This week’s SBQ was suggested by Vash and is:
Which way do you stitch, i.e. do you stitch /// followed by \\\ on top, or the other way around \\\ followed by ///? Are you left- or right-handed and do you think that this affects the way that you stitch?
Hmmm… this question sounds familiar. I stitch /// followed by \\\ and I am right-handed. I have no idea if this affects my stitching or not, nor do I care, as long as it looks good and is relaxing for me. 🙂
Well, I did it. I stopped at Michael’s on my way home from my Dr. Steve appointment this evening and I purchased materials to make matching bracelets for my friend Mary and I to wear:
I have decided to use the design used for the pink Hope bracelet that I made recently, except the design will be customized with very special meaning for Mary. There will be two repeats of the pink beads, to symbolize her two bouts with breast cancer, 1 repeat of the white beads to symbolize her latest fight against lung cancer and a final repeat of the purple beads to symbolize that she is (and will continue to be) a cancer survivor. The charm assortments along the bottom contain angels on the left side and hearts on the right. I have yet to decide which to use, but I’m leaning towards the praying angel charm, as I truly think that she will love it the best. I will make her bracelet slightly longer than mine to ensure that it fits because my wrists are small and bony. 😆
I’m excited to feel like I am doing something. I will take some time this weekend, I think, to put the bracelets together (I estimate it will take me about 30 minutes each) and then I will see if she’s available for a visit so that I can take them to her and give her a BIG hug!
P.S. On an unrelated note, I tracked down the furnace installer (the company was bought out and moved, which is why their old number no longer worked) and they came out today and fixed the furnace. Yay! We have heat until the new system goes in. 😀
I would count this as a realization, but I’ve always known this for a fact – Life is NOT Fair.
My best friend at work has been having some breathing difficulties on and off for nearly 6 months. She has gone to the doctor repeatedly and was told that it must be allergies. Given that I think we currently reside in a “sick” office building, I wasn’t surprised. However, last week her chest congestion and breathing problems worsened and she became very concerned. She went to the doctor for the third time about this issue and this time he sent her for a chest x-ray. The x-ray revealed that something foreign had infiltrated both lungs, so they sent her for a CAT scan with the contrast dye injected into her bloodstream. She was told that it could be lung cancer, damage to her lungs from previous radiation and chemotherapy treatments or a bad infection. Obviously, she was hoping for the latter. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Yesterday, she went to her oncologist and received the news that it was most probably lung cancer. They need to run some needle biopsies and several other tests to prove the diagnosis conclusively and determine treatment.
This is where the “life isn’t fair” part comes in. My dear friend has survived breast cancer – TWICE. She also had a small mass removed from her arm a couple of years ago that required no further treatment. This woman has been through hell and back (excuse my language) and now she’s going to have to go through it all over again. Cancer has cast a huge shadow over her life for so many years. Everytime she has a health problem, she worries that the cancer has come back again. And here it is.
I called and spoke with her yesterday afternoon and she was very calm about it, but she did admit that she was still in shock. Of course, my selfish instincts have me wracking my brain to figure out what I can possibly do for her. I found a website that sells products for every cancer known to man (practically), so I filled up a cart. I then abandoned it, thinking that there is always still some remote possibility that she won’t have it and that I should wait until all of the test results come back. I know that it is wishful thinking, but part of me insists on waiting.
And yet another part of me groans inwardly, saying “Not again!” You may remember that all hell started to break loose in my life around this time last year. By this time last year, I had lost my maternal grandmother, my mother-in-law (Mom2) and was a little over a month away from losing my paternal step-grandfather. He had lung cancer, too.
I feel like I’m going through all the stages of grief nearly simultaneously and I haven’t even lost her (and hopefully, I won’t). I am in denial, I’m scared, I’m sad and I’m angry, all at the same time. I just want to beat my breast, look up towards the heavens and scream “WHY?!” I feel an insatiable need to rip the pink bracelet off of my arm, run out and buy supplies to make a new one in pearl/clear, which is the color of the lung cancer awareness ribbon. Better yet, I want to make one in three colors – pink for breast cancer, pearl for lung cancer and purple for cancer survivors – just for her. In fact, I may stop at Michael’s on my way home from my appointment with Dr. Steve tonight to pick up the beads. I feel so helpless, powerless to help her. And yet, I feel guilty because I know that what she is going through is worse and so much more important than my own reaction. But I can’t help her deal with this challenge until I deal with it myself.
I wonder what the life lesson is here, both for her and for me. For her, I told her yesterday that I think it’s yet another wake up call. She has so many things that she has always wanted to do in her life and she hasn’t gone out and done them. I told her that we need to come up with a plan to get her where she wants to go, doing what she wants to do, being who she wants to be. This may be her last chance or it may not. But how can you go wrong with knocking out those important life to-do items that we all put off?
My friend’s name is Mary. Please keep in your thoughts, send her healing energy, pray for her or whatever you happen to do for people in need.
Thank you for allowing me a venue to express my feelings.
That is the ultimate question, isn’t it? Well, let’s see… I spent most of last week fighting headaches and migraines, so I barely stitched. In the meantime, I received a package in the mail that is an unscheduled round robin piece that I need to turn around within a week, if possible. I started that this weekend and then focused most of my time on Catherine-Michele’s round robin piece. My travel piece is my gift for the Robin’s Net Scissors Fob Exchange. I am working on painting some more scissors, as well. Add to that the usual catch-up on dishes and laundry and you pretty much have my week and weekend.
Predictably, with the colder weather setting in, our furnace decided to die on Saturday. That means we’ve been without heat for more than two days now. I think it’s being dramatic because it knows that we’re having a geothermal system installed in a couple of weeks. 😉 Fortunately, we have a gas fireplace to keep the downstairs warm and a small electric heater for the bathroom in the morning. We went in to work today, hoping to escape the chill in the house, only to find that the heat is not working in our office. I am not in the least bit surprised since we had weeks of problems with the air conditioning in the dead of summer. I predicted back then that we would have problems when it came time to turn on the heat. People were sitting around all day today in coats and sweaters. It’s more comfortable in our house than it is at work! Plus, they screwed up and accidentally locked us out of our office area today. The door could only be opened from the inside, as none of our access cards seemed to unlock the door.
On the furnace front, we met with the geothermal installer and the driller this afternoon and have an approximate installation date of November 1st and 2nd. In the meantime, the current system is still under warranty, so Terry looked up the original installer’s information and tried to call them, but the number is out of service. He called and left a message with the customer service person from the builder, but we haven’t heard back yet. Can you tell it’s Monday? 😆
And now, some photos that you’ve been asking for. I put the scissors on the scanner, but the picture isn’t so great. You just can’t capture this paint very well digitally and I’m feeling lazy. The two color-changing pairs are going out, so perhaps the recipients will take better pictures. 😀
Here are some long overdue CATS pictures, partially to show the previous length of my hair. 😉 Sorry the photo of me and Cathy is in black and white, but the white balance on Terry’s camera was off, so the photo turned out blue. Grayscale was the best I could do, since I have been unable to fix the colors to my satisfaction in Photoshop:
 Patti, Jo and Me |
 Me and Cathy |
Sandra Vanosdall (The Sweetheart Tree) and Me
And last, but not least, a picture of me and my new hair-do. It still isn’t behaving for me yet, but I tried styling it curly yesterday and it turned out reasonably cute, so I had Terry snap a photo of me, sweats, no makeup and all:
This week’s SBQ was suggested by Lee and is:
As we all know, stitching in the winter can really be rough on the hands. What do you do to treat your hands well in the cold winter months? Do you have any suggestions for creams or soaps? Or perhaps a special regimen that you would like to share?
I don’t treat my hands any differently at different times of the year because they are always dry. I use a lavender hand cream from L’Occitane just about every night to moisturize. Nothing special and I’ve been using the same stuff for a couple of years now, though I upgraded to an even nicer ultra rich body cream this time. It’s one of the small ways that I pamper myself on a regular basis.
Not a whole lot going on here. I feel like I’m really trying to make up for lost time now that I’m feeling better. With Terry’s help, I painted more scissors tonight. I put the final clear coats on two pairs, so they will be dry and ready tomorrow. I decided to start again on the other two that I had previously painted. I found the leftovers of some chameleon paint that we had played with a couple of years ago; it will look like two different colors, depending on the angle of the light on the object and where you are relative to it. We have three different colors, but I chose my two favorites and Terry helped me with the painting. It’s actually a multi-step process. You have to put on several coats of a flat black paint, then build up multiple coats of the color-shifting paint and then end with several coats of a glossy top coat. We got through step two (the color-shifting paint) and will finish with the top coat tomorrow or Thursday. This weekend, I’ll be taking a coveted pair of matte metal Dovo scissors and adding my favorite purple-green chameleon paint to the handles. 😀
The bottom line is that there are no losers in The Great Scissors Giveaway. Even though I had greater than 20 entrants, everyone will end up with a pair of scissors, one way or another. The ones that I’ve painted may not be perfect, but they will be uniquely me. Hmmmm… if I get good at this, I wonder if I could sell them… Food for thought.
Anyway, I’ll post pictures or scans once they are all finished. Probably this weekend, as I have a game night tomorrow and we’re meeting up with Terry’s dad Thursday night.
OH! I almost forgot my big news of the day. For those who have seen the photos from CATS the other weekend and those who met me in person, you know that I have VERY long hair. Well, had. 😉 Yes, I finally decided last night that I was fed up with all of this hair and went today to get it cut. I was only going to get 4 inches taken off, so that it still hung below my shoulders, but apparently my stylist had other plans. It’s now layered and shorter than I wanted. A lot shorter. Put it this way, when I say that I want the cut that Jennifer Aniston had on Friends, I don’t mean that you should take off 5 or 6 inches and then keep going, and going, and going. She got a little carried away with the layering. I think she definitely had a vision in mind and it was not shared by me. So, my shortest layer ends around the bottom of my ear and the longest layers end at the shoulder (Cathy, think your current haircut but just a tad longer; that’s what I get for envying your easy-to-care-for ‘do!). SHOCK! I’m still getting used to it. Maybe I’ll post a CATS photo and an after photo once I get the hang of working with it for a few days. It feels very strange to not have all of that hair hanging around. I was used to just gathering it up and throwing it over my shoulders to get it out of my face, now it’s right there, all of the time. But, as I told Terry before I went in and he’s been graciously reminding me since, it’s just hair. It grows. Give it a couple of inches and it will be closer to what I had wanted. 😆
Okay, that’s it for now, I just finished bundling up some more packages to go out tomorrow morning. And I’ve been fighting a headache since we left work, but it was a tough day fighting programming that didn’t seem to want to work how I intended. Plus it’s THAT week of the month, which usually means a migraine that I’d rather not have. So, I should get to bed, as I had a bout of insomnia last night and was unable to get to sleep for quite some time (fussing about my hair, funnily enough; tonight, it might be my mind fussing over it in the opposite direction!).
I’ll try to post tomorrow during the day, since we’ll have game night, probably into the wee hours. I’ll be taking a couple of hours off on Thursday, mostly likely, and working from home.
Tah!
P.S. I claimed another exemption to my 50 Projects Challenge today. I think I may have found the one store on the planet that still has (hopefully!) one of the Lorri Birmingham hardanger tea tray linen kits called Summer Hearts. As Cathy probably remembers me lamenting at CATS, they did not have that season in Lorri’s booth and I was quite bummed to find out that she was retiring and what they had there was all she had left. I talked to her during class and she was going to try to hook me up with the chart and the fabric, if she still had some, along with a detailed list of materials and where I could buy them, but I haven’t heard from her yet and the actual kit would be a lot easier! So, cross your fingers that they still have one. I have the other three seasons and the tea tray, so I’m really desperate to round out the set. If this order goes through and I win the two eBay auctions that I’m bidding on, my Lorri Birmingham exemption will be fulfilled and no longer in play.
Yes, I’m in trouble if I continue at this rate. I have already taken advantage of one of the exemptions I laid out to my 50 Projects Challenge. I know, I only started today. Didn’t last very long, did I? I told you that I’ve been rather frenetic about my stash intake lately.
To be honest, though, as soon as I figured out how awesome the WhimZis where going to work in my cube, I had a whole plan laid out. So, I wanted to get a head start on the next season. Since Just Nan doesn’t have any Thanksgiving designs that I can find (though I just wrote to her and made the suggestion), I’m heading straight on into Christmas.
I just got off of the phone with Drema at Needlecraft Corner (what a sweetheart she is!) and ordered Angel Melody. It’s a limited edition WhimZi design done by Nan just for Drema and her shop’s 25th anniversary. So, it technically fits under my limited edition exemption. 😉
I just had a revelation this morning. Something that will probably seem very basic to everyone else, but was MAJOR for me.
I was dealing with the coworker that I referenced last week and we were working on some issues with some code that I had written. We were instant messaging back and forth, so I wrote that I was relatively green when it comes to this particular programming language. To which said person responded that I shouldn’t be that green, that this was basic program flow. I felt about 1 inch high at that moment.
Until a few minutes later, it hit me. I allowed that person to make me feel that way. No other person really has the ability to manipulate my emotions, unless I allow them to do so. So, why would I let this person make me feel badly about myself and my skills when I am a very good programmer (I’m a very good dri-ver…). I’m not going to give anyone that power over me, and why should I?
Another thing that I came to understand about myself sometime last week is that I am a very vibrant person. I live my life in full color, with a lot of passion and gusto. I feel everything intensely; it’s part of what makes me who I am. Although this means that I feel pain very vividly, I also feel joy just as vividly. It’s a trade-off. My lows are lower than some people’s, but my highs are higher, as well. While that may sound bipolar, I don’t think that I am. I find it hard to explain, but the best I can do is to say that I am very passionate about everything in my life. When I’m excited, you know it. I don’t internalize, I don’t fail to show emotion. I put myself and my feelings out there for everyone to see. I am intense. I am extreme. And I wouldn’t want to be any other way, honestly. When I thought about this last week, I realized that I am happy to be who I am. I want to live my life to the fullest. I want to feel it, taste it, drink it all in. And while this may leave me open to negative experiences and even abuse from some people, I’d rather be passionate than lifeless. I am here for the life experience, the good and the bad.
Can you see my vibrance returning as I continue to climb out of my pit? I feel like I’ve been to the brink of despair and back again. And it feels good to be back.
Yes, you guessed it. I’m jumping on the 50 Projects Challenge bandwagon. I need to seriously work through my stash. Especially after the damage I did at CATS! LOL. I’m finally announcing my participation now because I just placed my final stash orders. Actually, these weren’t too bad because most of both orders were needles and fabric, plus the 2006 JCS Ornament issue and one chart (Sue Hillis’ Rainbow Bridge) which will be a gift for a friend of mine who just had to put one of her beloved canine friends down. I’ve been rather manic lately about acquiring stash, so this should settle me down (I hope).
To review:
Purpose of the challenge: to reduce the amount of patterns you have not stitched. This challenge can also be applied to other areas of your stash if you wish (please post your personal modification).
My personal exemptions include any fabric and floss required to kit up any designs in my stash, though I may choose to work through my stash as much as possible at first. In addition, I reserve the right to acquire any must-have, limited edition kits or designs that might be released by my favorite designers, like Just Nan, Mirabilia and The Sweetheart Tree. I also reserve the right to acquire any of the remaining Lorri Birmingham kits that I have on my wish list since she is retiring. And finally, an exemption I just thought of this morning as I hung Be Witchy underneath my nametag on the front of my cube… chart and Whimzi necessary to have one per season for my cube. These will be spread out over the holidays/seasons and will be completed promptly before each one is needed. As a concession, I will not count any of these towards my goal. I’ll try to go with limited editions so that it fits into the other exemption. 😉
AND… nah, just kidding. That’s more exemptions than I would prefer, so I will try to limit the use of these exemptions whenever possible and promise to put serious thought into it first. 🙂
Since the challenge technically started on September 1st, I have 3 finishes (Peace and Comfort, Enchantment and Be Witchy) that I can already count towards my 50, though I may or may not choose to count these later as I get closer to the goal. I may want to make it even harder on myself. 😉
Let the challenge begin!
Here is my happy dance scan of Just Nan’s Hershey CATS special, Be Witchy.
