Montse V, FF's, and Stash

Montse V won the 3 LizzieKate charts but she is nowhere to be found. No email on her profile. So Montse, get a hold of me, my email is .......... After 5 days, I'll send the charts onto the next person who wanted them. Note to self: ask for email addresses when I have a giveaway.

Picture heavy! I've been busy, haha.

So it's May and I'm continuing the Faithful stitching on ..

#SpookhouseSelfies. So cute. Needlecraft Corner in Maryland kitted this with the floss and the buttons, and I will be concentrating on this for the month of May; even if Halloween Delivery yells for more attention..

Here is what I had before..

The black funeral coach really makes the design. Here's a picture of one in the Birdcage Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona. It is called the Black Moriah..

Creepy, if you ask me! Tombstone is one place I really want to visit. It would take me almost a full day of driving to get there, maybe about 5 hours.

I had two FF's, finish finishes, and I cheated, kind of! I was wandering around in Michael's one morning and came upon these...

They were near the painting supplies. Four canvas boards, 4" x 4", for $3.99. I bought one package and cutting mounting board for the back, made my finishes on them..

On left is Fresh Fallen Snow by LHN and found in the JCS 2011 Christmas issue and on right is Blackie Pincushion by Homespun Elegance. I used store bought cording and used pins, buttons and the big metal bead from my stash. Blackie I made to sit on an easel. I have two more pieces of canvas to use. I try to use the mounting board with the foam in between because it's easier on my rotary cutter than the mounting board that is one compressed sheet and hard to cut thru. Here are the backs..

And I bought stash!

That new chart by Pineberry Lane really caught my eye. Not a ton of motifs and I love the colors. I don't know if any of you knew about this Mirabilia design that is a free download but here it is with fabric, beads, and floss/metallics. It's in the newest JCS issue..

Instead of the natural linen called for, I bought Legacy from PTP. I really liked how the colors of the beads and floss worked with the beiges going through the fabric. Needlecraft Corner had a package of the beads, fibers, metallic for sale along with a link to download the pattern as a pdf. I'm not sure if they're still doing that though. This will be my first Mira and someday I will start it!

My daughter and I drove to Albuquerque, New Mexico last Friday to attend an event which was fun. On the drive back Sunday here is what we ran into,,

Talk about miserable. And all that truck traffic too. A nerve-wracking drive for about 30 miles and then it petered out. There were cars in the median but everyone looked alright. Glad to get home!

I have more to talk about but I'll stop here! I'm hoping to hear from Montse V soon. I have entered giveaways and totally forgot about them so maybe that is what happened with Montse.

Here's to a stitchy day to you all!

Finishes and more

How's everyone today? I'm in the last week of my month long leave of absence from work and dreading my return, lol. So I will live it up these few days left! This is why I've been able to stitch so much. Oh, and picture heavy!

I have finishes to show. First up is a WIP from last year, The Journey by LHN. Yay!

Ta da!! I'm so happy I finished this. Journey was a crazy start from last year. How to finish finish this? I'm not sure, either framed or turned into a pillow. I have a tan, suede-like fabric that would go nice with the colors and subject, maybe some fringe. We shall see. This is my 7th finish of the year. Happy happy! 

Next finish is Witches Night Out by WTN&T..

Yes, I did manage to pull on the big girl panties and got the kettle done! However, I noticed I forgot to stitch her legs in. She is basically hovering above the kettle. But hey, she's a witch! 

Next finish is Bad Hare Day by Mosey 'n Me, a freebie that is still available on their website..

On 30ct Cocoa linen, beads for French knot eyes, and DMC. It looks kind of blurry or it's just my eyes! I have a flat ornament in mind for this one. I'm not keeping track of these because they are not WIPs from last year.

Last Saturday, Attic Needleworks had a Market day and I drove down..

It was warm, the skies blue, and easy parking. I didn't take pictures because my cell camera doesn't let me have my pictures after I've taken them but the walls are just covered in samplers. I walk in and I'm just overwhelmed! I have a list and managed to find the market things I wanted plus a few other things. One complaint I had though is all the new market items were just spread out all over. One fellow customer saw the new PSS chart I wanted over at another area and not anywhere near other market items. Oh well, I enjoyed my shopping there. Here is what I bought..

Had to have some Halloween-ish things in there! I have PSS's Salem Sisters I and III and picked up the 2 chart. I didn't intend to buy the LK kit but that fabric color is so pretty in real life and not the super pink that shows up in pictures. Threads for future projects, SB dyed ribbon, and that great thread holder, and fabric.

I received my Valentines Day stash order also..

Beau Leggy is perfect for these here parts! I love how he is squatting over the cactus. Ghostly Guard and the tribal rooster that I saw stitched up over at another blog in 1 variegated thread and it looks great. 

For this chart, I'm seeing a metallic color fabric, maybe a light copper or bronze with the symbols being a color resembling coins or something. I'll have to do some research on fabrics and thread.

So there you have it. New stash that should take care of me for the rest of the year. Should! Haha.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting! Have a great stitchy day!

Back with a finish

I'm back! And I have a finish, yay. More cemetery pictures too, hehe. The last one has a story about Nicolas Cage. Just scroll on by the tomb pics if you don't want to see more!

I was up until 10:30 last night putting in the last stitches. You know how it is, you stay up late because you're so close to a finish. This is Whoo's There by PS..

On 32ct something linen with all of three DMC's. My favorites are the two skeletons. I'm also seeing some cat hairs in this! Ha. I think I'm going to do a cube finish with this as soon as the finishing juices get flowing again. This is my 3rd finish in 2016.

Because I'm done, I would like to give the chart and the fabric away..

The chart has some dings on it. I always print out a working copy to use but for some reason, didn't here. But it's all good. The fabric is big enough for the design. If more than one person wants it, I'll choose a name a week from today. Let me know if you would like the fabric also or just the chart. Unfortunately, I can only mail in the U.S. 

Cemetery pictures! I think this tour was the highlight of my trip. Why? Because I'm weird that way and I'm a Halloween freak!

Here's the story: this is Nicolas Cage the actor's tomb. Yes, he bought a tomb! Which sets off jokes about his career being dead! Anyway, he bought a large house in the French Quarter, a more than 100 year old house that has some history to it. The history is of Madame LaLauri or LaLaurie and her husband who were said to perform medical experiments on their house slaves. You all might remember hearing about the actor and him going into bankruptcy and he lost this house among others. Now it is owned by a Texas oil family. According to our cemetery guide, money talks and Nicolas was able to buy a plot in the cemetery. He goes every now and then to visit his tomb to clean it up and wipe the lipstick off his tomb! I guess women like to kiss it, haha! It's in the shape of a pyramid and I'm not sure of the Latin wording on the front. There ya go!

One last picture of our trip, the place we stayed at..

Perfectly French Quarter!

Thanks and take care!

Oh and some responses to comments:

Heather-lol! My stomach was queasy but I managed to hold it together!

Barb- no beads! Tall people and those right at the barricade lucked out.

Vicki- it was 54 when we landed in Phoenix. That's cold for Phoenix as you know.

Linda- the furthest I had been East was either Denver, Colorado or northeastern Montana. Never

  say never!

Home and technology

I am home! I was never so glad to see Phoenix, probably the only time, lol. Our flight from New Orleans was pretty bumpy the first half of the ride. The pilot kept descending a little to avoid the turbulence, then rising up again. I was sure I was going to die!!

I'm keeping the feet on the ground for awhile.

Here are some pictures of the cemetery tour we took..

I have more but I'm not able to put up more. I took these pictures with a regular camera and now can't get these pictures over to my ipad. I've uploaded them to a regular PC and posting on the regular Blogger. So they may be small pictures. As soon as I find a way to unlock my laptop, I can upload the camera pictures to that and then email somehow to save to my ipad. Sometimes technology is a pain in the butt!

Tonight I will be stitching, yay! I am stitching on Whoo's There by PS and a lot of progress has been made. I think this weekend I can finish it up. I'll let you all know!

The Big Easy

Greetings from a sultry New Orleans evening! Yes, I am in New Orleans! I can't believe it myself! So my daughter and I flew here last Sunday morning. I've always wanted to visit for the Mardi Gras festivities and we got our opportunity.

It is so unbelievably humid here. Coming from Arizona where it's dry, we landed with 75 degree weather and 68 degree humidity. You could feel it in the air as we got closer. And we flew over a swampy area, first time seeing a swamp! We got ourselves a taxi and had to be dumped off two blocks away from our B & B because of a parade. So cool.

Three days into our vacay and what strikes me is there's a lot of water here! We in Arizona could sure use some lol. Here are some pics of our first three days...

The Colorado River has nothing on the Mississippi! Just huge!

We took an excursion on a paddle wheel boat and went downriver to the Chalmette Battlefield.

We came off the boat and listened to a very knowledgeable guide talk about the battle. Interesting.

And it was so windy on the boat. My daughter and her hair flying.

And we got to see these two Navy ships.

We also went on a ghost tour which was spooky good!

Today we jumped on a bus for a plantation tour. Here are some pics from that trip..

Oak Alley Plantation. What a beautiful place. Oak trees that are more than 200 years old. I might add that it was drizzling while here but it was still in the 70s. We took the tour inside..

Then we went outside to see the slave cabins..

And a not so antique cat! It's real but sleeping.

And I had to have a Mint Julep!

Which went straight to my head! I could only drink half of it though!

On the way to Oak Alley we passed by another plantation house. Beautiful. Also the fields behind these houses were just immense with most of them being sugar cane fields back in the old days. There are still patches of sugar cane being grown out in this area.

We also passed over the Mississippi again

Just amazing to me to see those huge ships floating along.

To close the evening, we stopped and had beignets and cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde with some jazz musicians playing on the sidewalk and powdered sugar flying everywhere. We then hopped aboard a carriage for a tour through Bourbon St. and some other interesting places. He agreed to drop us off at our place. We've really put some mileage on our feet so far and will add more tomorrow.

On the itinerary tomorrow is a tour through St. Louis #1 cemetery with the mausoleums above ground and two parades where we're hoping to collect a whole bunch of beads. We have ridden on a streetcar, a carriage and taxis. I didn't rent a car because I figured that most things were within walking distance, and they were. 

We have just tomorrow, we leave at 1:00 pm Louisiana time Thursday for Phoenix and back home to our kitties who I have missed. A cousin goes to the house to keep the cats food and water dishes going. I'm looking forward to stitching again too!  I'll post more pictures tomorrow of our cemetery tour and the parade.

Take care and hope you enjoyed my travelogue, lol!

An overhaul

Hi all! It's been awhile. I've had to fix a few things, hence my title. I had to change the two emails that were connected to this blog, comments went to one email and comment moderation went to another. It was that second one that was giving me problems. My family and friends started calling me asking what was going on with the emails I was supposedly sending. After they told me what kinds of emails they were getting from me, I had a feeling my email account got hacked or something. It definitely wasn't me sending them this stuff. How terrible. My iPad email is through iCloud and I ended up having to cancel it and then make another. In iPad alone I couldn't find a way to change this email. I had to search for instructions on how to do this. I did it and then ended up wiping out my Notes among other apps, where I had important things typed down, recipes that sounded good. What a pain but I now have a new email. The other email account that sent me your comments I had to change also because of all the spam I started getting. Around July is when all that crap started. I never used to get all that before so I was befuddled. That took a phone call to Centurylink that lasted an hour just to lose the old email and establish a new. Viola, no 6 or 7 spam emails a day like before. Unfortunately it means that if any of you have a personal question for me, you'll have to communicate with me through the comment section on this blog and I'll send you my email. If you comment on my blog, I'll respond right underneath your comment. It sucks to have to go this route. I hope none of you received any awful messages or emails, I want you to know I would never do that. Its seems that not only do you have to be aware of normal things like locking your doors, and strange cars parked in the neighborhood, but you have to be careful of things on the World Wide Web and people who don't have anything better to do than mess with people's lives. I really don't know sometimes. So what did I learn after this fiasco? Change those passwords on your emails often!

I also overhauled how and what I stitch. I think I was stressing out over all these ornaments that I stitched and needed finishing. I quit stitching on them after deciding that the world wasn't going to fall apart if I didn't get these ornaments finished. So now all I'm going to stitch on are my WIPs, the big ones. When I feel like finishing up an ornament, I'll do that. I'm joining no SALs in 2016 and I'm pulling out of another that I tentatively said I would join. Would you like to see what I picked up after my new way of stitching? Here is Winter Wind by PSS, all finished..

This design is found in the Jan/Feb 2011 JCS issue. Fitting for the crazy weather we're having here. It has snowed almost every weekend and for a couple of days the high temps never climbed higher than 40 degrees. But back to this pretty design...I had some reservations over the colors of the snowflakes. Timber? Stepping Stones? All Classic Colourworks but after looking at it after I ironed it, it works! It's very pretty and I'm glad I picked it back up. All I had before was a few snowflakes on the left and 3/4 of the house. It's on 36ct quicksilver linen by Lakeside. Here's another angle..

I love houses, labor intensive but worth it!

I also finished my Fleur d'Orleans by Ink Circles before my about-face, lol!

The fabric is much more whiter than the picture. I used DMC and 32ct antique white linen. Now that I look at it, something's missing..like beads maybe? I'll have to go back and look at the chart, ha.

My daughter and I headed to Las Vegas the first weekend of December. We took my new ride and it drove perfectly. We stayed at the Venetian and wow, what a lovely room!

Two queen beds, a sitting area, a gorgeous bathroom. I was quite content to ignore the sights and just stay in that room! There was also a well-stocked mini fridge..

Next to the lime Powerade at the bottom left was a bottle of Moët Chandon Champagne...ooooh! But! If you lifted anything in this refrigerator for more than two seconds, you got charged for it! If we didn't use anything, $100 was credited back to me. Whew! I told my daughter to not touch anything! The Venetian was super nice and we discovered there was a Carlo's Bakery inside, you know, the Cake Boss? We finally found it but there was a huge line of people and I wasn't up to waiting. I really wanted cannolis though. Shucky darn! Also inside is a short canal where you can take a Gondola ride, high end stores like Coach, Dooney & Bourke, Ralph Lauren, etc. we also found macarons

I really wasn't impressed. Somewhat dry I thought. Maybe in France they would taste better!

Well, that's it in a nutshell. I almost gave up blogging after my email account problems. I decided that I like doing this though so I'll continue for a bit. I'm also trying to limit myself on blog reading! It's hard but I can sit for 3, 4 hours on a weekend morning reading blogs and that is doing me no good as I'm ignoring housework, and being a slob. I did this with my Facebook also as I was spending a lot of time on it. I just need to move it! Move it!

This is certainly turning into a novel! But I have a couple more pictures for you, all season appropriate, lol!

Ignore the man! This tree used to be a bush. It's just a juniper that's in the median of I 17 between Flagstaff and Phoenix, AZ. Twenty-some years ago, someone began sneaking out there to decorate this bush for Christmas. Well this is what it look like now. It's grown and the ornaments have gotten bigger. The highway patrol has not been able to catch anyone decorating the tree so it continues on. We're glad of it!

Downtown Prescott, AZ. my hometown. As you can see it snowed! And we're supposed to have a white Christmas too, but after that it can melt! Haha.

I wanted to come back and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I'm glad you all haven't absconded and that I still have followers! Take care.