WIPocalypse!

Well, it's been several years since I've posted, or stitched for that matter but a friend of mine, Christine, posted on her blog that she was going to join WIPocalypse and after reading a bit more about it (here) I decided I wanted to join also. I'm hoping that it will give me back my stitching mojo, which has been sorely missing for a few years now.

So, I guess in lieu of doing a "progress" post for the first full moon of the year, I'm merely doing a small introduction post with a list of the WIPs I'll be working on, and maybe a few I'd like to start.

First of all, the two main ones I've had sitting around for forever and a day.

Fairy Moon - Mirabilia

This is the last picture I took of this WiP at 58.5 hours. It was taken nearly 4 years ago in April 2008! (see what I mean about getting my stitching mojo back?!)

EDIT:

Once I finished my post and dug out my stitching to get started I was pleasantly surprised. I had over 70 hours completed, but I'd just never taken a picture. I stitched for a few more hours last night and today and took this picture when I reached the 75 hour mark!

End Edit.

Summer Blooms.

This came from a magazine somewhere, I'm not sure which one. I LOVE the piece, but have the hardest time getting into it. I hate stitching it, but I know it'll be worth it when I'm finished.

Summer Blooms - 20 Hours - August 2007

What Summer Blooms will look like when it's finished! I only hope I make it there someday!

Dream Sampler by Dragon Dreams

Another one I'd like to add to my list is Dream Sampler by Dragon Dreams. I did this for my oldest daughter a few years ago and would like to do another for my younger. I've even gone so far as to buy the fabric and work the outline grid on it already. I just need to get my lazy butt in gear on this one. Here's the finished version of the last one I did.

There are others I'd love to add to the list, for example, I've already collected the patterns for Celtic Spring, Celtic Summer and Celtic Autumn by Lavender and Lace as well as the pattern for Romantic Stitcher by Passione Ricamo but I think the ones I have here with a few Christmas Ornaments from the Just Cross Stitch Christmas Ornament issues I've collected over the last few years should be sufficient for now. However, I reserve the right to change my mind at any given time. ;)

Happy Stitching

Christine

Wow!

Well, It's been over a year since the last time I posted anything and almost a year and a half since I was posting regularly. I have no excuse. I'm lazy and I should be shot. Ok, that last one is taking things a bit far, but seriously I used to love reading blogs and posting to mine, but I can't even remember the last blog I read. Oh wait, I lie. I was looking at Christine's blog yesterday for the first time in forever after getting a notification on facebook from her. But other than that I can't remember the last time I checked one of my fave blogs....

Oh well, here's one post and here's hoping that I can get back into the swing of things with both reading and posting.

I won't go into long boring details of my life in the last year, because I'd end up writing too much, then I'd get bored and never finish the post. Instead I'll tell you about my year in point form. Too bad I don't have time or I'd do a powerpoint presentation and load it up..... heyyy..... that's an idea! No, No, Bad Christine. If I do this in point form I might actually finish it.

• Olivia started kindergarten last September. She loved it for all of one day before she started asking if she could sleep for "just 5 more minutes". Though she does still love school, she just hates getting up.
  
• I started working in mid September as a teller at the Bank in my town. (no names mentioned here) I've been there for 10 months and I don't hate it yet. I think that's a record for me. :)
  
• I haven't stitched more than a few dozen stitches since I last posted an update on my stitching. I seem to have lost my stitching mojo.
  
• I have been making more cakes lately and I'm really enjoying that.
  
• We finally got Rachel potty trained after many many MANY months of false starts. She had no desire for the longest time and I'd have to force her to sit on the toilet, but she's finally good, though we still use pullups at bedtime. We're not completely done with diapers yet. Soon hopefully.
  
• Rachel is finally old enough (3) to farm her out to the grandparents for sleepovers! (Can I get a 'Booyah' here? - Sorry, too much Kim Possible!) and she's had a few of them recently.
  
• I've been to the funeral home twice for two different people in the last week, so it's been a fairly sad week overall.
  
• My DH, Jason lost over 50 pounds in the past year. He even came in first place in a "biggest loser" weight loss competition at his work and ended up winning $500.00 in gift cards.
  
• We used the $500.00 to go towards a big swingset/Jungle jym for the kids.
  
• We had a bear in the yard a few weeks ago, now I'm scared to let the kids go out to play on their new swingset.
  
• I, unfortunately, haven't lost 50 pounds. I haven't even lost 5 pounds. :(
  
• I'm very excited that Torchwood will be airing in Britian starting next week and I'm looking forward to watching the new adventures of Captain Jack Harkness and his band of merry men, (god I'm such a geek. lol) even if it is only 5 episodes.
  
• I think I actually cried when I found out David Tennant will be leaving Doctor Who. *sobs*
• We got a new kitty at the Fredericton SPCA a few months ago. He's doing great. He has to be the most patient cat in the world to put up with my kids. He's a big Orange Long Haired tabby. The kids named him Fluffy, though Rachel couldn't remember that for a while and kept calling him Fuzzy instead.

I'm reaching at this point to think of anything else, so I think I'll end with a few pictures of some of the cakes I've done since I last posted some.

Olivia's "Totally Spooktacular" 5th Birthday Cake

October 2008

We had a dressup Halloween party for Olivia's 5th birthday since she's so close to Halloween and she decided she wanted a "Witch Barbie" cake. I ended up having to special order the Barbie off of Ebay because apparently Mattel only makes the Halloween Witch Barbie for "Target" each year at Halloween ... So, since there are no Target stores in Canada I paid WAY too much for the doll on Ebay.

Here is the second cake I made for Olivia's birthday. We rented the Bowling Alley and invited pretty much the entire class to the party and I didn't know for sure how many would show up so I made a second cake in case the first one wasn't enough for all the kids and parents who were there. I ended up taking 3/4 of it home. lol.

Rachel's "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" 3rd Birthday Cake

April 2009

This was Rachel's 3rd Birthday cake. She wanted a "Somewhere over the Rainbow" party. Do you know how freaking hard it is to do "Somewhere over the Rainbow" that has nothing to do with Wizard of Oz? HARD!

I managed to find items in rainbow colours instead of actual rainbow stuff for the most part. The rainbow on the cake is made of Royal Icing made several days in advance, the border is Smarties. (I had a huge bowl of pink and brown ones left over afterwards.) The rest of the cake is just blue buttercream icing and white buttercream icing.

But then look what the inside looks like!

This was pretty neat. Find the tutorial here.

I had taken the rainbow off the top of the cake when I was cutting it and I put it back on to take this picture of the inside. I didn't realize until later that day that it was on backwards with the broken side of the rainbow showing instead of the good side.

Johnny's "John Deere" 60th Birthday Cake

June 2009

My most recent cake was a John Deere cake for my Father-in-Law's 60th Birthday. This one is just plain Buttercream and a printed John Deere logo that I cut out and traced onto the white buttercream with a toothpick. I then filled it in with a #16 star tip and yellow and green buttercream icing I coloured myself. It came out pretty good except for the little wow in the front of the cake where it's not quite even.

Well, that's all for now. Hopefully this won't be the last you hear from me for another year.

(Side note: it's been over a year and I see Blogger still has the freaky formatting problems that drive me completely batty. I've already had to stop myself three times from throwing my mouse against the wall when trying to get the post looking right after I uploaded my pictures.)

Random Winter Pictures

A shot of my backyard in mid afternoon with the moon above the trees.

Same location, just a closeup of the snow covered fence.

Olivia, Rachel and Jason out playing in the snow.

My kids and husband in their first snowfort.

"Pew Pew" - Olivia pretending to shoot at me from lazerbeams on her wrists.

(She's been watching Buzz Lightyear on Playhouse Disney lately)

Rachel eating snow. Don't worry it wasn't yellow. *heehee*

Halloween Pics

The three of us Halloween morning getting ready for
a Halloween Party at our local drop in play group.
Rachel as a Turtle, Me as a Juliet (without my wig) and Olivia as Snow White



Rachel the Turtle (too bad I don't have any
pictures where you can see her little shell!)



Olivia with all her treats on Halloween Night after I put Rachel to bed.



Our Dora Jack-o-Lantern the night I carved it.



Our Dora Jack-o-Lantern the next morning
when Rachel punched her in the face!

Happy 4th Birthday Olivia!

I started this post on October 24th, but things have been pretty hectic lately and so here I am over a week later, finally getting around to putting up pictures from Olivia's Birthday, and in the next post some Halloween ones as well.

Here are a few pictures from Olivia's Strawberry Shortcake themed 4th birthday party.

"The Birthday Girl" Olivia

"Little Sister" Rachel

Getting ready to blow out the candles on her Strawberry Shortcake Hat cake.

(Yes, I made the hat myself *Tadaa*)

A close up of the cake before I put the candles on it.

The cake was made using a 9" round pan and half of Wilton's sports ball pan. I used regular icing from a jar and coloured it pink. The strawberries I made a few days ahead using Royal Icing (I got the recipe from the Wilton website) The red ribbon around the hat is just red fruit by the foot and the green ribbon is a real ribbon made into a bow.

Olivia and her party guests eating cake and ice cream.

Rachel eating cake and "i-beem". (that's what she calls Ice cream)

Rachel and Grammy (my mom) cuddling. I love this shot!

Olivia opening her presents.

A video of everyone singing Happy Birthday to Olivia.

Has it been that long? Oh My...

It's been a while, and I haven't been doing much for stitching. I just haven't been in the mood for it lately. But now that the new TV season is back upon us I may get a bit more done while I sit my chubby little butt in front of the idiot box for hours on end.

I actually just realized how much I watch that damn thing. I always knew it was a lot, but just today I commented on another blog about which shows we watch and I now realize that I'm totally and completely addicted to TV! Here's our list of the shows we are watching this season.

Sunday nights we watch: Simpsons, Desperate Housewives, Dexter and Family Guy

Monday nights we watch: How I Met Your Mother, Journeyman, Stargate: Atlantis, Heroes, Chuck and Californication

Tuesday nights we watch: The Rick Mercer Report, Air Farce, Law & Order: SVU, House, The Tudors, Reaper and Pushing Daisies

Wednesday nights we watch: Back To You, Private Practice, Criminal Minds, Life(haven't seen this one yet, but it's taped) and The Bionic Woman.

Thursday nights we watch: CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Survivor and soon Lost

Friday nights we watch:Ghost Whisperer, Las Vegas, Torchwood, Moonlight

Phew... it makes me tired just typing it. Damn it that's a lot of shows to watch EVERY week. That reminds me... Private Practice is starting in 5 minutes so I should hurry this post up.

Even though I haven't been stitching much, I do have some progress pictures to show.

I realized that I never did post my latest progress on Fairy Moon, so here she is at 28 hours work on September 6, 2007

I've also been working on another project for Christmas. It's safe to show it here because it's for my Father in Law who doesn't own a computer. It's a John Deere pattern I took from one of the Cross Stitcher magazines I have upstairs. I don't remember when it was published, but I saw it one day when I was going through my pile o mags and knew it was perfect for him. He loves anything to do with John Deere. He's got an old OLD Deere tractor that he kept using up until last year when the costs for repairs became more than managable. So he went out and bought a new one. Anyhow, I saw this and decided to stitch it for his birthday (June!) but that never happened and I'm now attempting to stick with it long enough to finish it before Christmas. If I can stay with it and not switch to any other projects I just might do it.

In other, non-stitchy news I took Olivia today to get her hair cut at the hair dresser for the very first time. Many people who know me in person know the trouble I've been having with trying to convince Rachel that pulling out big chunks of Olivia's hair is not a suitable passtime.

Anyway, it finally got to be too much for me. Her long hair was too easy to latch on to and I found that if I put Olivia's hair in a ponytail Rachel got a hold of it once in a while, but not nearly as much... so I went one step further with this and decided to get it cut. It had gotten to the point where Olivia is getting bald spots on the top of her head where it's all getting pulled out. It's also looking very messy and unkempt because there was so much breakage further down on her hair. So, lo and behold here is her new look. Don't mind the blurry pictures. My flash is acting up on me and hasn't been working this evening.

In case any of you needed reminded what her hair looked like before here's a shot. Her hair was in a ponytail for the first picture. Jason took these before we left for Sandy's (my hairdresser) but he didn't take her elastic out right away. I reminded him to, but he never thought to take more than one shot of front or back with the hair down and the front shot is horrible. She's making one of the strangest faces I've ever seen. So I guess you guys get to see the before with her elastic in. After all, that is what she looked like most of the time.

I've got more to post about, but don't have time tonight. I guess that's what happens when you wait more than a month between posts...

Look what we got today

Here's a pic of Olivia in the Children's parade today. Jason thought he was doing me a favour today by getting up with the kids and letting me sleep. Normally I'd agree with him, but when I woke up at 9:45 today and remembered that the Children's Parade started at 10:00, it wasn't such a good thing. Anyway, I had the fastest shower that I think I've ever had, and did Olivia's hair in a couple of super quick ponytails and ran out the door with her and her scooter. We were going to decorate it a bit better this morning, but didn't have time to throw more than a few balloons on it.

We got there at 10:10 and had missed the judging of the Children's parade. Luckily the organizer took pity on Olivia and let her drive her scooter around in front of everyone even though she missed the rest of it...

I think the thing that soothed her the most about not getting a trophy was the other thing we got today at the Farmers Market. His name is Orange Sherbert according to Olivia and we brought him home this morning.

Apparently he's settling in quite well. (please ignore the dirt on the floor. I'd make an excuse, but it probably wouldn't be true... I'll admit it, I'm not quite as good a housekeeper as I like to pretend. lol)

It's a bird, it's a plane...

No! It's Super Olivia!

There is a Children's Bicycle parade this Saturday and Olivia decided she wanted to be a super hero riding her scooter, so I went searching on the web for ideas and found a cute little cape pattern here. If you use a felt or something like that it can be a completely no-sew project, which is normally the kind of thing I go for since I'm not great with the sewing machine. But unfortunately I couldn't find pink felt (only blues, reds blacks and whites) so I ended up getting some pink flannel instead. I had to sew the edges to make sure it didn't fray, but even with my limited skills it only took about 10 minutes at the sewing machine to do this one for Olivia and another little one for Rachel that matches. (Can I get a collective "Awwwww")

I found a bunch of downloads on this site for the mask she's wearing, wrist bands and belt buckles all in matching superhero looks. There were some pink ones on there so I printed them out and then glued them on a white sheet of foam, then cut them out the next day and let Olivia decorate them with glitter glue. She's not wearing the belt and wrist bands yet, but you get the idea.

I took a few pictures and told Olivia to "pose". She gets down on one knee like this and then says "Mommy, is this posing?" I laughed and told her it was a perfect Superhero pose and snaapped a few pictures. What a cutie.

Last night Olivia had a sleepover at a friend's house for the very first time. She's had a friend over one time and she's had a sleep over at her Nannie's house, but never at another friend her own age before. It was nice to put Rachel down to bed and not have to fight with Olivia for an hour or more to go to sleep. It reminds me what it was like only having one child again. I hardly remember what I did with all my free time. lol.

No stitching progress to report. I'm still in my stitching slump. Hopefully I'll get back into it after this weekend. I'll be busy most of the weekend with stuff at the Fair. We're taking Olivia and Rachel out to the rides tomorrow and I'll be working the Figure Skating booth tonight and tomorrow night selling tickets on a Diamond Ring. Here, take a look. This is the picture of the ring that I downloaded from the Crescent website. They donated the ring for our fundraising efforts! Thank you Crescent Gold & Diamonds!!!

Has it been 3 weeks?

Wow, where has the time gone. I knew it had been a while since I posted last, but I didn't realize that it had been so long. I've been on bit of a stitching lull. I haven't added more than a few dozen stitches to anything since I posted last, but I have managed to get one of my long completed cross stitch projects finished into my very first "no-sew Cube". (See the directions here)

I've had the project stitched and done for quite a while now, but I had to find some fabric for it. Needless to say, finding snow-y fabric in the middle of summer has been quite a challenge... I looked everywhere I could think of, but one day when I was walking through Walmart, I noticed a bunch of Christmassy looking fabrics on the end of the row and darted in for a quicker look. I found this very cute (and perfectly matching) blue snowflake fabric. Perfect. Seems that the Christmas fabrics came in earlier than usual and had just been put out the day before. What luck. The colours and pattern are a perfect match for this pattern.

I should mention that the pattern is called "Snow Ice Cream" and is by San-Man Originals. I didn't stitch it using the called for fibres. It called for a lot of overdyed fibres, which I didn't have... so I just kept pulling out different threads from my DMC boxes until I found some that I thought would work well.

All the swirls and snowflakes were all supposed to be stitched with an overdyed thread that went from blue to purple, so what I did there was stitch a few stitches using two strands of blue, then a few stitches with 1 blue and 1 purple, and then at the end I'd use two strands of purple... It worked very well.

In other news, Olivia has started getting an allowance as of this week. We have little "chore charts" that I picked up at Staples a few months ago where you can list what different chores she has to do each week to get her allowance. Of course being 3 years old we don't expect a whole lot of her yet. She has to Brush her teeth in the morning and in the evening, She has to help make her bed and help pick up her toys in her bedroom, and she has to help pick up her toys in the livingroom/kitchen. Then there's a spot to put an extra star if she's "Extra good" for mommy. If she refuses to do one of her "regular" chores (usually this is the brushing her teeth in the morning... she just won't do it no matter what I threaten her with) then she gets an X for that chore for that day. If she doesn't do something, but I didn't ask her to do it,(for example, her room isn't messy and there aren't any toys to clean up) then she doesn't get a star or an X.

At the end of the week we sit down and count all her stars and all her X's and if she has more stars than X's she gets her allowance. If she has more X's than stars, then nothing. The first week she refused to do most of the stuff on the list and at the end of the week I had to explain to her that because she didn't listen to Mommy when I asked her to do these things she wouldn't be getting an allowance. I think remembering that has helped her this week. She did much better and got a whole dollar for her troubles. She asked me to give her the allowance in nickels and dimes. (She wanted pennies originally, but I had already cleaned out my penny bank and gave it to her earlier in the week.)

Well, that's about it for today. We're headed off to see a parade this afternoon to kick off the summer festival here in our town this week. It's pretty boring for the adults, but Olivia is so excited. She's got it all planned out. She'll be in the Wagon with Rachel and she wants to bring a bag to carry all the candy that gets thrown to the kids. She doesn't want to miss out on a piece of it. lol. I'll post some pictures tomorrow if I remember.

Guess what we did yesterday!

We bought a new minivan! Woohoo!!! I've been asking for one for a while now.

We got a 2003 Dodge Grand Caravan. It's Light Blue in colour and is loaded up with all the bells and whistles. It's got the integrated DVD player in it so Olivia can watch a movie when we go somewhere long. We can still listen to the radio or CDs on the regular car stereo while she watches "Snow White" and listens to it on the Wireless headphones!!... cause you know, there's only so many times a person can hear the "Hi ho Hi ho" song without going completely mental. ;)

One of the things we really wanted was the quad seating as opposed to the bench for the middle row, so the kids can have their own space. It'll be really nice when they get older and are fighting all the time, but even at this age Rachel loves to reach over and pull out handfulls of Olivia's hair when she's not looking. Having them slightly separate will definitely make for a quieter ride.

Here are a few pictures of our new Grand Caravan. The pics are from the dealer website, we don't have it yet. Jason's going to pick it up on Thursday. They need a day or so to get all the paperwork finished, and I'm going to be in Fredericton on Wednesday for an appointment, so he'll be travelling to Quispamsis on Thursday to get everything finalized.

Yaaaayyyy!!

Fairy Moon and a "big girl bed"

Well, I guess it's been just over a week since I posted last. I've been busy working on Fairy Moon pretty steady. I've done 17.5 hours on her in the last week and the progress looks great so far. I've included a picture of her progress so far. The missing "spaces" in the stitching is where the beads will go. I've never done so much beading before, so it seems a little intimidating, but I know it won't be as bad as I'm expecting it to be.



I've finished my week's rotation on her as of last night and already I can't wait to start stitching her again. I really didn't want to put her down. I'll be back working on Summer Blooms tonight. So far the rotation thing is working well. I haven't switched projects yet that I wasn't dreading leaving the one was currently working on, but then, once I start the new one, I absolutely love working on it too. It definitely keeps me fresh and is exactly what I was hoping would happen.



In non-stitchy news, Olivia got her new "big girl" bed yesterday. We've been talking about it for a while now. She's been trained at night for a while now. She's had a grand total of 3 accidents over the last two months, during the night. Those are pretty good odds. But, just in case, we also bought a plastic sheet for her matress... we're not ones for taking chances. :)



Here's a picture of Olivia seeing her "big girl bed" for the first time yesterday. We set it up while she was at Bible Camp for the morning. She was so excited. I wish I had thought to bring the camera up when she FIRST saw it, the video would have been great, but I forgot it and ended up going downstairs a few minutes later to capture the momentus occasion. *grin* BTW, the reason she has no shirt is because they were playing outside at the end of Bible camp and Olivia came home covered in dirt and mud... I made her strip down before she got in her bed... I didn't feel like washing the sheets again so soon. lol.

One more thing...

I know, I know, I don't post anything in like forever, and then I try to make up for it with three in one day?! But I can't believe I forgot to post a special Congratulatory message to my little cousin Kayla for becoming a recent High School Graduate!!

Congrats Kayla! We love you!!

Kayla at 2 years old.

Kayla, at 17 years old when she got her grad pics taken.