And now back to our scheduled programming ...

... after several weeks of chaos, things have finally returned to some semblance of normalcy.  My husband has been back to work two weeks now and his spirits are steadily improving.  For my part, the usual school year rhythms are well established once more.  Work routines are just that again: routine.  No longer any mad rush to make up work backlogged during time spent at the hospital.

 Even my stitching is returning to normalcy as evidenced by these photos of the Mystic Smalls Stitching Pocket.  I have finished stitching this project.  I have included photos of the entire piece and of the section I just finished with the ribbon embroidery between the two stitchers.  Ribbon embroidery has always been my personal stitcher's Everest.  I think the roses turned out really well but I am not happy with the Japanese seed stitch that makes up the leaves.  The directions instruct you not to attempt to frog these stitches but to restitch directly over them without piercing the first stitch [Okay, that should be easy!  As the kids would say, Riiiight!].  So I think I will wait till I am done with all the other pieces in this class kit and see just how much ribbon I have leftover.  If I have enough, I will attempt the restitch.  I'd really prefer the proper tear-drop shape to the skinny straight shape I ended up with on most of my leaves.  But I can live with skinny if I have to.  I suspect the only way I am going to get this stitch done properly is to put the piece on the scroll rods that fit my floor frame so that I can have both hands free to manipulate the ribbon.

I think I'll be gridding out the remaining projects in this class kit on one piece of linen and mounting that linen on scroll rods so that in future I have the best possible outcome with the ribbon embroidery.  The remaining pieces are all relatively small: a fob, a scissor case, a needlebook and a biscornu.  So these should fit on a pair of 12" scroll rods which will be reasonably portable when doing the non-ribbon embroidery.

 I also got a good start on The Primitives Shop ornament from the Indy 2006 Town Square series. All the two over two stitching and most of the back stitching is done and I am currently working on the one over one display window of the shop.  I hesitate to call this a SAL much longer since, of the 6 stitchers who signed on originally, I am the only one still stitching these little beauties.  If anyone is intrigued you can go to the SAL Blog and see some more photos as well as the entire list of charts.  The very first post has all the info about the series and how to get the charts ... or maybe that's in the blog description, can't remember just now.  But it's all there somewhere.    I had originally intended to sew these into a quilt but that turned out to be too ambitious a project for me and I am turning them into ornaments for a Christmas Tree with the theme "small town USA", instead.  I am thinking of using one of those country primitive trees made of dowels.  I think these ornaments would look great on such a tree with nothing more than the addition of my wooden cranberry strands.

I also got something of a windfall this past weekend.  My niece and god-daughter works on the local CSA farm and had more vegetables than she could use this past week.  She's working two part-time jobs while taking a break from school.  She'd gotten some extra hours at the restaurant and wasn't going to have the time to cook this week's share of the bounty.  So she passed it on to me.  We have been enjoying roasted root vegetables: carrots and daikon radishes and onions.  I also have a week's supply of salad greens, some lovely red and yellow peppers, some small eggplant and best of all, fresh beets.  I will be making myself a Fall salad of sliced roasted beets with gorgonzola and walnuts drizzled with balsamic vinegar.  My own garden yielded its last hurrah.  I harvested a bunch of green tomatoes that I'll be ripening with the old apple in a paper bag technique ... not as luscious as vine-ripened but at least there's no waste.  And when I pulled the foliage of the zucchini plants away, look what I found lying hidden all these weeks.  I like to harvest my zucchini small but this one grew to a grand old size unnoticed.  I'll be grating it for zucchini bread and baking this morning before work.