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.

The Knitting Bug

 I should not have listened to that little voice that kept saying "Knitting would be fun. Finish some projects you have started. Maybe start something new!" But . . I listened.

There's a pretty major problem though. I cannot find the tub that has my knitting needles in it. I haven't seen it since we moved 5-1/2 years ago! I thought . . I'll just buy more but that's ridiculous. They have to be here somewhere but will I spend years looking for them and then the desire to knit will be gone?

I had not yet started cross stitching when we moved here so I have a couple of projects that have needles in them. Until I find more needles, I'll have to finish one project, find another project that uses the same size needles . . and go from there.

The good news is that I finished the body of this sweater a couple of months ago. I'm guessing this is one I started before I started back to cross stitching. I had been my 'knit in the car' project. I kept it in the car and if Vince was driving, I would knit. If I was waiting somewhere, I would knit. All I have to finish are the sleeves and that will free up a set of needles BUT . . I also can't find the stitch markers. Maybe when I find the needles, the stitch markers will be with them. I did order more stitch markers from Amazon and they should be here tomorrow.

I hadn't started the sleeves because they need markers but I've decided to just cut some pieces off colored thread or yard and use those for markers to mark where I've decreased on the sleeves. I would knit the two sleeves at the same time but the cables I have aren't long enough. Such problems!  :)

At least I kept the yarn together and I have more than I'll need to finish two sleeves. 

Next project I will start is Boulevardier by Baby Cocktails.

The yarn is Berroco Ultra Alpaca and tonight I hope to get the back side cast on and get started on the ribbing.

Husband Needs Cooking Lessons!

 Please read til the end and then tell me if you think my husband needs cooking lessons. I'm not complaining. I know  . . it sounds like a complaint. Some days I overload myself. Some days, if you're going to do something, it makes sense to do a LOT of something and get it over with and have only one big mess to clean up.

This morning Vince wanted pancakes. He's been wanting pancakes. Could Vince make pancakes? Apparently NOT! So I made pancakes with bacon for me and ham for him.

Then I started canning. We go through a lot of cannellini beans with using them in smoothies and we love them. I thought I had measured out enough beans to make 14 quarts but apparently, while Vince is in cooking classes, Judy should be taking math classes!  :)

I filled the 14 quarts and still had more beans. I filled 7 pints using the cooking liquid from the second boil of the beans and added no salt. Those will be for smoothies. One pint broke in the canner, dang it. Maybe Judy needs canning lessons too!  :)

While the canner was cooling down, and releasing pressure, I cooked dinner.

It's quick. It's easy. It's delicious and there's always leftovers. I like this recipe because it doesn't have any added sugar. The one I used to use had brown sugar added.

That's a half gallon jar so it's a lot of leftovers. We don't even serve it over rice - just cabbage, ground beef, onions, carrots and the sauce.

Once the kitchen was cleaned from that, I ran downstairs and buried today's veggie scraps. I do this almost every day. You can see that my garden soil is looking halfway decent. I do have a compost bin but . . mice have become quit a problem and I'm not sure if part of the problem isn't the compost bin. It's way back from the house and the neighbor has one too but they really made a mess in mine. I suppose there's nothing to keep them from digging through my raised beds but it seems like, with the compost bin, it's a constant buffet for them. Here, I'll use one raised bed one day, another the next and then I'll also use the mineral tubs. I'd like to think the mice don't get in those but I'm sure they do.

Then I came in, got the jars out of the canner. That's when I realized one pint that had broken. Had to let the canner finish cooling down and clean up that mess. Thank goodness it wasn't a greasy mess. I think I might have cracked that jar the other day. I remember hitting one and thinking . . I hope I didn't break that. The jar that cracked was one I got out of the dishwasher (because I'm almost completely out of jars) so I'm betting that's what happened. It was one of my Azure jars so that makes me sad .. sad about the beans and sad about the jar.

Nice looking beans.

Tomorrow we're having roasted chicken for lunch because I need leftover chicken to make soup for Tuesday. Got the chicken seasoned and in the fridge. Got the countertops sanitized and all the chicken germs/bacteria cleaned up. Whew I was tired!

One last thing to do was take the dogs out for a walk. Oscar will not go out with Vince if I'm home. Maybe our dogs need to to take obedience classes! I take them one at a time so that took a little while. Came in. It was about 5:30. I thought I would sit down and read my email and look what's in my inbox!

SEVEN emails from Vince with recipes he wants me to make. I'm thinking . . I have spent the entire day in the kitchen and you're sending me recipes to try. I think I'm going to propose that I'll be the canner and he can be the cook - breakfast and dinner . . and clean up the messes and I'll keep the jars filled and the garden going. Sounds reasonable to me. Thoughts??  :)