Possibly we skipped Spring?

I guess we've decided to go straight from Fall to Summer -- I mean it's not like we had a winter. Today it is upwards of 80 degrees. Hmpf. A lack of Spring makes me grumpy apparently. Possibly impending birthday-dom is making me grumpy as well. I'm turning 32. ;-) Anyone who says I'm math-challenged can take a flying leap again this year!

Let's see, to catch up... I dog sat for a couple good boys (well, mostly good boys) a week ago so their mom could go to Indiana for a scrap booking retreat. She was productive and the boys only tried to eat the mailman and the gardener. A good weekend all around. Here, meet the adorable fur hellions:


Aren't they cute? If only they stop trying to eat people the world could meet them and realize the full measure of their adorability.

Dog-sitting was accompanied by the early arrival of summer so the boys and I spent a morning outside lounging about. I stitched up the second side for my first biscornu:

Wish me luck! I'm going to try putting it together this week. When I wasn't working on the biscornu I admired my friend's camillias. My uncle used to have a walkway lined with giant camillia trees (ok, so they were awfully darn huge when I was 8. Come to think of it, I was pretty tall at 8 so maybe they were huge. :) Because you deserve the joy of a Southern California "winter," I share some shots of them:

Wish you were here?

Aside from the biscornu, I've made progress on a snowman-themed RR that is semi-secret so I can't share yet. Yeah, it's the one that drives me batty since it changes color every 3 stitches. I feel like writing a letter to designers:

Dear Outstanding Designer, I love your artistic talent. I envy your creativity. I think you and your designs are wonderful. But I wish to bring a small matter to your attention. No doubt a person of your talent and brilliance is just working on to high a level to realize the very simple, lowly fact that there is absolutely, positively no need to use 3 shades of every color in your pattern for shading. More often than not you are creating an obviously fictional setting so there really is not need for me to, for instance, change colors three times in order to stitch the 1 full x and 3 one-quarter stitches that make up the thumb on a snowman's glove. Really and truly I respect you -- all stitchers everywhere respect you. But we'd stop taking your name in vain if you'd just realize the utter and complete idiocy of never using more than 3 stitches of one color in a row. Thank you very much for your attention to this. Sincerely, Stitcher In Need of Drugs or a Hand Gun and Your Address

Think maybe they'd get the point?

I've also done some little bits on a few things. There's my Vierlanden Mystery sampler


Because I can never let well enough alone, I did some adjusting. I rearranged the letters in the alphabet so my name appears and I stitched the name in a different thread. Sigh. Why can't I just leave a pattern be? I am hoping to get the snowman RR out of my life this week and have a day or so to dedicate tho this piece. I would kind of like to catch up with the rest of the SAL.

I took a few moments to finish a bit on my M Designs personalized sampler:


I'm really liking this piece, but I have a problem. There's a whole bunch of beautiful fabric left over at the bottom....

I added the row of numbers to take up space, but, as you can see, I still have a bunch left. I've been hunting motifs and contemplating adding a saying to the bottom. Any suggestions?



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Quotes of the day:
"The corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to." Archie Goodwin – Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

"…his function is rather like an anticomputer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage."
Zelazny – This Immortal


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Currently would be reading if I could find it: Zelazny's This Immortal
Recently finished reading: Rex Stout's The Rubber Band and Stout's Fer-de-Lance