Snow Day

I'm not sure "snow day" really covers it. We so rarely get snow, you know. I did actually see very very fine snow at 10:15 am but by 10:30 it had changed to sleet and that's all we got the rest of the day- just sleet. It's kinda neat, though, to stick your head out the door and hear all the click-click-clicks as the little crystals hit the roof or trees or porch. Our American Eskimo dogs loved it- they'd play outside until they had icicles hanging from their fur and only then came in for a drink or a good petting, then back outside for more play. That's Buster on the left, and PeeWee on the right. DH Stan says it was "child abuse". How can it be child abuse when they kept begging to go outside?!?

Do you know how fast wild birds go through black-oil-sunflower seed when it's icy outside? Suffice to say ...any more ice storms and we'll need a several-billion-dollar bailout to keep buying bird seed!

Today's been busy: I started a Lynette Anderson pattern that will be a needle case. Right now I'm working on the hand embroidery- haven't done it in years! In Australia it seems most embroiderers use a stabilizer on the fabric before embroidering so I'm trying that. It seems to work very well and enables stitching without a hoop, plus the threads don't show through. I have one of Lynette's BOMs called Kitten Tales (anything with cats, you know) and can't wait to start it but I wanted to work on a smaller project 1st, thus the needle case. I've also downloaded several other free BOMs from different websites - some are hand embroidery with patchwork, some are applique with patchwork. Lynnette at the Ardmore Sewing Center has promised to give me applique lessons. Hope I can do it!

I did make the Scrap Therapy Table Runner today and like almost everybody these days, I used fabrics from my stash, I didn't go "buy" anything. (That would have been hard since it was icy outside and I didn't leave the house!) I found an old Debbie Mumm border print to use and found some scraps that went well with it. Isn't it amazing what we got stuffed away in our stashes? And since it's only a table runner, I crosshatched it on the Bernina rather than loading it onto the Gammill.

I"m also working on a Scrap Therapy panel project using fabric I bought almost a year ago at a quilt show- a very rich looking cat panel. I'll take more pictures when the camera's awake. Things were going very smoothly until I made a silly mistake and that's a clear sign that it's too close to bedtime to be sewing.

Meanwhile, the mind is churning with more & more projects--y'all know what that's like. We've got more ideas than we'll ever have time to churn out for real- and it makes a real mess in the studio when there's books over here, fabrics that go together over there, a pattern and its supplies in the middle, and then the cat wants to sleep atop it all! And every flat surface is covered with piles of its own --books, patterns, fabric, oh look! There's the schematic we drew for getting the studio organized! Let's go study that!