Where has the time gone? Why is it that when your a child the time seems to just drag on forever at the snails pace but once you reach adulthood it speeds by about as fast as the roadrunner that teases the wily coyote? I would love so much for time to slow down some and let me enjoy each day just a little bit more. Maybe the fact that I recently celebrated my first 49th birthday and inching me ever so close to 50 that I am wanting the time to slow it's pace for just a little while. I tend to get so preoccupied with getting through each day that I often forget to sit back and just relax. I also forget to keep up with my posts on this blog. I keep saying I will do better about posting to it but it just seems to slip away from me. I wonder if I can blame it on Fibro fog, that nasty little condition that goes along with having Fibromyalgia. My oldest son, A.J. has noticed that I am really starting to show issues with my short term memory over the past 9 months or so. I have complained about it to my doctor and was told that it is time to start taking at least some of the drugs on the market to treat my Fibromyalgia Syndrome. I have been fighting against taking any of the drugs since 2003. Why? Well when I was diagnosed in 2000, I was placed on Vioxx. And we all know how dangerous that drug became. Such a shame because it did so much for my pain. I was later put on Celebrex and it worked for a short time then it became useless. I am now taking a high dosage of prescribed naproxen twice a day for pain and another drug at bedtime that helps me to sleep without my legs convulsing. It has helped me tremendously to get the rest I need. I no longer lay awake hour after hour waiting on my problem solving brain to shut down. I seem to fall asleep rather quickly now. I can now get through each day and bare the aching pain from having Fibromyalgia a little better.
I had a rather weird experience recently. I have been sent to an orthopedic surgeon to help me with issues I have going on with my left foot and ankle that date back to 2007 when I fell down our stairs. I actually suffered 4 falls in less then 10 days. I blame my parents for giving me a middle name that means "graceful" Gravity was testing just how graceful I was! Anyhow due to complications from those falls, my left ankle and foot are in pretty bad shape. This Orthopedic surgeon put me on a super high dose steroid that I was to take for 6 days. The morning after the first day of taking it, I stepped out of bed and onto my feet and as I stood up bracing myself for the pain I have felt in my feet for the last 7 years and there wasn't any. No pain at all. Not only was it gone from my feet but it was gone from all of me! I could not believe it. I felt so free to move around. I started to make plans for all the things I would love to do again like taking long walks. It was overwhelming to feel so free of all pain. All those years in pain and now there was none. I was able to walk around and "window shop" without breaking into a sweat (always from increased pain) I did not get short of breath (another issue from pain) nor did my face become all red. It was amazing. I took my time and enjoyed my pain free outing. There was a very bad downside to this. The prescription ran out after 6 days and within 24 hours of taking the last dosage, my pain came back, all of it. It overwhelmed me and turned me into a couch potato for 4 days straight. I never really realized just how much pain I have been living with until it was all gone and then all back. I became so enraged by this. I am still in pain now but I have started to adjust to it again. I will be seeing my doc next week and see what can be done to better help get the pain under control. In the meantime I am trying to keep my hands busy working on many different projects to help relax me and take my focus away from the pain day after day that I continue to live with. Speaking of which I do have updates on quite a few of my projects.
Back in October my younger son Jared helped me get a sewing area set back up so that I can enjoy sewing from time to time. I have a lot of back issues that have kept me from being able to sew for a long time. I am now able to sit at my machine for about an hour or so before I have to take a break from it. Within a day of helping me to get this area ready for me, my son told me about a best dressed Halloween contest at the store where he works. We put our heads together and came up with a plan of action. Jared wanted to dress as a pirate. So we found a pattern and put our game plan into action with just barely getting the costume completed in the nick of time. Below is a photo of Jared posing in his costume. He absolutely loved it! He grew that beard to help sell the look of a pirate. I tried hard to convince him that he needed to tuck in his white shirt but he absolutely would not budge on it.
I have this dresser scarf that I started back in late spring/ early summer. I am hand embroidering the cotton fabric and tatting the trim that is going to frame the cloth. I have the other end of the fabric to embroider yet and I need to finish all the tatting for the trim. I work on it from time to time and hope to complete it sometime in the next few months.
As I mentioned I recently celebrated a birthday, well, one of my special gifts was from my husband Joe. He gave me this very special shuttle that I have wanted for quite some time now. It is handmade by the G8 shuttle brothers and designed by them as well. It is made from black walnut wood and holds two round bobbins to allow me to blend two separate colors together to create a unique color to tat with. I am still adjusting to using it but play around with it here and there to experiment and become used to the weight of it. It is quite considerably heavier then my regular shuttles. I am so pleased to finally own one. I do also enjoy collecting shuttles.
I was gifted a couple bags of yarn last fall and decided to turn a good portion of it into a new afghan for my family. After some careful thought, I decided it was time for me to conquer working a ripple pattern. I am pleased to say I did manage it and found it was not nearly as tricky as I had always thought. Of course I have a photo to show you. :)
Lastly and as usual, I have several photos to share with you of updates to multiple cross-stitch projects.
First we have Le Grand Marquoir. I have a few blocks of the second page completed.
I actually put in quite a lot of time working on the Sistine Chapel piece but unfortunately it goes at such a snails pace that I still have not quite reached the richer colors of the piece so it gets too boring for me to work on. I did grid out the various pages of chart thinking that I might start skipping about to work different pages here and there to break up the monotony I am experiencing in the drab color areas.
I am finding that I really enjoy working on the Two Crowns piece. The dusty rose colored fabric is a dream to work on. The soft tone of it helps me to see my stitches better and has taught me that I really need to stop working on white fabric because the white has become rather blinding to me. I am finding the Two Crowns piece to be much easier to stitch.
I recently pulled the Handblessings 2012 Diamonds piece out of hiding with the intent to finish it up over the next week or so. I really put in a lot of time on it yesterday and find it a very easy piece to stitch in comparison to the artwork pieces. I ran into a problem though. An annoying one. If you look closely at the last framed square at the bottom right you will notice the frame is not completed on the left side. I ran out of the specialty thread with only lacking 7 cross-stitches to go! Grrrrrrrr. I will have to make a trip over to my local needlework store and purchase more of that thread.
This final piece is the mini Fairy Book design from the artwork of Nadia Strelkina and was charted by Heaven and Earth designs, the same company that charted Two Crowns and the Sistine Chapel pieces. I had not touched this piece since early summer and was recently inspired after seeing a friends stitching and commented that her stitching was tempting me to pull this piece out and work on it. Well another friend saw my comment in our Facebook group and politely challenged me to do it, to pull this peace out and work on it as well as taking a before and after photo. This was back on Sunday. I did get it out and worked on the area near the horses hoofs on the right side of the piece where I had become so bogged down with all the different shades of blue that I stopped all work on it last June. Thanks to the friends, I worked may way through it and finished that area. I have since moved on down and am happily working in colors that are not blue. LOL! After taking the photo earlier, I decided to remove the piece from the scroll frame and return to working it with a hoop instead. It was for self survival. The frame was actually becoming too heavy for me to hold due to the recent escalation of pain across the top of both of my shoulders from a new fibro flare up. Anyhow, I am pleased with my new progress and very thankful to my friends for helping me to get my stitching mojo back. :) I am considering focusing on this piece in particular and see if I can get this one finished this year. I might be overly hopeful in this but that is something I would dearly love to do.
I had a rather weird experience recently. I have been sent to an orthopedic surgeon to help me with issues I have going on with my left foot and ankle that date back to 2007 when I fell down our stairs. I actually suffered 4 falls in less then 10 days. I blame my parents for giving me a middle name that means "graceful" Gravity was testing just how graceful I was! Anyhow due to complications from those falls, my left ankle and foot are in pretty bad shape. This Orthopedic surgeon put me on a super high dose steroid that I was to take for 6 days. The morning after the first day of taking it, I stepped out of bed and onto my feet and as I stood up bracing myself for the pain I have felt in my feet for the last 7 years and there wasn't any. No pain at all. Not only was it gone from my feet but it was gone from all of me! I could not believe it. I felt so free to move around. I started to make plans for all the things I would love to do again like taking long walks. It was overwhelming to feel so free of all pain. All those years in pain and now there was none. I was able to walk around and "window shop" without breaking into a sweat (always from increased pain) I did not get short of breath (another issue from pain) nor did my face become all red. It was amazing. I took my time and enjoyed my pain free outing. There was a very bad downside to this. The prescription ran out after 6 days and within 24 hours of taking the last dosage, my pain came back, all of it. It overwhelmed me and turned me into a couch potato for 4 days straight. I never really realized just how much pain I have been living with until it was all gone and then all back. I became so enraged by this. I am still in pain now but I have started to adjust to it again. I will be seeing my doc next week and see what can be done to better help get the pain under control. In the meantime I am trying to keep my hands busy working on many different projects to help relax me and take my focus away from the pain day after day that I continue to live with. Speaking of which I do have updates on quite a few of my projects.
Back in October my younger son Jared helped me get a sewing area set back up so that I can enjoy sewing from time to time. I have a lot of back issues that have kept me from being able to sew for a long time. I am now able to sit at my machine for about an hour or so before I have to take a break from it. Within a day of helping me to get this area ready for me, my son told me about a best dressed Halloween contest at the store where he works. We put our heads together and came up with a plan of action. Jared wanted to dress as a pirate. So we found a pattern and put our game plan into action with just barely getting the costume completed in the nick of time. Below is a photo of Jared posing in his costume. He absolutely loved it! He grew that beard to help sell the look of a pirate. I tried hard to convince him that he needed to tuck in his white shirt but he absolutely would not budge on it.
I recently completed one of my older crochet projects. I made a griffin filet lace piece to match up with the dragon filet lace I made a few years ago. I was quite pleased with the way it turned out.
Here you can see both pieces side by side.
I recently decided to get my tatting shuttles back out and play around some with that. It has only been two years now since I learned how to make tatted lace using shuttles. I learned from watching videos on YOUTUBE.COM I rather enjoy tatting. Here are some of my recent tatting projects. I actually designed the trim on the handkerchief directly below.
The doily was started last summer and was made from a pattern that was originally published in the 1920's. The thread I used was size 40 so it really made the doily very dainty to the touch. I am fairly pleased with the way it turned out.
As I mentioned I recently celebrated a birthday, well, one of my special gifts was from my husband Joe. He gave me this very special shuttle that I have wanted for quite some time now. It is handmade by the G8 shuttle brothers and designed by them as well. It is made from black walnut wood and holds two round bobbins to allow me to blend two separate colors together to create a unique color to tat with. I am still adjusting to using it but play around with it here and there to experiment and become used to the weight of it. It is quite considerably heavier then my regular shuttles. I am so pleased to finally own one. I do also enjoy collecting shuttles.
I was gifted a couple bags of yarn last fall and decided to turn a good portion of it into a new afghan for my family. After some careful thought, I decided it was time for me to conquer working a ripple pattern. I am pleased to say I did manage it and found it was not nearly as tricky as I had always thought. Of course I have a photo to show you. :)
Lastly and as usual, I have several photos to share with you of updates to multiple cross-stitch projects.
First we have Le Grand Marquoir. I have a few blocks of the second page completed.
I actually put in quite a lot of time working on the Sistine Chapel piece but unfortunately it goes at such a snails pace that I still have not quite reached the richer colors of the piece so it gets too boring for me to work on. I did grid out the various pages of chart thinking that I might start skipping about to work different pages here and there to break up the monotony I am experiencing in the drab color areas.
I am finding that I really enjoy working on the Two Crowns piece. The dusty rose colored fabric is a dream to work on. The soft tone of it helps me to see my stitches better and has taught me that I really need to stop working on white fabric because the white has become rather blinding to me. I am finding the Two Crowns piece to be much easier to stitch.
I recently pulled the Handblessings 2012 Diamonds piece out of hiding with the intent to finish it up over the next week or so. I really put in a lot of time on it yesterday and find it a very easy piece to stitch in comparison to the artwork pieces. I ran into a problem though. An annoying one. If you look closely at the last framed square at the bottom right you will notice the frame is not completed on the left side. I ran out of the specialty thread with only lacking 7 cross-stitches to go! Grrrrrrrr. I will have to make a trip over to my local needlework store and purchase more of that thread.
This final piece is the mini Fairy Book design from the artwork of Nadia Strelkina and was charted by Heaven and Earth designs, the same company that charted Two Crowns and the Sistine Chapel pieces. I had not touched this piece since early summer and was recently inspired after seeing a friends stitching and commented that her stitching was tempting me to pull this piece out and work on it. Well another friend saw my comment in our Facebook group and politely challenged me to do it, to pull this peace out and work on it as well as taking a before and after photo. This was back on Sunday. I did get it out and worked on the area near the horses hoofs on the right side of the piece where I had become so bogged down with all the different shades of blue that I stopped all work on it last June. Thanks to the friends, I worked may way through it and finished that area. I have since moved on down and am happily working in colors that are not blue. LOL! After taking the photo earlier, I decided to remove the piece from the scroll frame and return to working it with a hoop instead. It was for self survival. The frame was actually becoming too heavy for me to hold due to the recent escalation of pain across the top of both of my shoulders from a new fibro flare up. Anyhow, I am pleased with my new progress and very thankful to my friends for helping me to get my stitching mojo back. :) I am considering focusing on this piece in particular and see if I can get this one finished this year. I might be overly hopeful in this but that is something I would dearly love to do.
Well these are the last of the goodies I have to share with you right now. Here I was thinking that I have not accomplished very much since June but now that I have included all the projects that I can remember working on, I see that I have actually done quite a bit.
Until next time.
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