the 200 original broadsides of the Declaration of Independence. It was later authenticated as the real thing, and television producer and philanthropist Norman Lear bought it at auction for millions of dollars. For three-and-a-half years the broadside toured the country in Lear's Declaration of Independence Road Trip, a project to bring the Declaration to the people. In addition, in 2001 Lear produced "The Declaration of Independence Road Trip: A Living Blueprint for Democracy," a teaching unit on the Declaration that I was fortunate to receive at no cost for use in my classroom. Every year it is my privilege to play the video of the reading of the Declaration.

To commemorate the historic Obama victory in the Iowa Democratic Caucus last night, I include this link. I hope you can watch at least the introduction by Morgan Freeman, where he explains for me why Obama's victory is so exciting. For me, his victory shows that as we continue our "constant struggle to achieve [the] goals" of the Declaration of Independence, there is still hope that someday we may achieve them.

Hey, Missy!

WOOT!

Teeny Little Happy Dance

I finished one page of my enlarged "Firefly Fairies" chart. I'm thinking I'm close to being done with the blue floss on the blue fairy. There are probably still a few rows of blue but most of the bottom of her skirt is the pale salmon (like the orange fairy's dress) and metallics.

I've decided to move to one of the other fairies to work with a different color of floss for awhile. When I've finished all the floss, I'll do all the metallics and the backstitching, then block the piece and stretch it onto the biggest q-snaps I can find to work the beading.

Sidebar Surfing - Part Deux

On the same day as my Australian surfin' safari, I also visited Chiloe's site. Chiloe is my friend who introduced me to the Nimue fairy. Here's my progress on her:

When I had surfed over to the Nimue site, I met "La Balancoire" ("The Swing"). I ordered this chart from ABC Stitch Therapy and it was while the chart was on its way that Chiloe arrived home from her vacation in Germany. As soon as she read that I had ordered this chart, she had to send me to one of her favored sites in France, Le monde de Typh, where this baby fairy in a swing is in progress. "Just so you can drool," she warned.

Mind you, I neither speak nor read French, but I engaged my friendly Babel fish for a (kind of) translation of the site so I could (kind of) follow along. What wonderful work and very different from what I'm used to seeing here in the western United States. Check out the piece in her logo!

Having had so much fun (and been so impressed) with this French site, I decided to surf some of the other French sites in Chiloe's sidebar. I headed next to Calina et ses Fees.

WIPE OUT!

Check this out:

Why wipe out? Because, since I neither read nor speak French, I couldn't get any hints as to who designed this or where to find it. The good news is that I was able (eventually) to track this down. It's from a company called The Victoria Sampler and is called "Family." Now I just need to find a place to order it.

I've written before that my lns is 800 miles from me. There is (was?) one in the next town but they have been so rude to me on the few times I've gone there that I prefer to just keep a list going until I can get to the condo in Utah and shop at Shepherd's Bush. However, I was so anxious to get this one that I went to the designer's website and did a shop locator search. Sure enough, it said that the shop in the next town was a distributor for these patterns, so today I drove there to see if they had this pattern. The shop was closed (as in brown paper in the windows gone.) So, I guess I'll give the lovely people at Shepherd's Bush a call to see if they have this.

Dangers in the Water

I've commented before that I love sidebar surfing. I've met more lovely, talented people that way! But there are dangers in the water when you surf, and surfing the sidebars is no different.

One of my most recent expeditions started when I did a Google search of the terms "embroidery hand primitive" and visited Cinderberry Stitches, Natalie Lymer's site from Australia. I am always struck by the whimsy in many Australian designs. (Of course, they are in a land where they get to claim indigenous animals like kangaroos, kiwis, kookaburras and the duckbill platypus, so one would think whimsy might come naturally.) At Cinderberry Stitches I fell for this free pattern for a needlecase:

Interest piqued, I had to browse the rest of Natalie's designs and coveted "Christmas Mice"

and "Christmas Wishes."

At this point, though, I ran into a serious problem. Natalie doesn't sell patterns from her site. She does, however, have her "Stocklist" posted. Where, you might ask? In her sidebar, of course. I jump on my surfboard and, "Cowabunga!" I am off to Treasured Threads,

"Your Number One Source for Australian Quilt Patterns in the US"

where my heart about stopped because there, on their home page, is the new quilt by another Australian designer, Leanne Beasley.

These folks are terrific, and in just a couple of emails my check for the full set was on the way to them! (That's what I get for surfing without a PFD - personal flotation device.)

I'm really hoping to use some of my Robyn Pandolph stash for this quilt, but just look at Treasured Threads fabric board:

Now, you think at this point I would be satisfied with my adventure, but there is always another wave (and another sidebar) to ride, isn't there?