HI everyone

I just wanted to say that I am sorry I haven't been around recently. I am just a little overwhelmed with life right now and I always tend to withdraw when that happens. Please forgive me!

I've been stitching, on my exchanges and Bea. Bea is 1.5 motifs from being finished! I am so excited! She's all I want to work on but I MUST, MUST, MUST be disciplined and work on my exchanges. I do love what I am stitching so it's not that big of a chore.

I haven't taken any pics to share but I promise I will tomorrow as long as we have sunny weather. So stay tuned.

In other news, we were told that our gelding, Joey, is severely arthritic in his hocks and in his right front fetlock. The ponies got pedicures today and the farrier was very concerned about him. We will be putting him on an arthritic supplement. The farrier really gave us a start cause initially, he thought it was laminitis which is very bad. He thought this because our horses have been on grass for the past few days and new grass is very rich. We've been weaning them on it for a week now so we thought all was well. Fortunately, laminitis is not the case, YAY!

The Cadet, the lovely Jenna and the DH graduated this past Saturday. I am so proud of all of them!

So, off I go, my needle is calling!!! Stop by again soon!

When Life Hands You Lemons - PUCKER UP!!

Although I believe that the saying states that one should make lemonade. Whatever.

First of all, my lovely SUV decided it needed new brakes ($675 poorer, I am no longer grinding grooves into the rotors) AND my WOOBIE, Joe, now has an *ow-ie* that is going to cost me plenty because he and Maggie cannot co-habitate peacefully side-by-side in the barn. Seems they decided to fence fight over the stall wall. Maggie whaled on her stall door which she completely knocked off the track bending the wheel mechanism inside the track so the door does not slide correctly AND the force of kicking said door tore the door latch off the stall wall where it was found across the barn aisle lying on the floor 12' away. She is physically ok, just pretty pissed off. Joe, however, is not. He kicked his stall wall (made of 2 inch thick oak boards) and has hurt his left hind leg. He is gingerly resting his leg on his toe and will not bear any of his ample weight on it except to take short, mincing steps to where ever he wants to go. Mainly, he is standing in one spot. If he wants to drink, he just swings his head to his bucket so he really doesn't have to move too far.

So this morning, I made the call to Dr. Wendy. She is coming Monday morning to check him out. In the meantime, I am syringing bute (horse aspirin) down his throat 2 times a day. God only knows what this vet bill is going to cost me. I swear, I've had this horse for 16 years and he's only seen the vet a handful of times in those 16 years until THIS year when we've seen Dr. Wendy 3 times in less than 9 months.

There goes the extra paycheck this month...eaten by the car and the horse. Can't seem to get ahead...blech.

Mike is home from Australia and is terribly lonely because his lovely fiance is there until mid-September. He also is unhappy because school starts Monday and so does ROTC and work. So his Summer abruptly ended this morning at 5:30 when he returned to Dunkin Donuts completely jet-lagged and in desperate need of caffeine.

On stitching notes, I have stitched but there are no photos because I can not find the camera that the DH took with him to Pittsburgh when he visited his family last weekend. It's MIA. I've worked on a number of things (my Hungarian Sampler, Blackbird Designs and Prairie Schooler) and made significant progress on a few. So this is just a tease until I locate my lovely temperamental, 2 pixel wonder of a digital camera and take some pictures. So stay tuned!

But! Have you seen these new designs from The Primitive Needle? TOO CUTE!! MUST HAVES! Love them so much. I can't wait till they are released.

Near Halloween

Witchy

So that's all from Chez Empty Wallet...stop by again soon, please...K?

I've got a bad case of startitus

But I am restraining myself! This weekend, I am working on Blackbird Designs, Where Your Heart Blooms. It is the piece that is calling my name the loudest right now but I need to finish up my Quaker exchange. I am at a crossroads for finishing it so I think that's why I am avoiding stitching it. If I chose to finish it one way I have in mind, then I should continue stitching the entire motif. If I go the other way then I need to stop stitching it and start it over again (2 halves). I think that if I go the second finishing route and then mess it up, I am going to be really upset cause I am cutting it quite close for mailing. Knowing me, I'll take the easy way out but I really want to try the second way to finish it. The second way really isn't difficult, just fiddly. It will look bad if I don't exactly mount both halves the same way....decision!

Where My Heart Blooms is coming along but I have to say that I do not like stitching eyelets. They never look right for me and they take a LONG time for me to stitch. Those blackbirds on the top of the sampler have taken a lot of time and I have 2 more complete ones to stitch. I started the house cause it's mindless work. That's fine cause I can stitch the house on autopilot.
I'll post a picture later cause I have to get ready to go to church.

I've pawed through my stash and pulled out more patterns for my growing list of I NEED TO STITCH THIS! I chose a Mary Garry design and a Little House Needlework pattern. I don't know if and when I will begin them but I will tell you browsing blogs is bad for you cause I saw both of the patterns stitched and it made me want to kit them up and begin them right away!
Bad blogs, bad computer!

The weekend is going very fast. Yesterday, David putzed in the yard, I helped him string a plastic fence around the little salad garden to keep the Wonderdog out. She's pretty unhappy about the fence cause she LOVES to garden (smashing down the plants)...she's a big help. And I did some raking and I started getting my containers ready to plant. It won't be long now before I go and pick out my annuals for the pots.

The rest of the day was spent playing with my horses (barn chores and some grooming) and watching the Preakness. Gosh, Big Brown is phenomenal! He didn't even look like he broke a sweat racing that distance! Do you think we will have a Triple Crown winner this year?

Mike and Jenna are coming home on Wednesday for a few days before Mike has to leave for Kansas City and his hand-to-hand combat training. We will be putting him on a plane bright and early Saturday morning and then driving Jenna back to Rochester. She leaves for Brisbane Australia on June 3rd for a work/study. She's pretty bummed out cause she will not get to see Mike until August. I remember those days, I said goodbye to David a few times for an extended period. I think this will be good for them but I hope that she doesn't get too discouraged and gives him a hard time about LONG distant relationships. She gives him a great deal of consternation during the school year about being 2 hours apart. I am wondering how they will deal with being at opposite ends of the earth! WOW.

Anyway, I need to get off the computer now, I have to get myself in gear and go get ready for church. More later!

What I've Been Up To This Past Few Weeks

This will be coming home with me when it's released to the shops. I love it!! It's a new design from Carriagehouse Samplings called Blackhorse Inn. It's got HORSES!!! HORSES!! Yay!!

I have been stitching. Small things, mainly pincushions and pinkeeps. I had a few designs that I started as *in-betweens*, you know the projects that help you keep your sanity between the big projects, the projects that you stitch hours on and only complete a small piece of the pattern. In my Wip basket, it seems that all I have left are big projects. So, I finished stitching a variety of pincushions, most notably, Mary Garry’s, Pins & Needles, Blackbird Designs, Bluebird’s Pinkeep and the Needles pincushion from the Autumn Song Loose Feather’s pattern. I have to put them together, which I believe I am going to do this weekend, in between re-painting woodwork in my sunroom. The Mary Garry piece will be made into a mattress style pincushion. The others will be your run-of-the-mill pillow type cushions. I did finish Their Song last week. I want to get it framed but right now, I can’t justify the money. So unfortunately, it’s gotta wait. Stay tuned for pictures.

Have you ever been in a position where none of the Wips that are in your basket are calling you anymore? That’s where I am at right now. No whimpers, whines, screams or begging coming from the basket. So what to do? Do I pull something out and force myself to work on it or start something new? I told myself that I wasn’t going to start another new project until I finished some of my Wips. I worked a little on Where My Heart Blooms but there’s not enough completed to give you any reason to ohh-and-ahh over and it's not making my heart sing. So my choices were:

A) Not stitch (Heaven forbid!) or,

B) Start something new.

Guess what I chose?

Yeah, you know me too well. I chose to start a new project.

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to stitch Nellie’s Garden Revisited as a memorial sampler to my Mom who passed away 12 years ago but other designs always seemed to win out over poor Nell. I am glad that I finally chose this sampler to stitch.

My Mom was a lady who put her family before herself in all matters. I wanted to find a sampler that was simple and sweet. Mom wasn’t into frou-frou or fancy things (although she had fabulous taste). I chose Nellie’s Flower Garden Revisited because her name was Nellie and the sampler has a sweetness about it. No frills but simply tasteful. I started it last night on 32ct. Lakeside Linens, Vintage Pearled Barley, with the available GAST that I had on hand. I have to pick up a few more skeins to complete the palette. And I will be personalizing it with her name and birth/death dates along with some simple tribute yet to be decided.

Anyway, I hope to have photos up on the blog tomorrow. I just wanted to say hey to all of you, thank you for coming by to visit and also to tell you thanks for asking about Joey. He’s fine and pretty antsy now, he wants Spring as badly as I do!

Sunday...

Sorry about the lack of posts. It's February, remember?

The weather in NY is truely brutish. Cold, raw, windy and it's going to get worse. Windchill in the negatives, wind gusts sustained between 40-50mph. Perfect.

Today, I spent 2 hours out in the barn with the horses. It was pretty nice there, not too cold. I had some housekeeping chores to do and the farrier was coming for trims. The horses got a pedicure today. Our farrier is very nice and handles the animals gently. My Joey likes to talk to Bruce. He nuzzles him and makes very quiet nicker noises while Bruce is tending to his hooves. And when Bruce is done with trimming him up, Joe will lay his big head on Bruce's shoulder. And Bruce will scratch his head and tell him he was a good boy.

Once I *talked* to my horses via an animal communicator. I was really surprised at what this communicator told me, she described my animals in detail (she never met my horses) and proceeded to tell me that Joey is quite the comedian. He likes to tell jokes, especially to the farrier. So that's what I think he does when he *talks* to Bruce. My diva, Peaches, knows she's beautiful and told the communicator that she wanted everyone to know that she was very pretty.

Once Bruce was finished, I picked everyone's stalls one last time and fed them their dinner, swept up the clippings and headed up to the house. Walking the 200 feet to the house was such a treat, blowing snow and wind in my face.

I worked on Sarah Tatum most of the day. David and I stayed home from church today, neither one of us wanted to go out in the cold so we listened to a CD on the book of Romans as our Sunday sermon. So, I had a full day of stitching and I think that's just what I needed. On Sarah, I am almost finished with a very large motif with a flower that reminds me of a calla lily. I have only one more motif on the upper right and the top of the sampler will be finished. I will start the large swan motif next just so I can start the 1/2 basket motif on the right side. Once I get those 2 motifs done, I will have stitched 2 complete rows. I don't think I'll get that done tonight! I wish I could though, it would be so much fun to stitch until my eyes cross.

I jumped over to ABC Stitch Therapy to look at the Nashville market releases. Fortunately, the only piece that grabbed my attention was Just Nan's biscourne, When Barnabee Met Bella. That's surprising as Just Nan is not my cuppa tea. I am glad there wasn't a lot of things that wanted, I sorta, kinda went nuts buying up some Blackbird Designs on Ebay. And I stupidly ordered AND bid on 2 listings for the same design. Guess what! I won both auctions and I have the pattern on order. So, I have 3 American Star designs coming my way so I will sell 2 of them.

Anyone want one? I'll sell them to you for the price I won them...$8.00, postage on me. Leave me a comment and I'll be in touch.

Well, I want to get back to Sarah and see what progress I can make before I have to say good-bye to the weekend. Boy, where does the weekend go? Last I looked, it was Friday night! How did it get to be Sunday already?

Have a great week everyone, thanks so much for visiting!!!
I am so glad that you've stopped by to *chat*.