Another giftie arrived home...

So I can show it below.

It's a busy Sunday - H. arrives tomorrow and besides regular work I need to deliver tomorrow morning, I have the rest of the cleaning, sorting, packing, some shopping to do etc. With the recent disasters (moths and furniture falling in the kitchen) I am well behind my schedule so I might have to sleep just 2-3 hours this night... ack. Before I head for the airport tomorrow I still need to go to the Town Hall to fix some administrative stuff so I have to leave around 8 am... H.'s plane arrives before 12... then some nice time together over a nice meal in town, probably, and the usual chatter after some weeks of not seeing each other - and then it'll be time to fall asleep and Tuesday - surgery. Double ack. The rest of the week is unsure yet - either my father will come in car to pick us up with cat and dog or we'll first visit my aunt (if my cousin is in Warsaw this week with his car) and from there to my father's. Lots of traveling... Anyway, whoever has not sent their PS exchange to me yet might have to wait till the 26th for news... I will be away as I announced previously. That said I'm certainly in Warsaw till Wednesday, so I hope Sharon's piece will arrive by then! :)

Can you believe? They're annoucing some light snow! Oh this climate... When I see all the snow in North America in March... and we had absolutely no winter in Poland and Norway... oh the weirdities nowadays.

Time to show Harmien's giftie... it's a PS piece, of course :) I was so PS-inspired this beginning of year :) Good thing I am not so fond of their summer pieces!

Some of you have already seen it in our PS group.

Prairie Schooler - from leaflet #17 Woodland Sampling

It's the first time I tried to attach my name's label this way :

Some goodies too... the rabbit insisted to bring some along, so how could I refuse? :)

PS spring exchange # 1

Now I hope the other four arrive fast too! :)

Here is the piece I stitched and assembled for Nath.

Prairie Schooler - Spring Fairy

It was a lot of work but I loved the result :) I know this spring fairy found a good home in France!

These birds ought to fly down....

Thank you sooooo much for your lovely comments! I love that piece and I will have a hard time parting with it. I want to offer it to H. :) so it won't be hanging on my wall. Hah! Elisabeth understood my problem with the borders...! Of course I suspect that a non-stitcher's eye won't spot these small problems that ME sees :)


I didn't resist uploading one more picture to show how the frame looks beautifully in artificial light...



And here are finally some pictures of the gorgeous biscornu I made from a chart Nath from France sent me for Christmas. I finished it off last week bt I had a very hard time making a good picture of it. As I wrote precedently, the colors and the style are extremely delicate and bad winter light makes it hard to present it well to your curious eyes :)

I am waiting to hear from Ela, Nath, Donna, Cheryl, Sharon and some person whose first name starts with an H ;-) that my packages to them have arrived. I so hope they'll like what I stitched and sent them!


Apart from that it's a busy week. Yesterday I had to do the blood tests for Tuesday... the surgery. H. flies in on Monday to be here to take good care of me and our furry kids :) Each time I have to have a blood sample taken, it's a small horror because not only my veins are not visible, but also my blood doesn't flow regardless of how much water I drink before and God knows I drink a lot on that day! And since I have to take blood samples twice monthly recently, I don't find it funny. I was now told to tell the nurses that it won't work the normal way and that they need to use a syringe to suck it up (sorry for the gory details!) from my arm or hand - in the latter case it hurts like smths, as you might well know. Anyway, the results will be ready to be picked tomorrow. I need to find time to have my hair cut also before Monday :)

With all that war against moths and then works in the kitchen, I am well behind the schedule with my pre-Easter cleaning! What happened in my kitchen is that one big, hanging furniture fell on the 'hooks' and started falling down very dangerously.. it could kill Toska who eats below it and create big damage anyway. Two men worked a full 7 hours this week as it proved more difficult to be fixed but they also fixed some halogen spots etc.

With all that I haven't yet had time to worry about that forthcoming surgery! :) I'll wake up fine, right? Right... :)


And here's a headstart on The Sampler Girls's new freebie. I am stitching it over one on 40ct LL - yes, I know, I am nuts.

Back from the framer...

I'm excited to show this piece framed.... I am not 100% satisfied with this framer's work, the piece looks "uneven", I mean the backstitched borders don't look straight. I am not sure if it could have looked better... I don't think these people look at it with so much detail... and maybe I am the only one who sees it :) Anyway, I love the way it looks framed and I think I chose the right one for that design.
ADDENDUM: The picture below really doesn't show it well. Click on it to see it enlarged.
Now, in the evening, in artificial light it looks splendid, the frame glitters beautifully :)
ADDENDUM2: The problem as I see it is that the framer stretched this delicate piece so that the tiny backstitches moved to the left, right, became distorted. But maybe it couldn't have been done better, I don't know.

Litterary little #4 called My Everything (W.H. Auden) by The Sampler Girl

GOOD MOOOOO-RRRR-NIIIIIIIIIIING!

For all sampler lovers

I just came accross this blog yesterday, it is fairly new and I love the concept. Spread the word if you can! See here: http://galleryofsamplers.blogspot.com/

Weather, weather...

It's just been very windy here, but no real disasters happened, no fatalities. Today the world looked beautiful from my windows - the sky was very dark grey while a strong sun was bathing building roofs... amazing sight. I took this picture thru the net in the window that is meant to protect Toska from falling out. While it is practically invisible from the inside, it looks like prison barrels on this picture, sorry for that :)

Finishing time...

I spent the major part of my Saturday washing my big furniture inside, putting more loads in the washing machine, packing more dry clothes in bag... I really didn't need these ^&%$%^#%$# moths right now! So far my apartment looks like a hurricane went thru it, but I hope I'll have the situation under control within a week. And in two weeks H. is coming and I have my surgery and then there's Easter, quite a busy schedule :)

We were supposed to be badly hit by the Emma hurricane but it slowed down over Germany and we just got strong wind but nothing too serious - this time.

In the afternoon and evening I spent xxxxxxxxx+++++ hours doing the finishing over the rest of the pieces. xxxxxxxxxxx++++++++++ hours more tomorrow and I should be done with that! I had some 'creative' ideas I am impatient to show you all :) I can't say what I used as materials... but I can reveal I *also* used beads, thermofliseline, cording and ribbons LOL!

There's one piece I am not happy about... hope that person likes it. There's something about it.... Oh well.

I've been sweating on two pieces today because I tried to put into reality some idea I had... they both look very nice :)

The only piece I might need more time to send would be Cheryl's... I might need Monday evening to put the final touch on it.

Hope you're all spending a lovely week-end!

I'll leave you with a very bad picture of what will become a biscornu after I add buttons on it. It is done on 40 ct and very very tiny - the ladies at my LNS couldn't believe I'd stitched that (yes, of course I had to show it off! - nah, seriously, I went with the stitched piece to choose the right buttons). This is a Tournicoton design I received from Nath. I'll have to do more than my very best to show it well once it's sewed because the colors are difficult to show well and and it's very, very delicate in style. I just LOVE it, Nath!

It'd be nice to be rich

...says me... sometimes... OFTEN when I see handcraft work done by talended people. If I had 120 usd to spend on anything, here's what I'd order. Hmmm..... That'd be 480 usd - for my 2 pets and the 2 others who aren't with us anymore... What a wonderful way to remember them...
See HERE.

Friday's nothing to say...

I've done the finishing on Nath's exchange piece yesterday, and to me it turned very cute :)
Thank you to all the new persons who visited my blog recently, it's such a pleasure to meet new talented people and find older acquantainces (waiving to Judy! - Judy, do you have a blog/web album now?)
Not much more to say today... I'll spend the week-end doing the finishing on the last PS exchange pieces so I can post them ASAP... and battle more with moths... I found a whole colony last week in the furniture where I hang my warmer clothes and have my pullovers (the moths found some very yummy). I decided to wash all the content of that furniture, my washing machine thinks I'm nuts, but about 8 loads more and I'm done with that. Then I just need to iron a lot :)

I just have to share this..

John Cleese (from the Monty Python) was hired to play in a TV commercial for a bank loan. Controversial for some, absolutely loved by most! The TV campaign has just started here. Watch till the very end :)

Thursday blogging...

See what I found this week in my LNS! I so love tins, boxes etc... especially vintage. I always admire altoids on others' blogs and always wanted one. I was so surprised to discover these two metal tins! They contained 4 spools of sewing threads each, but of course they will be used to store something else.




Whether you understand French or not, do see this blog... wonderful work and superb pictures of Kiev (Ukraine) almost daily. I didn't know this city could be shown in such an interesting way... If you're curious of what life looks like there and love quilting, you'll be spoiled.


Earlier this week, I receives this cute chart from Ela, my Polish stitching buddy in France... Ela has a heart of gold and she surprises me so often by her kindness!!

Other than that, I am working on the finishing on Nath's exchange piece.... :) Nath's package still hasn't arrived and now I really start to worry... but not much yet!

Pictures from Sweden

I tought I'd share a few pictures H. sent me today. He drove to (or rather had his car driven to) Sweden on Monday for a major car repair. One of his friends owns a car towing place so that was a big help. Why Sweden? Because the repair place is just 3 hours away, in Karlstad and the repair will cost soooooo much less than in Norway. Lots and lots of Norwegians do that.

It all started at 3am so they could deliver the car at 7am...

I was pretty amazed by the standard of the local backpacker's hostel... A normal hotel room if you ask me, just that the bathroom ++ was shared and H. had to hire the bed clothes. When he found out he has to stay overnight I helped him find a place to stay - I could go online while he was stranded in a big mall drinking coffee after coffee waiting for the car which eventually wasn't ready the same day. Karlstad is no big place and the hotel prices horrendous - Scandinavian horrendous. Youth hostels aren't cheap either comparing to the rest of Europe but still, about half the price. And honestly, when I saw what he got, I started to wonder why we haven't tried such places before in Norway. But maybe they're not all the same standard as this one below. They have single rooms, double rooms, 6 persons rooms etc.

Old caserns around the place with the hostel... now transformed and used as regular appartments. Though I'm sure the big square place in front of it must have been used by the military for the usual training purposes etc. judging by the way it looks.

More former caserns...

The building with the hostel.


To read more about Karlstad, click HERE.

I can't say for who it is and I can't say what is is, though many of you will immediately recognize it and some will even see it in one of my yahoo groups ;)

I'll uncover it some time next week when it reaches one nice person!

And nah, it's not one of the exchange pieces. The design is too small, just 36x36.

Quiet evening...

I'm stitching on some Shhhhh!!... projects so I can't blog about them for some days and/or weeks, but they look very promising! This w/e I plan to do the finishing on my privat exchange PS pieces and then stitch my PS group fob exchange for Milly. If you know Milly you know what the theme will be, LOL!

Mary Kathryn received the belated birthday giftie I sent her, mail is soooo slow these weeks... And 10 days later, still no sign of the package from Nath. You'd think it should be able to hop across just two borders in two days, yes it should!