Lots of pictures to bore you with.....

First off, I got back to Susan Rambo, even with secret stitching going on.  I'm pleased -- I really want to finish her up.

Susan Rambo Sampler

40ct Meadow Rue

called for NPI with substitutions

She's soooooo pretty!

I love how she's coming out.

Next, my TUSAL report.  The new moon is June 1, so I'm doing it now.

Like my bunny pincushion?  I'll have to show you my pincushion collection sometime.  This one is by Lori Ann Corelis.  I love her work!  The antique strawberry hanging from it is from Kathy Barrick.  Isn't it cool?

You can see our rhododendrons blooming too!

Remember last week when we helped the girl child move her stuff around at school?  Here are some pics she took of our wanderings in town after the move.

At the Indian restaurant.

Yum!

Sated.

Walking around town.  (I'm hiding behind the father type.)

Doing some shopping.

Saying goodbye.

Pretty good, huh?  Took the girl child a while to send me the pics, so they're a week late.

I don't know if you can tell from the pics, but the boy child got an extreme hair cut.  Here he is in all his shorn glory.

(He wasn't cooperating.)

Here are a couple he took of himself.  Works much better.  (He doesn't like having his pic taken. (Like mother, like son.))

Never thought I'd say this, but I miss his long hair.  :D   At least his senior pictures have the long hair in them.  (Why do they take senior pics at the end of junior year?  Is it like that at all high schools?)

I think I've remembered everything.   Told you I would bore you with pictures.  :D   Sorry!

Thanks as always for stopping by and saying hi.  I hope everyone has a great Memorial Day.  Don't forget to remember and honor those who have served and are serving our country.

Mia says to take a nap.

Sorry, Ms Rambo.....

Poor Susan Rambo has become a neglected piece.  I had to work on my Jeannette Douglas class piece.  I just had to.  It's done, but I'm still not sure I can show it to you.  So I'll just show a couple of motifs.

Those are blankets in the middle there.  Aren't they cool?  Such fun to stitch too!  And

I got to try darning for the first time!  It was fun!  Takes me back to my weaving days.  :D

Here is a picture that was taken for my friend Nancy (no blog) with her camera of Nancy, Kathy (no blog) and I with Jeannette.  I'm glad one of us remembered a camera!

I so enjoyed this class!  And the best part is it's so doable!  It's finished!  Finished finished even!  :D   Once Jeannette teaches this piece again, perhaps I can show you the whole thing.

But poor Susan Rambo.  I really want to finish her, but I have to do some secret stitching now.  I'll be able to tell you about this secret project, but not yet.  Sometime next month I'll show you.  Hopefully I can work on both the secret project and Ms Rambo.  We'll see!

If you want to see a beautiful, finished Susan, go to Tamami's blog.  She just finished hers, and it's gorgeous!!!!  You can visit Mia's online friend too, Ms Limo.  Such a cutie!

In other news, the three of us trekked down to the girl child's college to help her move into another dorm and to take some of her belongings home with us.  The girl child is staying at college for the next week and a half so she can work the college reunions.  It's always a chore to move her and her stuff around.  But it got done in record time.  And then we could have some fun -- a late lunch at a yummy Indian restaurant, a wee bit of shopping for some sale sweaters, and a naughty treat at the local ice cream shop.  It was weird leaving the girl child behind and yet having lots of her stuff in the back of the car.

The French Open started yesterday.  I'm looking forward to being able to sit and stitch and watch the goings on.  Unfortunately, Mia isn't used to me sitting in the TV watching chair.  (The TV watching chair is usually the father type's territory.)  She's taken up residence.

She will not be best pleased with me when I kick her off the chair.  lol!  Ah well.  Such is life!

Thanks as always for stopping by and saying hi!  It's so much fun to meet new people and chat with friends.  Have a great week!

fun, fun, fun!

First off, here is Susan.  She's coming along slowly but surely.

This pic was taken with a flash and the rest were taken with just my ott lite.  (It's rainy today.)

She's pretty, isn't she?

I love that duck in the middle!

So is that the fun, you ask?  Well, Susan is fun to stitch, but no.  That's not what I was referring to in the title.  And you will want to throttle me, cause I'm going to tell you about the fun, but I don't have pictures of the fun -- except for a few.

This weekend was a two day class at my LNS with Jeannette Douglas.  It was a fun two days too!  Jeannette taught us a new piece called the Island of Hope Sampler based on her research of Ellis Island.  She requested that we not show too much of the piece since she's hoping to teach it at another location next year.

But I figured I would show you a small part of my sampler to give you a tease.

I think the lovely star quilt motif is one of my favorite parts of this design.

Jeannette is such a lovely person, very fun, and a wonderful teacher too.  We got to work our way down the sampler, doing a motif here and a motif there and learning new stitches and techniques along the way.  It was great to be able to stitch on the sampler as we went along.  Jeannette also showed us a slide show about herself and her family, her designs, and of various places where she has taught.  At the end was a lovely slideshow of sampler collections and stitching tool collections she has visited.

Of course we also got to shop.  lol!  I picked up a few things, of course.  I so want to stitch this piece of Jeannette's.

As is so often the case, the picture doesn't do it justice at all.  For one thing, it's not stitched on white linen.  There are also smalls to go with the piece.

Jeannette showed me how easy it is to do the finishing on the box top and the smalls.  She says she is another one of those who would rather be stitching than finishing, so she likes easy finishing.  Which is good!

And there was a model of this piece that one of our class mates had stitched and which was framed.

Once again, the picture doesn't do it any justice at all.  IRL, it's spectacular!  Beautiful colors (red, ladies!), wonderful stitch design.  It's so neat!  So of course I had to get it as well.

I'm so glad I took this class.  Jeannette is a wonderful teacher and so much fun to learn from!

Finally, I won a prize from Catherine of Bramblewood Stitches.  She and her family had gone to Williamsburg, and while there, she picked up a cute bag to give away.  But she gave me much more than just the bag!

It had goodies in the bag as well!

She gave me some charts -- and she really picked well, she knows my tastes!  Also some chocolate (yum!), some stationery, a lovely piece of linen, and some fibers that look very very Williamsburg in color!  Thank you so much, Catherine!  I feel so spoiled!

I forgot to mention last week that the boy child's NYSSMA score wasn't that great.  He got a 95, an A.  Not good enough for All State.  But that's ok.  The boy child doesn't seem to mind.  He's just happy to be done with NYSSMA auditions for good.  :D

I will close with a picture of the two friends in a position that the boy child seems to enjoy.  I think Mia enjoys it much less.  lol!

Poor Mia!

Thanks as always for stopping by and saying hi!  I enjoy our visits.  Have a great week!

Happy day after Mother's Day!

Hope everyone had a good Mother's Day!  I did.  :D

But first off, let me show you my progress on Susan Rambo.

She's so pretty!  Although I do think the squirrels look a bit hunchbacked.

And like they have weird, pointy helmets on.

I used 931a for the color for the squirrels instead of my substitute for 603 (931), since I thought it looked more squirrel-like.  (It looks a bit more purple IRL.)  I've just about come to the conclusion that I may do the same from now on -- just use 931a for all the places where it calls for 603.  I've also discovered to my consternation that the yellow-brown used in the wreath around the parent's names to me should be much greener in color.  I get the sinking feeling that the piece shown in the SANQ mag must be the original and not the model?  Dunno.  Anyway, that same color was used in the grass under the squirrel.  I subbed  the lighter green from the border instead.  I wish I'd realized this before I stitched that wreath. Hate that yellow-brown color on the wreath.  But I'm way too lazy to frog it.

As for Mother's Day, it was a gorgeous day here so we took advantage and went wandering around our favorite antiquing town, Cold Spring, NY.  (Not Cold Spring Harbor.)  The boy child should have been studying for his music theory AP exam, but what the heck.  I think he was about as ready as he was going to be.  We had fun wandering around and looking at the antiques and the people.  Sat by the riverside for a while too, but it was a bit too windy and chilly to stay long by the waterside.  We also went to Barnes and Noble to check out the written word, so that was nice.

Guess what the father type got me for Mother's Day?  (How did he know what I wanted?  :D)

You should be hearing squeals of delight about now.  Yes, my very own, antique toy Singer sewing machine!  I love it!  It's in great shape too!  Came with the original box and clamp.  Even had a little pack of needles and a little key.

Mia has been very curious about it, as you can see.  I think the main attraction for her, though, was the wrapping material the clamp was wrapped in.  She thought it was the greatest toy.  lol!

I got to talk to the girl child by video chat for Mother's Day as well.  She managed to make me cry with her little Mother's Day post that she sent me.  She's busy writing final papers for college and worrying about possible summer jobs/internships so no time for her to come home.  But at least we got to talk.

Can I just put in a slight off-topic here and say wow?   Novak Djokovic is unbeaten so far this year in tennis.  He's managed to beat Nadal in their last three meetings (all finals), their last one being on clay, Nadal's surface of choice.  Wow.  I'm impressed!  He's 32 and 0 so far in 2011.  The French Open should be interesting this year!

Sorry about that.  Now for something more on topic.

Here's the boy child torturing Mia by picking her up in a bag.  She'd been doing her usual thing of enjoying hanging out inside the bag.  Don't think she was pleased to be up in the air.

Thanks as always for stopping by and saying hi.  It's a pleasure to read your comments and to talk with you all.  Hope you have a great week.

A very musical weekend, framing, TUSAL -- in short, a long post

Lots to talk about with this post.  First off, a Susan Rambo update.  The flower borders are finished!  Yay!

And I made sure to check to see if the bottom border meets -- it does!  Love those little chickens (or whatever they are).

Next, a quick TUSAL report for May's new moon.

Love all the colors!

I forgot to post about my framing in my last post.  Duh!  Went to my LNS a couple of weeks ago, and got a couple of pieces back.  Here is Jane Tindall.  Love her!

Here's a detail of the frame.

And here's Guarding Eden.

And a frame detail.

Definitely a senior moment when I forgot to post!

We had a very busy, musical weekend this weekend.  Friday was the boy child's final NYSSMA audition.  We counted the number of times he's done NYSSMA -- it came out to 7 times, from the first year he took double bass in 5th grade.  Pretty amazing!  Only two of the years were actual All State auditions, this year and last, as only juniors and seniors are allowed to take part in All State.  Both the boy child and I feel he didn't do as well this year in his audition -- he messed up on a scale, and felt he was a bit shaky at the beginning of his audition piece.  But it sounded pretty good to me through the door.  Of course one can never hear very well through a door.  lol!  We should hear in a week or so what his score was.  Fingers crossed!

Sunday was the boy child's non-orchestra concert in NYC.  It was at Avery Fisher Hall -- the second time he's performed with his orchestra there.  Here's a very blurry picture taken with my cell phone.  (Cameras weren't allowed, despite the fact that cameras were actually everywhere.)

You might recognize the Avery Fisher Hall stage from things like Live at Lincoln Center.  The boy child is second from the front of the stage in the bass section.  Very successful concert, sounded wonderful as always.

Before the concert, the father type and I got to wander the city a bit.  We wandered over to Central Park, and I was thrilled to discover that we were only a little ways down from the Dakota building and Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon in Central Park.  So we wandered over there, and of course I had to take a picture.  My cell phone did a pretty good job!

If you want to read about Strawberry Fields in Central Park, there's an article about it in Wikipedia.  There's also an article about the original Strawberry Field (the one that inspired the song) in Liverpool.
Being a Beatle fan, I was very moved to be at this memorial to John Lennon.  When I told the boy child we'd gone there, he was totally jealous.  :D   (He's a huge Beatle fan too.)

The father type and I also went to the branch of the American Folk Art Museum that is close to Lincoln Center, and I got to see a small quilt exhibit there, which was very enjoyable.

Here's a picture of the boy child in his finery at home before the concert.

He was being silly, in case you can't tell.  :D

And finally a couple of pics of the two friends together.

Mia enjoying the open window, and looking back at the boy child through the window.

And the boy child and Mia tussling together on the bed.

Thanks as always for stopping by and saying hi.  I love reading your comments and visiting with you all. Hope you have a great week!