Baa Baa Knit Stitch

>That’ll Wake You Up

>I’m the first to admit that I enjoy a good nap… especially on a Sunday afternoon after church. The Nextel Cup race was last night (ok. I’m over the fact that Dale Jr. didn’t make it into the Chase), and the Falcons weren’t really doing all that well against the Vikings, so I didn’t fight much when the Nap Monster took over.

Then the phone rang. It was American Express, and right up front they said it wasn’t a sales call. By the way, had I tried to make some charges totaling about $1300 over the internet today? The amount looked a bit suspicious….

Uh. No.

“Well, we’ve denied the charges, and we’re stopping your account, but you might want to check your next bill.”

“Hang on and I’ll pull it up….. Holy Cow!”

Yep. They’d been having a party since September 1, and they hadn’t even invited me. Total was almost $1800 till today when evidently they got greedy. Then AmEx read me the litany of charges they had made today…. small ones that didn’t include the $1300 that drew attention to themselves.

My personal fave was the $103 they’d spent at QVC, so I decided to give QVC a call (since most of you know I’m the QVC queen). Got the customer service rep and informed them that someone had bought something with my credit card and gave them the card number.

“Yes, someone did purchase something with that card today.”

“Well, you probably don’t want to send it. They stole that card number from me; it’s been reported to American Express, and I’m not paying it. By the way, what did they buy?”

“I’ll report this to our fraud department and we’ll get in touch with American Express. We can’t release any other information due to privacy concerns.”

Privacy Concerns?? These lowlifes have tried to steal from me, them, AmEx and all of us in general and they have Privacy Concerns???? Give Moi a major break.

I’m just hoping I didn’t buy too many Adult Entertainment books, videos and supplies for them….

>Evidently I have a type…

>Another day with the organizer on Wednesday. We’re making lots of progress, but I have to tell you this whole process is exhausting (sorry, Jenn — I know she’s reading this!). I find it amazing the projects I’m finding. What’s more amazing is that I can tell you what was going on in my life when I was working on most of them. One I found from when my mom had surgery about 8 or 9 years ago was finished except for attaching 3 charms. I guess I must have put it away because I didn’t have a beading needle in the hospital, and I kind of lost track of it. I plan to finish that up as soon as I finish posting this.

Another is the small project I took with me to work on in the waiting room while my dad had his radiation treatments for the brain tumor. Needless to say, there’s some upsetting memories associated with that one, so I’m not sure when, or if, it’ll be finished up. Although it’s been almost six years since he passed away, I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can even think about those days without crying, so I’m not sure if working on that project would be a good part of the healing process or not. I’ll address that another day.

But as the subject says, evidently I have a type. My task while Jenn was here yesterday was to sort and organize all my tapestry and other needles that I had in this nifty multi-drawer unit I’ve had for awhile. Here’s the end result:
If you look carefully at the top row (please excuse the glare from the flash), you’ll notice 5 drawers full of size 28 needles. Evidently I prefer to use 28s in stitching. And, evidently I don’t need to buy any of them or any other type of needle in the near future.

>In the Spirit of the Holiday

>Happy Labor Day to everyone! I hope that all had a nice, relaxing holiday to mark the unofficial end of summer. As for me, I can certainly do without any more 100+ degree days here in all too sunny Georgia. I’m a girl who loves cooler weather. I figure you can always wear more clothes, but there’s a socially acceptable limit to what you can take off to get cool. His Royal Lowness, on the other hand revels in his nekkidness in the evenings when we take off his collar. 🙂

In the spirit of Labor Day, we labored around the house. Waded through a ton of paperwork, which we seem to attract like bees to pollen (or some other more appropriate simile that I can’t think of right now). I hear Richard at the shredder now. It pays to have a home office with an industrial shredder.

We’re also trying to prove our worthiness to the organizer. While Jenn didn’t give us “official” homework, we did have this:
Yep. That’s a laundry basket chock full o thread. DMC, Sampler Thread, Weeks, Thread Gatherer, Waterlillies, and sundry other fibers from a variety of completed projects that were just tossed in and needed to be put in some orderly fashion where they could be found and used for other projects. While Oscar supervised (a task he does quite well), Richard and I sorted thread by maker and number and/or name, and in the case of DMC bagged it with other floss and with other types of thread put it on rings. Eventually I’ll have floss bags for everything, but I’ve got to order them.

Jenn’s not a stitcher. She’s a knitter, but she’s learning all about stitching. When she first asked if I really *needed* all this thread, I really tried not to gasp in horror. I explained the concept of stitching out of stash and how it differed from buying yarn for specific projects. She’s learning a whole different world of needlework, and I’m trying to see things from another point of view. Interesting all around. 🙂

>How Boring is CPE?

>CPE — Continuing Professional Education, for those not up on acronyms, is the current bane of my existence. I’m subject to 40 hours of it a year. 8 of those hours must be in “Accounting and Auditing” or A&A, which in Accountantspeak means mostly auditing. I don’t do auditing; it’s a good way to get yourself sued, thanks to our friends at Arthur Andersen, Enron, and WorldCom (not that I’m bitter or anything).

So how boring is 8 hours of A&A?
All it needs is the toe. The foot was completed during a particularly tedious session dealing with the finance of family business. The gentleman teaching it was trying to assign a quantitative value to the happiness derived by the family by working in the family business to calculate a rate of return on the capital of the business. (Either your eyes are now glazing over or you’re going “huh?”.)

Last week I attended an advanced tax class on pass through entities. You may now yawn, although I did find it more interesting than the A&A credit. Nevertheless, I worked on this:
It’s the first of the Barker’s Dozen ornaments from Pocket Full of Stitches, “A Papillon with a Package”. No, I didn’t finish all of it during the class, but I did stitch all of the package and the dog, and I got a good bit of the background done, all the while shocking the teacher by actually paying attention to what he was saying and asking questions he really couldn’t answer. That’s what gripes me about most CPE. It’s all theoretical with very few practical applications.

Lest you think I’ve abandoned the wiener dogs with the canvas above, rest assured that they appear in the 11th month. 🙂

In other news, I’ve cried “uncle” and hired a professional organizer to help me with my craft room. (Actually, this was after I sat down in the hall outside of my craft room and actually cried because I couldn’t find my stuff). Her name is Jenn Hanna, and the woman is wonderful! It’s a long process, but it’s kinda kewl because I’m finding stuff I had forgotten I had, and stuff that is so very close to finishing that it’s really just a shame I put it down (like that Halloween piece we found this morning that had everything but the spider band stitched — it will now be finished sans arachnids. I understand God had His reasons for spiders, but I am not a fan of them. Actually complete screaming fear of them is more like it. While rationally I realize I’m thousands of times their size, I know they’re out to get me. Really. They’re plotting. Crafty devils. And some of them can actually kill you.).

>Sparkly Shiny Things

>Ok. It’s been a hideously long time between posts. Between my angst at my wait to get onto Ravelry and now, Richard and I went on vacation to Highlands, NC. Unfortunately, before we went, both Richard and my mom very generously shared whatever type of summer cold/flu bug they had both gotten with me, so I was as sick as the proverbial dog on vacation, and the aftereffects are still hanging on.

But at least with the altitude in Highlands and the NC mountains, I was sick about 15 degrees cooler than I would have been in Atlanta, so the trip was worth it in that regard.

This is the seventh year in a row that we’ve visited Highlands for our anniversary (which was Aug. 11 – 23 years!). We started going there because the town featured a very pet friendly hotel. That hotel was subsequently bought by some not so pet friendly people, so we switched to the Skyline Lodge. Our room looks like this:Not on the posh side, but very comfortable. Faces the mountains and has a very nice view. Staff is very friendly and very accomodating. Best part of all is the restaurant at the hotel, which has a patio and welcomes all three of us to dine there.Here you see one of the managers welcoming Richard and Oscar to dinner. The chef will cook up a burger especially for Oscar so His Royal Lowness can dine with us. The food is fantastic too!!!

Another highlight of our trips to Highlands is our annual visit to the Jackson Hole gem mine, where we buy buckets of dirt and pan for gem stones. In past years, we’ve found and had cut and mounted into very lovely pieces of jewelry garnets, topaz, green tourmaline, and emeralds.

Here you can see where you actually do the gem mining. You scoop the dirt into the boxes with screen on the bottom, then lower them into the flowing water, where all the dirt/residue is washed away, leaving you with a variety of rocks. After some experience, you learn what is a gemstone worth keeping, and what is “just a rock”. Of course, folks from the mine are there to look over what you’re keeping and what you’re throwing away to make sure you’re not throwing away any treasures.
On the right is Holly, jeweler extraordinaire, and her mom, and their family owns Jackson Hole. Every year (except on years like last year, when she’s off doing something important like having a baby, so we’ll let it slide) Holly helps us decide which stones would be good to cut and helps us pick out mountings. This year, I decided that earrings were in order, so here are the sparkly, shiny things Holly made for me:The top earrings are 10.77 carats of aquamarine made out of a stone that Richard found. The bottom earrings are more difficult to see, but they’re 2.07 carats of watermelon tourmaline made of a stone I found. You can’t see the color well, but the watermelon tourmaline is a stone with both pink and green tourmaline in layers looking like a slice of watermelon when it’s cut. Very kewl! The stone was small, so I was amazed that they were able to get anything out of it, so I’m very pleased with my pretties!!!

Almost forgot Daisy….Daisy is the very active Goldendoodle shop dog at Jackson Hole. I think she was more interested in Oscar than Oscar was in her (after all, Oscar isn’t a “dog person”).

>**sigh**

>

>We Have A Wiener!!!

>

im on ur kalendur…pikin out ur jale tyme.

The winning caption was submitted by Heather! So, let us know what your choice of prize is: a chart from Needlecraft Corner, a skein of sock yarn from The Loopy Ewe, or a donation in your name to the dog rescue organization of your choice.

Of course, there are no losers in this competition; there will be a contribution made in the names of our other captioners, Teresa and Jill, to Don’s Orphans, an animal rescue organization run by the Animal Hospital of Towne Lake (which is Oscar’s v-e-t, the wonderful Dr. Weaver).

Thanks to everyone who entered or who visited the blog to check out the contest. Oscar promises to run more contests in the future since he’s gotten the hang of it. 🙂

>The Rush of Starting…..

>You know that rush you get when starting a new project?? The wonderment of collecting all the fibers…. of picking out just the right fabric…. of gathering everything all together and getting it all ready and putting in that first stitch??

Well, last night I was doing that. I had purchased a new (to me anyway) chart from Ink Circles… the lovely Sea Stars, and I had treated myself to the equally beautiful Vikki Clayton premium silks to stitch it with. The only thing left to do was to select the fabbie, and I had decided to stitch out of my stash.

First I looked at the fabrics I had just gotten out of the Silkweaver grab bags that had found their way to my door… A couple of very likely candidates after a floss toss, very pretty green overdyeds, but alas, they were 28 ct, and were too small. Off to get the bin of 32 ct fabric. I needed a 21×21 inch piece (yeah, this sucker is gonna be big)… and much to my dismay… the best color choice was…

…white.

Plain old boring, ordinary antique white.

Richard sensed my disappointment and asked if I couldn’t just wait and order something more appropriate. I told him that would defeat the idea of stitching out of my rather extensive stash.

Not that there’s anything wrong with white. It’s a perfectly nice color: it shows off the beauty of the silk. I guess I was just hoping for something more… well… exciting. Guess it should just teach me to appreciate the beauty in the more plain things around me and how they can show off everything else, eh?

So I started stitching my new project, and the dark blue I’m working with does look stunning against the white background. And I know it’ll be beautiful when I finish. White does serve it’s purpose.

Just a reminder to scroll down and check out Oscar’s caption contest. Only a few more days before it closes on the 31st! 🙂

>I *finally* stitched something!!

>Ah yes, they’re small, but they’re completions just the same….
Behold the Jeannette Douglas ornament from the 2005 JCS ornament issue. Imagine, if you will, it constructed into a wee needleroll. I’m trying to imagine that myself right now, because I’m having a Major Brain Cramp on hemstitching. Too late tonight to work with that anymore!This pretty is the Nordic Needle ornament from the same issue. I’m imagining it with some nice twisted cord around it. I’m sure Vicky will do a splendid job finishing it the way she has all my other ornaments. Someday I’m going to learn to do that…. One more item on my “to do” list. Right now I don’t seem to have the patience.

A reminder that Oscar’s caption contest is still open and will remain so until the 31st. Looking forward to seeing all your creative thoughts! 🙂 Did I mention prizes?? Your choice: A chart from Needlecraft Corner, a skein of sock yarn from The Loopy Ewe, or a donation made to the dog rescue group of your choice (if you don’t have one, Oscar will be happy to make a suggestion).

>Oscar welcomes your input

>He’s weighing in on the Michael Vick situation…And he’s looking for a caption to this picture…. He found a calendar in Office Depot, and while he didn’t want to waste his hard earned dog-treat money on it, he decided to have a little fun with it and a cell phone camera.

Any suggestions? There’s a prize for the most original caption as determined by hubby Richard….