Long days at work this week but I’m looking forward to the weekend with my hubby. Plus I can’t complain about the work, we’re getting so much accomplished, more than I could have anticipated that the trip was definitely worth it.
And in other news – I got a picture message today of my niece heading home from the hospital – less than a week in the NICU. I was very excited to hear this and I hope her first night home is a calm one!
After a long day at work today, I am settling in with some tuna for dinner (better than last night’s dinner which was just a fruit snack pack). Now I have about an hour left in me of work then I’ll hit the sack. I had such high hopes of stitching in the evenings this week but I’ve been too exhausted!
Thursday April 29th, our new niece Finley was born. 5 lbs 15.5 oz and 18 1/2″ long I believe. She was 5 weeks premature but doing well. When we went to visit her on Sunday she was very active and looked very healthy. While it was a treat to meet Finley for the first time and hold that little tiny bundle of joy, I had a memorable time playing with my other niece.
3 year olds have quite an imagination and the games we played ranged from go-fish (with a fishing pole) to pretend hop scotch, to dancing around to pretend music.
Now I’m 3000 miles away but still smiling when I think about the fun we had. Can’t wait to see the girls again soon!
This past weekend was the annual Celebrations of Needlework in Nashua. I have been attending for 8 or 9 years now and always have a great time. This year I decided to take some classes as I skipped it last year due to cost and interest.
The weekend began on Friday, I took the day off of work so I could take a class with my favorite teacher Jeannette Douglas. I took Royalty ABC:
This class was great, some new stitches, time to stitch, great stories, everything I was expecting and hoping for. I made some good progress on the piece and always love stitching with silks!
Royalty ABC progress from class
Friday night my stitch group descended on my house for dinner with Vikki Clayton of Hand-Dyed Fibers. We ordered chinese and gabbed for a few hours.
Saturday it was back to Celebrations for my next class. This class was much more involved, it was a finishing class by Jackie du Plessis of It’s Finally Finished. It was called Chocolat and appealed to me for a number of reasons, not least of which was the wool bunny!
Chocolat
This piece I did not make much progress on in class, although I did start the hershey kiss (silver) stitching. However I worked on it during the flight to CA and made some good progress.
Chocolat progress
Saturday I had a sleepover with two of my friends staying over, we watched Jane Austen movies and stitched. I made some progress on My Stitching Treasures, taking the Royalty ABC class really got me interested in working on something of Jeannette’s.
Sunday a group of us took a Beginner Finishing course where basics for making ornaments and other small finished items from needlework was covered. This course was a great deal for your money and I started finishing a dragon ornament I stitched a few years ago.
All in all celebrations was great this year because of the classes. I’m hoping to finish something from this year but that’s always my goal 🙂
Celebrations this weekend! And the weekend starts early for me because I’m taking classes at 9 am Fri, Sat and Sunday!
In other exciting news, I’m an aunt again, my sister in law had her second very very early this morning! More than a month early than scheduled! I can’t wait to meet the new little one!
I finished vacuuming the demolition area and moved all the tools and wood into there. Then I cleaned the tvroom and furniture and got that moved into the tvroom temporarily. We need one downstairs room to live in. We’re keeping the couches/tv swapped from the planned final layout because it will be easier to move the couches to work on the builtins than it would be to move the tv.
Tonight I got together with some friends after work at a coworker’s house. The main goal was to hem a prom dress but I brought along some stitching and finally put a few more stitches in “My Stitching Treasures”.
It’s not much to show but I finished up the heart motif which is over one and then I started the Bargello block on the bottom left which goes much faster than over one stitching 🙂
Getting psyched for Celebrations this coming weekend! 3 full days of stitching stitching stitching!
Finally a little time in the gardens! This weekend we traveled back to NY to visit some family. We had lunch with Ryan’s sister, then dinner with his mother and stayed the night at my parent’s house. When we got back home it was still nice out so I headed out to the gardens to get the first spring weeding done and reveal what plants survived the winter! Then I picked up the yard so we could mow this week.
First up – my perennial garden, surprisingly I got quite a few plants back this year. I’m not seeing any sign of a few of the plants but it’s still early so I’m not giving up hope. Plus i think I kept a few weeds because they looked pretty right now and I wasn’t sure what we planted.
Perennial Garden coming back to life
The Epimedium (there are 2) is really blooming.
Epimedium blooming away
I’m taking a quick review of what we planted which can be seen here: Perennial cutting garden. It looks like both Epimediums (2) survived as well as all Mountain Bluets (3). Lily of the Valley survived but I thought it was a weed so I weeded it back pretty strongly (my neighbor has it there too), it will grow in again most likely.
I didn’t see the Valerium (2) coming in – but I don’t really know what it looks like so I may have weeded it out. Actually I just looked at a picture and that one may have been coming back but if so it was popping up all over the place and already blooming (seems too early?) and I thought it was a weed (oops) so I pulled it out.
The chives (3) are coming in very nicely and the Bergenia (1) came back too. At least one Dark Geranium came back (maybe both).
What I didn’t see coming back were the daisies and the black eyed susans. I also don’t know what the Echinacia looks like so i couldn’t’ tell that one. I’m going to keep an eye out on that side of the garden, I did not weed as strongly over there knowing I didn’t see the plants yet.
And the rose garden. These i weeded and cleaned up a bit. 3 of the 4 bushes are coming back beautifully. One has no buds yet (white roses), I’m not giving up complete hope yet because it was such a late bloomer and budder last year but it may not have survived. The silvery plants I cut back because they had new growth in the center and were a little unwieldy. We’ll see if my efforts destroyed them or helped them.
Rose garden coming back to life
The raspberry bushes came back very strong, I cut out some dead wood and removed some of the baby plants that were too close to the lilies. 3 of my lilies are coming back! I don’t’ remember if i planted 3 or 4. They look great so far! I’d like to reorganize some of my perennials from the roses side and put them in front of the raspberries to tie the two gardens together but so far no time!
After gardening I headed inside to continue the vacuuming of the demolition area. I got it pretty cleaned up, enough so we can now use it and I started moving some tools and trim in there. I’ll continue this progress each night, my goal is to have the tv room set up as a proper livingroom for company by Friday night!
This week really passed by quickly, that tends to happen when we work a lot though. Even though I haven’t had any time to work on the house this week I’m hoping to get the new demo’d area vacuumed some time this weekend so we can move the tools in and start using that area again.
Last night I managed a little sewing, got a dress hemmed for my sister and even fondled a little quilting fabric (if only i had some more time to play)!
I’d like to have one day a week that I do something for myself, sewing or crafting of some sort. Eventually I’ll get there. I think I need to get to a better place with work first however, it’s a bit hard finding me time when I work such long hours. Speaking of work, I forgot I needed to log on to do something quick tonight – then it’s time to watch Bones (we missed it last night)!
It’s been a hectic week back to work for both Ryan and I. Monday and Tuesday night found us both at work late. Finally tonight we were both home by 7 so we had a quick dinner and then a nice walk around the neighborhood.
I’m enjoying a new author on my ipod – Lisa Kleypas. I’m listening to the second book in her Hathaways series and quite enjoying it.
Now we’re watching some netflix on our Wii – trying out Robin Hood the tv series before calling it a night.
It was a nice day of relaxation! We watched movies in the morning and early afternoon. Then we ran some quick errands. Finally I ended the day by cleaning the upstairs really well (I hate dust and demolition stirs a lot of dust up). So I did a quick cleaning upstairs and started vacuuming up the downstairs demo area. This is a major task and will take a few nights this week to get completed to my satisfaction so we can start moving things around!
All in all we had a wonderful vacation and our only wish is that it was longer! Now it’s back to work!
