a sunny tuesday update

It’s another gorgeously sunny day.  And the kids have been back in school so it was blissfully quiet. :0

Arden’s been having trouble sleeping from 3 till 7 a.m. lately, and that combined with having all the kids home for a little over a week kind of took a toll on me. So instead of going to visit a friend in Delft this morning as I’d planned to do, I took a raincheck and instead did all my errands and housework that had not gotten done during the past few days. But we did the errands slowly - walking instead of driving whenever possible. I just love these sunny days! On our way back from walking to the bank, I even saw the first duckling of the season! What is cuter than a baby duck?

Today was Nicky’s first meeting for “Book Beasties” - a sort of pre-reading group for kids of about 5 years old. We went to the library yesterday to try to set the mood. He was a little nervous about it at breakfast, but by the afternoon, when it was time to go, he was his usual irrepressible, enthusiastic self. It turned out they didn’t do much with books, but he had a blast anyway.

Thank you all so much for your too-kind comments over my play-with-clay attempts yesterday! I’ve read that you can varnish Fimo after it has baked to give it a nice shine … does anyone know about this? I didn’t see anything like clay varnish at the hobby store, but I would like to ’shine up’ the finished products so the glitter in the clay shows up better.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around at making some very simple cross stitch patterns using this freeware program. While not suitable for photographs or large projects, it is at least a good jumping-off point for smaller/simpler designers. Look what resulted from a Curious George birthday invitation - obviously, I won’t be using the scores of suggested DMC colors, but I love to pick colors anyway. Somebody we know and love has a birthday coming up in only 7 1/2 months … one can never begin brainstorming too early! LOL!

Eventually last night I managed to settle down long enough to do a little bit of stitching on Thine Forever. Have I mentioned how much I love working on this?
 

 

and now for something totally different

A little while ago, I provided a link to an etsy seller whose cross stitch artwork included the female reproductive system. Not to everyone’s taste, perhaps, but most certainly original. Last night I was wandering down some of the less well-lit pathways of cyberspace and visited the old site of Blog Green (now more menacingly named Radical Cross Stitch), which was full of links to different destinations, including this one, which I’d tried to tell another blogging friend about recently - but of course, I’d failed to bookmark the site and could only dither on about the cool samplers in a sort of pointless fashion.

Kate Westerholt designs samplers that fly in the face of convention when it comes to the text bits. LOL. You’ll not find any tombstone angels exhorting you to remember this when I am dead and gone, but instead, you’ll be told to Get your freak on. Yeah, I like that one.