Tuesday Progress Report

Sue Donnelly's Kindred Spirits Pin Pillow: I made sure I zig zaged the edges of this piece since I wanted to work on it this past weekend and then couldn't put it down.  It was just the right sort of stitching to take along on the trip to Boston for my nephew's wedding.  Simple, easy to pick up and set aside again without losing one's place or momentum.  In short, perfect for a week of socializing with a large family.  I decided to create a border for this project and when finishing it up will embellish the pillow with some lovely ecru crocheted lace.

Brightneedle's Kindred Spirits Bonus Kit: I finished the stitching on this and assembled it right away as a fob.  I just have to decide whether I will use chenille or cording to trim it.  I have the perfect scissor for it, one of those very tiny pairs with green handles.  The blade is less than an inch in length.





Some sewing finishes:  While I was in the mood for sewing finishes, I did a few more:

A Halloween freebie

Here Be Dragons

My Grand Nephew's Blanket:  As you may remember, I had to rip this back having lost the crochet needle.  I started over last night when I was simply too tired to stitch.

I was off for Columbus Day and had every intention of stitching the whole day.  Reality, in the form of exhaustion, put paid to that idea.  Two weekends in a row spent traveling long hours in the car can be very wearing.  After attending my nephew's wedding this weekend and socializing with my family [which is the size of a small African country], I needed a day of rest and solitude.  Incidentally, that's three weddings down and two more to come in the next year and two more the following year.  I am getting to be quite the old crank about weddings.  I love every one of my 16 nieces and nephews and I wish them all the joy in the world.  But, as weddings fill my calendar with the inexorability of falling dominoes,  I find myself wishing that it would become the rage to have string quartets play at wedding receptions rather than rock bands or deejays.  A little Mozart, please.  And a lot less of that throbbing bass that thrums in one's very bone marrow.  At the last wedding, we were able to duck out early because my 85 year old mother was weary of the noise and we volunteered to take her home.  No such luck this time around since we had to travel to the Boston area and were all staying at the same hotel where the wedding was held.  But I have offered to bribe Mom with big bucks to repeat the request at all future local weddings. Unfortunately, the next wedding will be out on Long Island, another hotel affair, though this one will be on the beach.  It is getting hard to watch my mother's heart break with each wedding held in a hotel "chapel" rather than a Catholic church but even her priest advises her to err on the side of grand-maternal love.  And I keep telling her that I believe God is at lot less rigid than humanity when it comes to "the rules".  However, she comes from a generation when Catholics were taught that they could not attend non-Catholic services at all and it pains her deeply to see her grand children discarding a faith that means so much to her..