… just stop reading right now. Why? This entry is all about red. Not just any red, mind you, red from Spain! My 36 count Vintage (don’t even ask me to go in to how long it took me to remember that word) Magnolia linen from Lakeside Linens arrived earlier this week and I’ve gone to town on Diane Jourdan’s
Spanish Rouge. The linen is all slubby and loosey goosey and Kathie grimaces every time she looks at it. It only goes to prove that I’m an old person and she’s not. I love stitching on linen; especially that uneven stuff that makes your Xs look like mutants. Not for all pieces, of course. But for samplers, I like the vintage look it gives to things. (Oh sure… there the word “vintage” just rolls off my tongue like any old sentence, but ask me what kind of fabric I’m stitching this thing on and I freeze up. BLONDE! *rolls her eyes*)
Ok back to my sampler… I finished the first band in an hour… and that’s only because Nikki ran off with a piece of my rubbery shelf liner stuff that I use to help keep the fabric (because it is kinda thin) from slipping in the QSnap and hid it under the chair. Here’s that one.
It has an “Alternating Double Backstitch” in it, where the top leg, the one that goes \ actually goes over two Xs worth. It sort of creates a herringbone look. In case you’re squinting for a closer look, here you go.
After that, I moved on to section two which is entirely cross stitch. It’s two colors of Vikki Clayton’s OMG Red series. *grins* This is only half of the pattern, but it is the full height of the second band. The fabric is all loosey goosey and my tension is loose so the Xs look a little wonky. No, it’s not me being an untidy slacker of a stitcher, it’s the way my stitching looks on this stuff. Rest assured that once the framer stretches and frames it all, it’ll look peachy. Oh duh Sue, I didn’t actually show you that picture yet, did I? See? I toldyas I was really blonde today. Here we go!
It got a little washed out from my flash so you can’t see how rich the reds are and you can’t quite see the vintage-ness of the fabric, but it’s there, honest it is! As a side note, at some point while I was typing all of this up, Maggie came in here and put a small stuffed snake on my shoulder for me to “babysit” for her… I don’t actually remember her doing it… but I now have this cute little stuffed snake sitting here watching me type. Wow do I have bubbles for brains. *shakes her head* I think I need to go do some more stitching.
There’s the final score. Well, not really as we’re now doing the roofing contractor thing and based on what they say it will determine if we need to do the structural contractor thing. I’m rather sure we’ve got structural damage because no matter how I look at this it just doesn’t look like a nail pop to me!
It also is exactly at the spot where the tree hit, so it’s rather clear that it’s impact damage and that the tree hit hard enough to damage the roof, the gutter, the soffit and any other stuff used to build the house at that particular spot. But for those of you who haven’t seen the pretty purple of my “suite,” you have now! It’s the only two rooms of the house where I had the walls painted something really “girly!”
Having friends who live right across the street who are taking a year off is a totally awesome thing because they can 1: be home when the topic-of-my-week falls on the house and 2: can stand in their second floor hallway and take “Wow!” pictures like this one! (Thanks, Mike!)
Thanks to our next door neighbors, we were able to save our lawn and borrow their driveway onto which what looked like a small truck-like thing was driven. Well, when this thing was unfolded, there was one huge crane there as you can see! There was a guy on our roof who tied the tree to the crane, and then the tree was lifted to a vertical position at which point it was chain-sawed through at it’s base. Then my girls, from within the house, bellowed, “TIMBER!” as the tree was gently set down on our lawn. Then the chainsaws had at the tree and all that was left was a stump. Oh, right… and some holes in my roof. No need to squint, Mike has a great zoom on his camera, too!
What you can’t see clearly of the large hole on the bottom is that it’s actually a gash of sorts, where the tree branch pierced the roof and ripped downwards. OUCH! That had to hurt the house and the tree! What’s even more sad is that there was a second pine tree that was next to the one that fell that also had to be removed. It had a fungal growth at it’s base that had weakened the roots on the side next to the house. So we could have gone through this again during the next wind storm. (That’s a big no thank you!) So what I see when I look outside and down from my sunroom window now is two piles of white pine wood chips which are all that is left of the stumps.
This is actually quite sad. I do have a lovely view, but having a lovely view framed with pine trees was even better. *sigh*
But, enough about my trees. I’ve blogged it out and I’m done talking about it. I got a hug from up north!! *bounces around* Mermaid Thinking arrived in my mailbox yesterday from Sonya! Thank you thank you thank you thank yooooooooooou!! *giggles* I sent Sonya this thank you card that says “You deserve a million thanks!” and it has these two cute little guys talking and saying “thank you” over and over and over in different voices… and I mentioned to her that if she waited for them to say it all 1 million times that she was more blonde than I was! My guess is that between the two of us we did hear all 1 million thank yous because those little guys are cute! Thanks a bunch, Sonya!! *super big HUGS!!* I cut the fabric and printed the chart and then had to de-Nikki and de-Ziggy fur the fabric because the phone rang as I was cutting it and they decided to sprawl on it… but you get the idea… I’m all bouncy!
Hey, it’s CC on 3! Did everyone dig out their Character Creations projects?
