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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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%.

August 23, 2026 - A Messy Garden

 The heat and lack of rain has taken a big toll on the garden. It's ok . . it had a good run and I won't be sad to see the summer garden end. This is the time when every year I say I'm not having a garden next year but I know I will . . in some form. One thing I learned this year is that I'm not growing anything that will not stay contained. I had squash vines and cucumber vines everywhere - totally out of control We couldn't use the weed whacker or the lawn mower in a big chunk of the back yard because of vines that were producing. I suppose it's a good thing we had the drought because that probably helped with the weed reduction a bit. 

I'm pretty confident in saying I'm not planting squash next year - maybe a bit of zucchini that I start in the greenhouse and can get planted and producing before the squash bugs and vine borers move in. I love the Thelma Sanders squash and the Georgia Candy Roasters but it's just not worth the fight with the squash bugs. 

I have such limited space for growing and I need to get some elderberries growing in the back yard (they're outside the fence now and I don't have a good way to water them. They didn't produce much and what they did produce shriveled up and got crunchy.

My grandparents were such neat gardeners. I often look at my garden and wonder if they're happy I'm a gardener or if the shake their heads at the mess in my garden. Here are a few photos. Please let don't judge!  :)

Those Cooper tomatoes are still EVERYWHERE! They're actually Sweet 100 tomatoes. I think they should change the name to Sweet Millions or Sweet Invaders!  :)  The area above is the space between two raised beds and nowhere near where Cooper's plant was last year.

I forgot what we originally put this bed here for but whatever it was didn't do well . . oh, I remember. We bought some raspberry plants from a lady down the road last year and not one of them lived. We had already planted this same size bed of grapes and raspberries on the other side of the yard. I had never grown raspberries and then the babies started popping up around the edge of the other bed, I dug them up and brought them to this bed and this is how much they've grown since about May. They have produced quite a few berries and still have more to ripen.

The raspberries are doing so well that I think I'm going to plant some blueberries. We planted quite a few in Texas but never could get them to grow. So, if I want to plant blueberries, something has to go . . no room to add anything but I can substitute.

On the back side of this bed is where I planted my three eggplants. There were no raspberries in this bed at that time. The raspberries are not leaving the eggplants much room but they're still producing too.

On the other end of the back side of that bed is where I planted 5 or 6 okra seeds. They should make til we have a hard frost.

I have okra growing in two of the 4 x 8 raised beds, in one of the big containers that a friend gave me (he had built them for growing peppers and when they moved away, he gave me his container gardens). Vince decided to drill holes in an old fridge and plant okra in there. Not terribly attractive but the okra seems happy.

In fact, I missed two days of cutting okra and ended up with three trays to flash freeze and get vacuum sealed. Okra is another food I love that is high in oxalates (kidney stone producer!)

Once I got all the squash out of the pepper bed (squash seeds in the compost), the peppers have done quite well. I always have pretty good luck with peppers. This one is the candy cane pepper. It's basically just a pretty bell pepper but it is a bit slower to mature that plain bell peppers. I think the plant is so pretty.

The pepper will eventually get to be red with pinkish stripes but then it will turn all red.

The jalapenos that get full sun are turning red but still producing so I'm not complaining.

I planted several of these Zucchino Rampicante squash. Everyone says "Plant squash late . . the squash bugs will be gone." Not true at my house. They are everywhere! They're so aggravating. Not sure if I'll get any of these to mature or not. I saw a couple of the vine borers moths yesterday so I'm sure the squash doesn't have a chance.

Remember the bay leaves from Texas? One of these I thought was dead and tossed it out in the woods and a year or so later, I saw something green growing and it was the bay leaf so I grabbed it, re-potted it and now don't even know which one it was. That is a lot of bay leaves!

I guess I should say I have okra growing in six places. An okra seed ended up in a 5 gallon bucket with a little soil and it started growing. I've been getting a few pods of okra off it so it can grow as long as it wants.

The bright spot in the garden! I had planted marigolds in the buckets with the tomatoes, which are history, except for Cooper's tomatoes, but the marigolds are bright and happy among the weeds and vines these bright orange flowers make me smile!

With seven raised beds, I have one that's asparagus, one that's peppers, two for okra, one is rhubarb. That leaves two. I think I could put two blueberries in one 4 x 8 bed so I think I'll plant two blueberries in each of those two remaining beds. The blueberries, rhubarb and asparagus are permanent. That leaves the two okra beds and pepper bed that will get replanted each year. The peppers don't have to be transplanted until after the garlic is harvested so that gives me one "dual purpose" bed. I'm going to try that next year. I can plant a few tomatoes and some overflow peppers in the mineral tubs. Maybe I have a plan for next year's garden!