Archive for the Category »doh! «

Feb
09
Kitten: 2 Frogs: 0
Sue

First I have to confess that Twitter has made me quite the slack at blogging. Of course this does absolutely no good for all those friends and family who don’t use Twitter, so I really look like a total slacker. I do have my Twitter updates shipped over to my Facebook page, so if you’re following me on Facebook, then you can see my Twitter updates.

The kitten (who is now looking more lanky and feline-like rather than like a ball of fluff), was taking quite the interest in alpha daughter’s pair of pet dwarf African frogs. (They’re tiny things that live in their own ecosystem and stay in water.)  So we decided to move their small aquatic world up into the room where her gerbils are to keep him away from them. (The doors are kept shut.) A few days after this move, Scott and I heard a loud thud and just thought it was the girls making their normal crashing and thud-ing sounds. As it turns out, one of the girls had accidentally locked the kitten in, you guessed it, the gerbil and frog room. He hopped right up on the dresser and knocked over the frogs’ small aquatic world. We had thought he had eaten them until alpha daughter discovered two flat dried up frog bodies that had hopped under the bathroom door to escape the frog-chasing kitten. Fortunately, she isn’t mad at the kitten. She is, however, quite sad that her first ever pets of her own are dead. Now she wants a turtle or a snake; preferably a snake. *sigh*

I’ve done a little bit of stitching since last time, including this bit which I’m going to leave as a mystery for my favorite girls to ponder a guess at. It is a HAED chart (and a full size one at that). It is an active artist and an active chart.  It is also an artist whose work I have drooled over but have never stitched… until now. She has been with HAED for several years, too! This is the middle of the chart and it’s part of a face.

Next up is my new start for the 5th weekend retired artist/chart SAL. I’ve been wanting to start this chart for a while and have tagged this as my guilt-free start for 2009. It’s Linda Ravenscroft’s “Serendipity.” While I’m not sure what is serendipitous about the scene, I love it anyway. I know I’ll be stitching this more often than every 5th weekend. There is something about Linda’s work that I find amazing. I have her “Mask of Colors” going around as a round robin. But other than that, I don’t have any of her other work in progress. I will be getting to part of the tattoo on her arm really soon. It’s next on the top right of my stitching!

My next stitchy picture isn’t all that exciting to see. It’s a square of sparkle and two shades of really pale grey. It’s QS Day Dreaming Fairy by Zindy Nielsen which is the piece I’ve chosen for the 2009 HAED Freebie SAL. I was torn on what to choose because stitching all these neutral colors will drive me bats, but it’s a new artist for me and she’s pretty. She is due to come out this coming weekend for some stitching although maybe I will pull her out a bit earlier.

Speaking of 2009, I’ve made two stitching goals for this year on the HAED front. One is to finish the QS I just mentioned above, and the other is to finish the top row of pages in Christophe Vacher’s Sacred Hour.  I’ve got about 2 1/2 large print pages to go and somewhere in those pages is a face! This was the first HAED chart I ever bought and it is the one I love most of all.

Category: doh!, family, friends, pets, stitching  4 Comments
Aug
20
1 PhD and 376,425 Xs
Sue

Ciro Marchetti’s artwork, “Hubble Bubble” has been charted and released today! While I’m not a fan of all steampunk-like art, I really love this one. My question to myself is this… can I complete 376,425 Xs before a certain physicist-o-mine adds “PhD” to his name?

Some restrictions do apply. As in he has to decide to if he will be going ahead with PhD work AND in astrophysics. If it’s not in astrophysics, then a telescope, as cool as this one is, just won’t be as applicable. I also wouldn’t start stitching until he officially starts working on this particular degree.

So can I do 376,425 Xs in the time it takes a 40-something year old to earn his PhD in astrophysics? *nibbles on her fingernails and nervously eyes the pages of the chart* I just thought I would mention that “Marchetti” and “confetti” rhyme and it’s quite applicable for most of the pages.

Stay tuned to see how things turn out! (10 skeins of 310…that’s what happens when it’s something in SPACE, Sue. DUH!)

Category: doh!, family, stitching  6 Comments
Jun
27
Note to self…
Sue

… when you’ve just spent an intense week stitching 2 over 2 and move back to a 1 over 1 project make sure you’re using the right number of strands before you spend 90 minutes stitching.

Duh.

Pictures coming soon! (after I chase the frogs away)

Category: blonde, doh!, stitching  One Comment
May
11
The terrible, awful, no-good, totally unforgiveable thing I did…
Sue

… to myself. And here it is. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? It’s Bernadette Lusk’s Serenity Fairy from Heaven and Earth Designs; the chart I was practically singing about in my previous post from ages ago. Two weeks ago, I found some fabric that I had page gridded for another project. It’s perfect for this chart. The same number of pages in width and there’s more than enough height to accommodate it too. I adore the colors and watching the Klimt-like background appear. This chart, for lack of a better word, ROCKS! So what’s with the subject of my post? Today, while being a ballet mom, I recalled just what I had originally gridded this fabric for. It wasn’t for a HAED chart. It was for a Character Creations chart and Kerry’s pages are a wee bit smaller than Michele and Bob’s. (Ok, quite a bit smaller.) I came in the door, rushed to my stand, popped the fabric out of my hoop, laid it out flat on the floor, fended off the cats and measured. Then I looked at the chart again. I measured again. I cried. I have never made this mistake before.

So now I have to decide if I want to stitch this. I think I’ll stay away from it for a while and spend some quality time with the xbox and my DS for a bit. *whimperwhinesob*

The princess of the house has/is (hard to know exactly when as she’s a shelter baby) turning three this month. One look at this picture and you can see why she’s the princess, empress, resident goddess, supreme being, one-to-be-reckoned-with and lady in charge!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Nikki!

Happy 10th Birthday to you too, Fluffernutter, you scared ball of fluff!

Category: blonde, doh!, pets, stitching  4 Comments
Feb
20
Ice can be nice…
Sue

… but not usually.

Last week we had our usual February “wintery mix” weather. This equates to something that starts off as snow and then meanders through snow mixed with sleet, sleet, sleet mixed with freezing rain and then freezing rain. Sometimes we get snow after that. Last year we got a lovely near foot of that stuff and Mike aptly named it concrete as it took over a week for some of us to be able to get out of our driveways! Last week, however, we ended up with freezing rain. This was unfortunate as it my daughter ended up breaking her arm in ballet class that afternoon and we spent several hours in the emergency room only to emerge with her newly splinted arm to find our car completely encased in ice. (the orthopedic doctor she visited on Valentine’s Day had to put a cast on it — she chose bright pink!)

The next morning, Scott risked life and limb to take some lovely pictures… this is the part where ice can be lovely. Fortunately, he didn’t need any casts, Ace bandages or other boo-boo mending gear. These are some Crape Myrtles. We live far enough south that they love growing here. Of course, after they burst into bloom, we usually get a wicked windstorm and all the flowers blow down the street… or into the pool. *sigh*

Some of you may recall when the white pine tree fell on our house last year. That was due to wind and shallow tree roots. Of course, it doesn’t keep me from worrying that another one of the huge pine trees around will do the same even though the arborist has assured us that the remaining pines are stable. They really droop when weighed down with ice, but in this closeup, they don’t look so menacing. In this area, residential power lines have to be underground, so I don’t have that worry on my property. Whew!

We have a myriad of shrubby things around outside and when we built the house, our landscaper was very good about having the tags left on things, but that would still require me to either trapse outside into the cold and try and find the tags on nine year old shrubs or dig out the landscape plan and translate his really long latin-y names into the more common names that we know. So instead you just get my swell description of a hibernating bush with ice-covered berries on it. It’s still quite pretty!

Meanwhile, inside the house, life goes on and my Ziggy sleeps through everything without a care in the world… not even that there’s a stuffed bunny (affectionately called “Bun Bun” by Lindsey) perched on his back. Ahhhhh, to be able to relax like my ZigZig! He does curl up next to my head in the morning so I can rest my cheek on him so I have a purring pillow, so life is stripey and purrrrrrfect!

Category: doh!, family, general, pets  3 Comments
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