Thursday, September 3, 2026

September 3, 2026 - Furniture Moving Day

 I hope this doesn't come across as whining because I don't think I'm whining but . . I have had the hardest time finding a stitching chair I like. 

First, when we bought this house in 2020, the owners weren't taking the two Lazy Boy recliners that were in the basement. They said they would leave them if we wanted them but otherwise, they were donating them. Our furniture wasn't coming for six months (because I came here before Vince came here). We bought new furniture for the upstairs family room but had nothing for the basement, which is where the only TV is, so we were happy to keep their recliners. They were older but didn't look bad. Six years later, they look bad, they aren't comfortable anymore. They're still in the basement, which is where I stitch and where I sit probably way too many hours per day. 

I have truly tried to find a better chair/sitting situation. First, we didn't yet have Oscar and I bought an electric recliner. It was ok until Oscar came along. First, when I need to get up quickly to get something away from him, the chair goes down slowly. I can pop that foot rest down way faster manually. Second, Oscar is always on my lap or next to me and every move he makes would cause that chair to wiggle because it was a rocker/swivel recliner. That could make for some not so great stitching. I have a neighbor who has teens and they have a "rec room" type room and I figured they would use it. They were happy to get it.

Next . . I thought maybe a loveseat might be better. It had to go in a different location in the basement family room and no matter where I positioned my magnifying lamp, it was in Vince's eyes.  The loveseat itself wasn't so perfect. It felt like it didn't have enough stuffing - just felt wimpy. We talked to the store where we bought it, they sent someone out to look at it, agreed, took it back and had more stuffing put in. 

By then, I had decided I just wanted a new recliner and I wanted a bigger one so Oscar could sit comfortably next to me without us feeling crowded . . I should say without ME feeling crowded. Oscar manages to get all the space he wants and it doesn't seem to bother him at all.

So, the new recliner arrived. It's one of those kinds that you could comfortably sleep in. It's HUGE but the handle was all the way down near the floor and I almost had to crawl out of the chair to reach the handle. I know the one I sat in at the store was not that far down - almost completely on the floor. Vince sat in it and decided he loved it so he took it upstairs and brought his old recliner downstairs. Definitely not comfortable for me.

Then we bought a love seat that wasn't a recliner but had an ottoman. My legs are short so if I had the ottoman close enough that my legs could rest on it, there wasn't enough room for me to get up because the ottoman was in the way of putting my feet on the floor. When we looked at it in the store and I sat in it, the ottoman wasn't there.

I know . . there are millions of people who wish there problems were this small but really, I want a comfortable chair.

We got rid of the old sofa that I had bought when Chad was 3 years old. He's almost 40 now. I kept saying "It looks so good and it's comfortable!" It was a sleeper so it was very comfortable to sit on .. not so comfortable to sleep on. It was in the sewing room in Texas and a couple of times when the A/C wasn't working in the house, we would sleep in the sewing room on that 

As you can imagine, Vince isn't very happy when I mention that I need to find a better chair!

Earlier this week, my back was hurting so I decided to move over to the loveseat - the one that's a recliner. It's in the family room. The one that isn't a recliner is in one of the basement bedrooms.

It's a love seat. There's room for two people. I had to stack up boxes on one end to try to keep my light out of his eyes but where it's sitting, I had no place to put my pens, scissors, etc. The tablet and the lamp were right next together . . it just wasn't working.

This morning Vince left to go to PT and I thought . . I'm moving everything! The loveseat was heavy but I managed to move it over to where the recliner was; moved the recliner to where the loveseat had been. I had to plug some open areas with storage bins to keep the dogs out of trouble. 

This is the recliner that I have to use my legs to put it down. I definitely can't do that with my knee so I'm kinda sitting in the middle. I keep the left side extended and sitting in the middle, I can still stretch my legs out but I can also put my feet down and little to the right and not have to put down the foot rest to get up.

Another good thing about having the love seat is if I have a longer project (I use scroll frames and don't have a whole lot of space to move the project to the left or right), I can scoot over to the left or scoot over to the right and be right where I need to be.

I had to stack more storage bins between the loveseat and Vince's chair because Oscar jumps from Vince's chair to the love seat and I'm afraid he's going to hurt himself.

I really like the place where my recliner was and now where the loveseat is (I can see almost all of the family room and know what the dogs might be getting into). I think everything as far as where the magnifying light is; where the stand for the tablet is, where the Lowry stand is . . just hoping the loveseat is still comfortable after sitting for hours and hours.

Once I get everything put back where it goes, I'll share some photos.

Vince got home from PT and I asked him to come downstairs for a minute. He came down and talked to me, sat down in his chair . . never even noticed that the furniture was all moved around. Let me order one piece of linen and he notices that!  :)

Sunday, August 30, 2026

August 30, 2026 - Looks Good From a Galloping Horse!

I had a quilting friend years and years ago who wasn't very precise with her cutting or her sewing. It never bothered her and she would look at what she had just stitched and say "It looks fine . . from a galloping horse, don't you think?" I've always been of the opinion that if the creator/maker of something is happy with it, I'm happy with it.


From that distance, it doesn't look too bad.


From this distance, maybe not so great. I don't even know if I did it correctly but it's done. There's one more row of it to do. I think I'll go ahead and get it done so I can stop thinking about it.

Tomorrow (Monday) I'll get back to working on the Blackbird project - Come Into My Garden. 


Saturday, August 29, 2026

August 29, 2026 - A Wasted Morning

 Wasting time is one thing that makes me crazy. Of course, my idea of wasting time is probably different from everyone else's.  :)   I can sit and fondle linen or floss all day and to me, that isn't wasting time. Looking for something I can't find .. that is a total waste of time.

My plan for this morning was to get the okra cut, get the sprinklers going, pick peppers, get the okra rinsed, cut and on a tray to flash freeze, vacuum seal the cut okra from yesterday and then I could start stitching. I was going to stitch two hours on Rejoice Evermore, then get 450 stitches made on Come Into My Garden, then go back to Rejoice Evermore if there was time.

All the gardening/food storage things got done. I was out in the garden just as the sun was coming up - a little after 6:30. I was done with all the food and garden chores by 7:30. Took a shower and was ready to start stitching. 

Yesterday I pulled out the Rejoice Evermore project (bag with floss and the stitching on the scroll frame. Then last night, this picture popped up on my Facebook memories. This happened at the beginning of 2024.


Luckily, I had made a PDF for using in Markup R-XP but back then, I didn't know how to add the key/legend to my project in Markup so with the paper chart gone, I had no key.  I put the entire project away and then in May of this year, I got it out to work on it. No legend. I went back to the PDF I had made, printed myself a legend and kept the paper copy with me. I worked on this project for a couple of weeks and when I pulled it out to start working on it again this morning - no key/legend. I searched and searched. I thought . . I'll just go back to the original PDF except apparently when I cleaned out a bunch of files, that one got dumped. I decided to order a new chart but they're $18 plus shipping. Nope, not doing that either.

Then I told myself . . I have so much stitching done on this already, I can match the floss up to the same symbol I've already stitched but you know how my brain is - there's probably a little (or a lot) of OCD in there. I absolutely could not make myself stitch without a key. I would make 2 stitches, get up and look some more. In two hours, I made 11 stitches. Ridiculous! It would have been perfectly fine to match colors to previous stitches but I just couldn't do it.

Vince and I had to run an errand and I was telling him. He asked me where I stored my original PDFs that I make. I told him how in the beginning when I first started making them, I would save them to the memory card in my phone . . oh, wait! I didn't clean that off. I grabbed my phone, went to those files and found the PDF, with the key.

I have now printed three of those keys. One is in the project bag. One is pinned onto my design wall and one is in the side pocket of my chair . . where dogs cannot reach it. Surely some day I will finish this project and laugh about this. Today I am not laughing about it.

August 29, 2026 - Table Made by Chad

 Chad used a piece of wood that Vince had in storage and made a table/desk for Nicole's office.


Here's a picture of the top before it was assembled onto the legs.


Isn't that so pretty! I'm so proud of Chad. He loves doing things like that. I don't know how he's done it - he works out in the heat and then comes home and worked an hour or so in the evening in the hot garage.

Just wanted to share and . . maybe brag a little.  Moms can do that, right? Some will remember Chad's middle school and high school years . . I'm so thankful he's the man/father/husband/son he is today. 

Friday, August 28, 2026

August 28, 2026 - Sampler September

 

Because I do much better with deadlines and accountability, I try to participate in challenges, stitch alongs, etc. with cross stitching. I so rarely stick with it but it is fun to plan and start.

Since I'm committed (or as committed as I get!) to the Blackbird Academy, and I need to stitch as much as I can to keep up with that, I'm on the fence about Sampler September. Everyone pretty much interprets it differently. Some will start several (or MANY) samplers during September. Some will work on one sampler and try to get it finished. At this point, with three days until September 1, I think I'm going to do some minimum participation in Sampler September. I'm thinking about working two hours each day on a WIP that is "sampler-ish" - something that could reasonably be finished some time soon. I dug through some projects and came up with these two. 


This is Rejoice Evermore and I'd like to think I could finish this in a couple of weeks working two hours per day.

The second one is Winter Rose Manor.


I don't think I could finish this one in two weeks working a couple of hours a day but I could make some good progress and getting it closer to being finished so this is my Sampler September plan for now.

The Blackbird Academy project will remain my main project and if I don't get Come Into My Garden finished in September, I'll chose a smaller project for October and try to finish that quickly and then get Come Into My Garden completed. I do not want to end up with Blackbird WIPs after the end of Blackbird Academy.

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Dasher & Dancer

 For several years I have wanted to stitch Dasher & Dancer. I told Debbie in January that this is one I am going to get done in 2026. Not going to happen but I am going to start it!


It isn't HUGE but it's big. It's 355 x 168 so it will be about 17-3/4" x 8-1/2" on 40 count. If I use 36 count, it would be 19-3/4" x 9-3/8".

Yesterday I was watching flosstube and Sara W. (Stitching With Sarah W.) showed her Dasher & Dancer (at about 11:10). 

The struggle for me with starting it, besides having too much else I want to work on, is that I wasn't sure what color floss to use. I've seen it stitched in green and loved it. I ordered a Colour & Cotton green and then decided maybe I'd rather have silk so I ordered a green silk. Then I decided  . . no, I'd rather red. I ordered a Vikki Clayton Red silk, then I ordered several colors of red. This takes a good bit of floss so I have quite an investment in floss for this project. 

But, yesterday, watching Sarah, she was using Colour & Cotton's Dracula. It's so pretty. That might be the winner of the floss contest for this project. I ordered the Dracula and at some point soon, I will choose a linen. If I decide to go with 36 count, I may have to see if Vince will make a longer scroll frame for me. Maybe I have a longer frame that has something else in it . . so much to think about!  :)

Let's hope the Dracula floss works and if not, I just pick one I already have and don't order more floss for that project.

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

August 25, 2026 - A Bit of Stitching

 As you might guess, there hasn't been much going on around here. Yesterday I went back to bed after getting up and watering the garden and slept from about 7:30 until 10. Then I still slept well last night. About noon today I told Vince I was going to take a nap until almost 4 p.m. That's just a crazy amount of sleeping going on. So . . not much to report!


The first thing I need to explain is that I did not stitch 991 stitches on the 17th. That's when I switched everything over to a test project on Markup and I marked off ALL the stitches I had already stitches. The second thing is that on the 22nd, I got home from the hospital and thought . . no one will expect anything out of me this afternoon. I can stitch for hours. I made one stitch and decided I should go to bed. :)

On the 24th, I did meet my goal of 400+ stitches. I think I will again today.


Here's where I am on this piece (Come Into My Garden by Blackbird Designs. Actually, I'm just a tad farther because I've outlined the whole border. There's still more border stitching though. The border has double rows and I did half stitches on only one row of the border so there's still quite a few stitches there. I thought finishing this before the end of September would be a piece of cake but I'm not so sure right now. I will not be able to keep up with my percentage done because I had to break this chart into two projects because of the crazy formatting on this one. It's ok . . it either gets done or it doesn't.

 

I've been quite disciplined . . stitching the border, starting at the top and going down but . . there's only so long I can remain disciplined and I want to stitch that house. So, the new plan is that I'm going to stitch over to about the lower case "c" and "d", then stitch probably 1 - 10 on the row below, then I'm going to work on the house! My plan MAY be to stitch what's left and right of the house, fill in the border on both sides towards the top and I believe I'll be close to halfway done by then.

I'm going to change some of the bottom so I'll have to make some decisions by the time I get that far down.

As far as the kidney stone, the stent comes out tomorrow and I'm so hoping I'll feel MUCH better once that's done. I still don't have a lot of energy. Yesterday I decided to put a roast in the slow cooker for today, make cookies, make homemade pasta for our lunch and about halfway through the cookies, I realized . . I am going to struggle to finish all this. I did it but today I stayed out of the kitchen and will plan my projects a little better until I'm back to 100%.

September 3, 2026 - Furniture Moving Day

  I hope this doesn't come across as whining because I don't think I'm whining but . . I have had the hardest time finding a sti...