Holiday decorations & some stitching...
Within the past 2 weeks, Chicagoland has decided "It's WINTER!" and we're doing our best to keep up! I slapped some pretty bows on a couple wreaths to put on our front door - here's Abby modeling them. The model is thinking "Yeah, I'm really cute. Now put down the darn camera & let me in! It's COLD out here!"
On to the stitching!
These Blackbird Designs projects are so fun to work on - I can't believe the first part of the Mystery Sampler is already complete! Drew & I both love how this one is turning out. I think I'll get back to Cirque and some ornies before starting on part 2.
In other (non)news, I've been meaning to mention a movie that I really liked - "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not". It's more fun to know less going into it, so I won't say much about it other than that it's a love story from his & her viewpoints. If you like a great story with a twist & don't mind foreign films (Ex DH: "You mean I have to READ it?" he he) then this is an interesting one.
Weekend pics
The frogs attacked my Cirque project (grrr!), which required a good chunk of work to be pulled out. So sad to pull out so much pretty silk thread and it sure didn't help my lack of thread situation much!
I have a couple of pictures to share. The first was from Friday night when I let Abby the Dog out to do her evening round of the yard. Half an hour later I went to check on her, and she was chillin' on the plastic chair. When I first saw her, she was curled up with her head on the armrest, by the time I got the camera she was posing. (c: Abby is 7 and a half - she's starting to get quite a bit of grey around her muzzle.
I'm really enjoying our new place and love my stitching spot. I can look out the window or watch TV. Abby really likes her bed next to the window. (you can see a bit of her on the left). The last picture is where I am currently on Cirque. I've finished pages 1 & 2 and parts of 3, 4, and 5.
Flickr Meme
The rules:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search. b. Using only the first page, pick an image. c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.
The Questions:
- What is your first name? Allison
- What is your favorite food? Thai
- What high school did you go to? Dow High
- What is your favorite color? Purple
- Who is your celebrity crush? Jason Statham
- Favorite drink? Chardonnay
- Dream vacation? Sweden
- Favorite dessert? Chocolate Cake
- What you want to be when you grow up? Joyful
- What do you love most in life? Family
- One word to describe you: Thoughtful
- Your flickr name: cheeto (Not flickr, but my blogger name)
Learning to entertain...
She hosts a number of parties over the course of the year - some summer garden parties, a big holiday party for all their friends, and my favorite, her Chinese New Year party, which includes about 12 people - each bringing their favorite read from the past year to discuss.
My Mom, prior 1st grade teacher, next to never swears, but just before one of her parties this happens, and 16 years later it still makes me laugh:
Our new place!
Thanks for well-wishes on our (rental) house hunt! They accepted our application & terms! We 
just have to sign the lease. (c:
Neighborhoods in ‘burby Chicago are varied; we ran across rents from $15,000 per month to $600 per month and commutes from 10 minutes to over an hour. We saw a three bedroom place that looked like a single family on the outside, but was split into 2 units; one of which held a family of 6+, a couple cats, some birds, and some fish in its’ 3 bedrooms. One of our biggest considerations was a yard for the dog. She gets rather miserable being constrained to a leash & you can almost see the puppy depression in her eyes for not having free squirrel-chasing reign over a yard.
We finally settled on a house in the country…I have to say it’s simply perfect for us! Well, almost perfect! It’s fugly as hell on the outside (complete with bad 70’s brick), the brick hearth is outdated, there’s a urinal in the master bath (!), and a teeny-tiny tub. But for a whopping $10 more than what we were paying for our under-insulated (burst pipes in the master bath!), 1200sq/ft, 2BR, 2BA, we’re getting a 2BR, 2.5BA, 1800sq/ft brick house, with a (blissfully dry) basement on 2.1 acres. Abby the Dog is going to be so psyched! Drew says “It’s going to be from famine to feast for the baby!” There’s also a pool, which is empty & covered right now; we may not do anything with it because of the maintenance cost/time.
While our apartment is really cosmetically nice, there’s something about having a yard, garage, 
and basement that we’ve really been missing. We love the wood floors, the kitchen makes our “foodie” hearts happy (granite counters, spacious cabinets, and gas stove), and the bedrooms are huge. The best part though is the yard – I just can’t wait for Abby to be able to run around and hassle the wildlife!
The past couple days have been rough – there’s this great hope that everything would work out, but this fear that it might fall through or we could jinx it somehow. I don’t think either of us has slept very well with visions of furniture configurations dancing through our heads. It will be fun, now that it’s settled, to think about how we want to make this house our home.
The top picture is of the living room; you first walk in through double doors opposite the french ones in the photo. I’m picturing this spot on the right of those doors for my stitching nest!
The next photo is of the back yard - the property is quite deep, that fence you see is a dog run. To the right is the pool.
The last photo is of the family/hearth room. It's taken from the kitchen, which is open to this room.
Fun stitchy weekend!
Yesterday Drew was out of town visiting family, so Abby and I decided to do some things together. Abby voted we go to the doggie park, and I voted that we go to the stitching store. Although I get to drive, and thus have final decisions about where we go, Abby whimpers more, so we went to the dog park first. It was a beautiful day with the colors changing, and we had a fun couple laps around the pond (complete with squaking geese taunting Abby from the middle of the pond).
Then we got to go to the stitching store, which I'd never been to before. It's Welcome Stitchery in Crystal Lake, IL, about 40 minutes' drive from home. They are a very well stocked store and the people there were really nice. They helped me pick out some pretty fabric and fibers for Cirque des Cercles. I chose a 32ct R&R linen called "Weathered Barn" and some Caron Waterlilies threads in Monsoon. The soft blue/grey fabric picks up the blues in the silks really nicely.
On the way home, Abby seemed thirsty, so I poured water into the cup holder for her; it's solid & removable, so that seemed like a brilliant idea until, from force of habit, I dropped my cell phone in there a few minutes later. Apparently, cell phones don't like water. Any time I put the battery in and turned it on, it went into permanent vibrating death throes until I took the battery out again. It's made a miraculous recovery after drying out overnight!
So the really cool thing is that I finished Drawn Thread's Marriage of the Minds. I love it - I'm so happy with how it turned out; the fabric, the threads, I just love how it all looks together. The Latin phrase below our names means "love conquers all". Now we just need the date! The picture below looks a little wonky, taken at an angle:
So today I started on the new Cirque des Cercles project, now that I have threads & fabric. Not much so far; I'm hoping that there's enough variation in the threads for it to be visually interesting. That's always the challenge when changing materials!
