A New Plan

 If I had a dime for every time I come up with a great new plan, I'd be a rich woman!  :)

One thing for sure - I cannot be a monogamous stitcher! I started America - 250 on February 15 and planned to stitch right through until it's finished. I'm 34.2% complete - which means if I stuck with it, I'd finish it probably by mid-May but I just cannot stick with it. I try to stitch at least 400 stitches per day. The last four days I've stitched 143, then 190, then 154, then 124. I find myself looking for anything to do other than cross stitching. 

I had to come up with a new plan.

I pulled out about 15 projects I want to get finished . . no deadline except I would love to get America - 250 finished and framed by July 4. We'll see. If I don't . . I'll get it done eventually.

For me the hardest part of getting back to an older project is finding the chart, the floss, my notes and whatever else I need to find to get back to it.

Today I pulled out the projects, and for all of them, I put the chart and the floss in a project bag, put them all in a bit with the bag right behind the frame.

Here are the projects I pulled out to work on.

1. This is the Day by Plum Street. There's not much left to be done on this one.

2. These are in no particular order as to how/when I intend to work on them. This is G. Leger by Reflets de Soie. There's a LOT left to be done on this one.

3. And God Saw by Teresa Kogut. Another one with a lot left to be done but it's so pretty!

4. Live on Little by Plum Street. This one also has a lot left to be done. The original verse says:  How great the blessing and how vast the art to live on little with a thankful heart.

I changed the verse to read "How great the blessing and vast the art to live every day with a thankful heart." We aren't wealthy by any means but when I think of "living on little", I would feel a bit weird saying we live on little, especially compared to how many are struggling these days.

5. Prairie Life Sampler by Heartstring Samplery. Still lots of stitching to do but at least the border met up! I LOVE the verse on this one:  The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful, to be happy with simple pleasures and have courage when things go wrong. That's where I would have failed being a prairie wife - I don't have much courage! 

6. This one is Mary Ellen Turner by Fox & Rabbit. There's a lot left to be done on this one too. See a pattern here? Lots to be done! But, again, the border met up. Considering the border outline is stitched, I may be close to one-third or more done on this one. It is stitched on a beautiful pink linen by X-Ju.

7. I've done a ton of stitching on this one but still have a ways to go. It's Let Freedom Ring by Lila's Studio. It will not be finished before July 4.

8. Next is Seeking Refuge by The Scarlett House.

9. And Be Kind to One Another by Needlework Press. This one is kinda narrow but long (about 5" x 21") so maybe it will go quickly.

10. Forever & Ever by Brenda Gervais.

11. Winter Rose Manor by Brenda Gervais. I started this one quite a while ago and I hope to finish it this year.

12. New Year Sampler by Owl Forest Embroidery. There's a lot to be done on this one but these individual motifs are fun and fairly fast.

13. Noel Sampler by Brenda Gervais. This is one I started when I was a beginner and there are quite a few mistakes I have to work around but once it's done, it should look fine.

14. And Heaven & Nature Sing by Kathy Barrick. 

15. And, here's America - 250.

Here's how I plan for this to work:

1. One day a week I stitch with Debbie and I have a 36 count project that I work on those days. I usually keep the same project and work on it just that one day a week so it means that project will get four days per month of working on it and I usually stick with it until it's finished so that project kinda isn't in this plan but it does reduce my stitching days for this plan to six days per week.

2. I can pick any project I want to work on but when I pick it up, I have to work on it at least five consecutive days AND I have to work on at least four different projects per month. So, in a 30 day month, take out the four days I'm stitching on something different with Debbie, that leaves 26 days. If I work on four projects for five days, that's 20 days so I can go back to one of the four projects and work more or those or pick up a fifth project and work five or six days on that. 

3. I can't work on the same project two months in a row except projects that have REAL deadlines (America - 250, a Blessing Sampler in January, a challenge every now and then).

4. New projects can be started but they are discouraged.  :)

This plan sounds like it may be challenging enough to keep my interest. We'll see. If it doesn't work . . I'll come up with a new plan! 

I'll keep you posted on how my plan works.

Winter is Back!

 No one that I know invited winter back but, nonetheless, winter is visiting for a few days. Our low tomorrow night will be 15; our high on Monday will be just around freezing and our low Monday night will be in the low 20's. I don't see any more temps that low through April 12, which is as far as I can see. I won't plant anything tender until after Mother's Day though.

One thing I don't have to worry about are the elderberries because . . they are gone!

It is a very sad story. I am NOT happy about it. I thought I was past the tears but . . I guess maybe not yet. These were the very first thing I planted when we bought this house in 2020. There are a few small bushes that I planted from cuttings but they're outside the fence and the deer will get most of those. I loved the elderberries and I loved the flowers. OK . . it's done. We move on.

Peonies will be blooming soon. I've covered those with straw. I've never grown them before doing it here so I have no idea how they will handle a hard freeze but hopefully with the ground being somewhat warm and a thick blanket of straw, they will be ok.

I've covered several of the raised beds with straw - onions, rhubarb, garlic. I'm thinking they will be fine without it but since we have the straw, I spread it over them. 

There is one mineral tub that has some kind of squash from last year that came up volunteer. I covered those hoping to protect them but I have no idea if they will survive. They don't like cold temps. I'm guessing if they don't make it, maybe there are some seeds that haven't sprouted yet and they may come up after the cold. I love volunteer plants!

I do have beets, cabbage and carrots planted and they haven't come up yet so I left them alone.

One thing I know we're going to lose . . 

The buds are opening on one of the pear trees. One tree had buds several weeks ago when we had a freeze so this means two of our three pear trees will not produce this year. A "critical temperature" chart tells me anything below 25 degrees will kill 25% of the ability to produce fruit and anything below 19 degrees will kill 90% of the ability to produce fruit so I'd say we'll be lucky to get pears off one tree.

My most precious and loved tree now that the elderberries are gone is the sour cherry. Those buds are still tight. I may lose 10% with a 15 degree temp but there are a lot of buds and I will need to thin some of the fruit if a lot of those buds produce. I'm pretty optimistic they cherries will be fine. 

The peaches and plums are pretty much in full bloom but we do have two trees that are in pots and they're blooming like crazy. Young trees won't produce much but a plum or two would be very nice. They will be in the heated garage, along with the bay leaf trees, for the next few days.

It's too expensive to heat the greenhouse so I've brought all my little seedlings inside the house.

I'll be hoping for the best - especially with that one pear tree and the cherry tree.

America - 250 Progress

 No one will be surprised to hear that I've changed my plans. Plum Street Samplers has several new patriotic charts and I was smitten with all of them. My original plan was to stitch America - 250 first.

I started it in mid-February, figured I could have it finished by the end of March (right!!), then I would start A Worthy Patriot and finish it by the end of May, have both of them framed and on the wall by July 4.

After a couple of weeks of stitching on America - 250, I changed my plans and figured I'd try to have it finished by the middle of April. That would give me the rest of April, all of May and June to finish A Worthy Patriot.

Now, I'm thinking if I get America - 250 stitched and framed by July 4, I'll be doing good!

Here's where I am as of March 9.

According to Markup, I'm 30% done and they say I will finish it on April 21. I suppose if that happens, I MIGHT could still start and finish A Worthy Patriot. We'll see. 

I also have Pledge of Allegiance and Freedom Flock, both by Plum Street. But, there's also We Are Blessed (along with the drum to be painted and put together.

If I could get two of those three done and then stitch A Worthy Patriot later, I would be happy.

Here's something funny and if there are any new stitchers here, this may give you hope. I had stitched years and years and years ago but hadn't done anything really hard. Then when I started stitching again in 2020, I was using linen and the designs were more detailed (and difficult) than what I had stitched before. 

The first few pieces I stitched when I started again, I had to get a bit creative to get things to match up. My borders would get so off that I started stitching the borders first. It was easier for me to have some "guidelines" once the border was stitched. It's still kinda rare for EVERYTHING to match up on my pieces. I know I need new glasses but I do use a magnifying light.

Anyway . . see the needle in the piece below that's just below the blue flower on the right. On this piece, I started at the top right, stitched over to the eagle. The middle of the eagle is the center of the piece. Then I started on the flag and then I started on Independence Hall. Then I stitched those letters "dent" (which is the end of "evident" - We hold these truths to be self-evident), then I started working back up towards the top.

I was shocked when I got to where my stitching had to meet up (at the needle) and it did! I told Vince this long story about how it used to never meet up and lately, it's all been matching up. He wasn't impressed. Please tell me you are!  :)

I'll keep stitching on this one until it's finished and then I'll decide what to stitch next.

Busy and Lots of Progress

When we moved into this house, our main goal was to get everything put SOMEWHERE! I can't say that we've done that yet because we still have three rental storage units but we would like to make progress and eventually get rid of those. There are several rooms in the house that have become "storage" rooms, aka . . junk rooms. The "sewing room" has become the biggest, messiest junk room of all. It isn't a fun place to be. All of the fabric from my quilting days is in there, along with ROLLS of batting, which takes up a lot of room. There were tubs and tubs of yarn. Most of my canning jars are now in the sewing room. There's a long arm that has never been put together in the 5+ years we've been here. Now there's cross stitching - tubs of linen, bins of charts, lots of floss. There's a large cutting table, several sewing machines, a serger, a cover stitch machine, an ironing table and, the latest, a tall shelf unit in front of the double door with my seedlings growing.

There's a bedroom in the basement but it's a "non-conforming bedroom" because it doesn't have a second way of egress. There are no windows in the room. Three walls are concrete. It's a very safe room, completely quiet and very cool. A lot of nights, I end up in the basement. Vince likes it way warmer than I like it. In the summer, he's very happy with the thermostat at 74 or 75. If the upstairs is 74, the basement is about 65 so many nights I end up downstairs. Or, Vince goes to bed at 10:30, I say I'll be up in a few minutes and the first thing I know, it's 2:30 a.m. I figure I'll wake Vince up when I go up and it isn't that long until he will be waking up - just as I'm getting to sleep so I just sleep in the basement.

The basement bedroom has no way out other than the door which leads into a little sitting area, then the family room, then the downstairs garage . . a long path to get to the outside if there's a fire. So, I asked Vince what he thought about moving all the yarn tubs and some of the food storage into the 'bedroom' and moving the bed into the sewing room. He was fine with it so we did it.

There's a double door that goes from the sewing room to the outside and there are two small windows that are plenty big enough to escape through, and two regular size long windows. 

Then there's the love seat. It's the one I bought when I rented the apartment in Nevada, MO before we moved here. I never used it because I only stayed in the apartment three nights and here. There's a recliner in there and I would sit in that with Boots so the loveseat has never been used really. So, it's in the sewing room and it had been piled high with "stuff". In fact, we bought blinds for all the windows in the sewing room and Vince had put them all up except that one because he couldn't get to it! Now that I have the sofa cleaned off and the space in front of the sofa cleared, he can move the sofa, get behind it, hang the blind and . . he'll be done with the sewing room.

The best news . . today I got an extra magnifying light set up, an extra Lowery stand set up and a tablet holder set up. Vince loves to watch TV. I do not. I don't like movies. It doesn't bother me for him to watch anything he wants to watch EXCEPT I don't like bad words and loud shooting and blowing things up so . . Mars vs. Venus I suppose. I guess the most important part of this story is that we only have one TV and it's in the basement family room. The dogs don't go upstairs so I pretty much live my life with the dogs in the basement family room so if Vince wants to watch TV, he has us to deal with. Now, I can take the dogs and go into the sewing room. I can stitch. I can listen to Pandora or have YouTube videos on my laptop and Vince can happily watch what he wants to watch with my "input".  :) The dogs are happy to sit with me and are kinda getting past the stage of getting into everything, although there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially if your'e a little dog.

There's still a LOT of work to be done in the sewing room but I feel like we've made some very useful progress.

Bread Baking Day

 Lunch has been served. Laundry is done. Supplies in the safe room have been checked, replenished and we're ready if we have scary storms tomorrow but it looks like they're either going south or north of us but . . we're ready.

I've mentioned here before that Vince loves Ezekiel bread and eats it every morning. I make three loaves at a time and freeze two of them. I don't keep up with how the supply is going but Vince will tell me when he gets the last loaf out of the freezer and within a week, I'll get more made.

I also made a loaf of whole wheat rye bread (about 60% rye and 40 hard white). I seem to be playing rye chicken with the rye berries. Since we're now having to drive close to 40 miles to get to the Azure pickup (80 miles round trip), I'm hoping to make an order every quarter instead of every month. The only problem with that is that often they're out of something one month and have it the next month. We'll see how it works out. I can order grains from other places but Azure has the best price and I've been happy with their grains.

The rest of today I'm going to cross stitch. I would LOVE to finish Independence Hall today.

Not much difference at all from the last time you saw it but yesterday was Stitching with Debbie Day so I was working on a piece on 36 count linen. I should be able to get 8 hours of stitching this evening .. let's see how much I can get done.

A Little Knitting Progress

 One thing you can always expect from me are very bad, non-staged photos. Today's post will not disappoint.  :)  I just decided to share a few photos of knitting projects; both dogs are asleep in my chair and I'm a firm believer in not disturbing a sleeping dog!  :)

Last night I did find my box of needles. There are several packages of interchangeable needles but many are not in the packages, which probably means they're in projects. So, the more projects I find and finish, the more needles I will have.

I ordered some stitch markers, cable needles - some of the basics from Amazon and they should arrive tomorrow.

A little backtracking story . . some of you may remember. I learned to knit in college - that was a very long time ago - 50+ years ago.  How did I get so old so fast?  I could knit basics but I never learned how to put sweaters together. There was a lady in Texas that we were friends with and she would put my my sweaters together for me. Thinking back . . I didn't know how to knit sleeves either so she would knit my sleeves and finish my sweaters. Probably in the early 80's, I stopped knitting.

Then in maybe probably 2002 - 2004, I wanted to knit again but I could not remember how to cast on. I don't know if there were youtube videos back then or if I just didn't know how to use them but more times than I care to admit, I would spend too much time on the knitting row in Hobby Lobby. Every lady that came along and looked at yarn, I would ask "Do you knit?" Most did not - they did crochet.  Finally, after many days of hanging out in Hobby Lobby looking for a knitter who would help me, someone told me about a group that met at one of the churches downtown on Tuesday mornings to eat. She knew the church, what time, etc. - I've just forgotten. So, I went down there and they got me started. Everyone had a different method of casting on and finally one of the ladies was doing it like I remembered so I was good to go. I knitted with those ladies for about a year - maybe two because we moved away from there at the end of 2006.

Today we took both of our vehicles in to get the tires rotated. We left mine, took Vince's to Hobby Lobby, then to Sam's Club; then took his to the tire shop, I left, he walked to some nearby shops and found some good deals while they were rotating his tires.

While in Hobby Lobby, I was on the knitting aisle and a young lady walked over to me and said "Do you knit?" Oh, my goodness . . I had come full circle. We stood there and talked for probably 20 minutes. I ended up giving her my phone number, told her it was fine to message me any time, told her I could meet her in Joplin and help her if we can't solve it on the phone.

OK . . back to the post.

I found several projects in bags that are started. All have needles and yarn together so these will be easy to finish - I don't have to look for anything.

I have no idea what this is - some kind of shawl. I will figure it out.

This is a cardigan and the body of it is about 3/4 done! I love this red Madelinetosh yarn. I could see this one being finished for next winter . . or maybe not!  :)

This is the one I started several days ago. I've made good progress. This one is knit in separate pieces - back, then front, then sleeves. At some point I will stitch the front to the back, then finish the collar/top area, then knit the sleeves and get them stitched in.

I will find a balance that works for me where I knit some, cross stitch more. The knitting gives my hands a break from cross stitching; and the stitching gives my hands a break from the knitting. A couple of days ago, I was happy to be knitting again; tonight I'm happy to be back to cross stitching.

I'm still working on America - 250. My plan is to finish stitching Independence Hall and fill in the flag before I put it down for a few days to knit a bit more.

The Rest of the Alpha Gal Story

 No one should ever listen to me when I talk about medical things. Got that? NEVER!

I probably wrote that I thought I was over alpha gal because I can eat anything I want to eat without having the itching, hives and breathing issues. My doctor here would not order a test, which costs $149 if I self-pay so I'm not real sure why she refused to do it. I haven't been tested since probably 2013 - 2014. I was so sure I was over it. So, so sure! 

Vince always tells me I live my life through rose colored glasses and apparently, he's right. I was thinking to myself that the CDC would probably be calling me to see how I had cured myself of alpha-gal. That's not going to happen.

I asked our doctor that we use through a subscription to order the test and he did. I had the test last week, got the results back within a few days and my alpha gal numbers have actually gone up - not down. When I opened the email and read those numbers, I actually cried. I was so disappointed.

This morning I saw a new doctor who will be my PCP - hopefully for the rest of my days. She's younger - probably a few years less than 40. I know this because I mentioned someone and they had graduated high school together.

I handed the new doctor my test results. She looked at them and said "Your numbers are high! I've never had anyone with numbers this high." Of course, the tears came rolling down again. I'm just being a baby because I know my problems are few. This is not life threatening so long as I keep my new epi-pen handy. When I think of medical problems suffered by many, I know I'm one of the lucky ones .. this is a problem that can so easily be controlled - I'm just disappointed that I allowed myself to be convinced that I was over it - kinda unrealistic but . . those rose colored glasses cause me to do/think crazy things!  :)

My numbers may be the highest she has seen but they could be a lot higher BUT, the numbers that show my "allergy level" don't have anything to do with how likely I am to react. I read that someone whose numbers are .4 may be more likely to react than someone whose numbers are 90. It's just crazy. There's an allergist a bit south of here who is supposed to be knowledgeable but I'm not sure what they can do other than tell me to not to eat beef, pork or lamb.

OK  . . enough of me feeling sorry for myself.