well, hello!

Anyone still out there? Hello! It's me, Andrea, and yep, I'm still kickin', chickens! Not sure how time flies by so quickly and how four months have passed since I made a decent post here! Yesterday I was at my eye doctor, getting my annual exam for contacts. Except that it had been TWO years since I'd been there. NO WAY! She showed me my chart as proof, since I didn't believe her, lol! Why is it, the older we get, the faster time flies? Oh well. You know that expression...time flies, whether you're having fun or not!

Anyway. I'm blessed that even when my life gets busy and hectic, I am still able to stitch. So I have lots of stitching to share, almost too much! My plan is to break it up into several posts. Also been doing a LOT of cooking and baking...if I'm on your list on Facebook, you already know this, lol! Sometimes I think I post too much about food. But it's a passion, as well as my stitching.

This is a little something that I stitched a long time ago and sent out for finishing. Love what she did with it!



Love is All You Need
Freebie by Bent Creek

Will be back with more that I've done, but for now, I must share a couple of gifts I'd received for Christmas.

Becky sent me this adorable little cupcake pincushion she made.



I think the design is from Blackbird Designs, but not 100% sure. It's just the cutest bitty thing you've ever seen! Thank you so much Becky, sorry to be so late in posting about it!

From my dear friend Patti:



Design by Carriage House Samplings. Filled with crushed walnut shells and also finished by (?), isn't it beautiful?



OK, one more from me ;-)



Bent Creek Winter Snapperland
I'd stitched this one a while back and sent to my sweet friend Tobie, to do her magic on it. I LOVE what she did :)




The fabrics she used couldn't have been more perfect! I have more Tobie finishing to share with you later :)



That's all for now. If you're still around after all these months, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I promise to come out and play more often ;)
xoxo

some finishes and some winners too

Apologies in advance for these horrible pictures. I've been fighting a cold bug for weeks and it finally hit pretty hard the past few days, so everything I try to do just turns out cruddy!

I recently sent a few things to Tobie for finishing, she makes awesome pillows and other things. Got two of them back today...

Here's Jingles & Jack (design by Becky's Boos)...



and the Daisy Sampler (design by Little House Needleworks)....



Also, I recently stitched up this little freebie from Shepherd's Bush, called Halloween Grins...



Stitched once for my hubby, as he picked it out when he was with me at the LNS last fall. The Frankenstein one is his. Then stitched again for my daughters, the grinning kitty. They are in some tuckable hanging banners that Tobie made for me a few years back. Can't remember what they were originally for, but these fit perfectly. My original plan was to make these into little hanging ornaments, but I feel too shaky to even attempt that, so here they go. I may need to spruce up the banners a little...when I feel better...maybe some cute buttons in the corners.

Thanks to everyone who entered my giveaway. The random generator thing was done and the winners are Tracey for Lot A, and Deborah for Lot B. Congratulations ladies, I will be emailing you soon for your mailing info...or if you see this first, please go ahead and email me with it :)

Back to my Mary sampler...which I've managed to work on in-between my Nyquil shots, lol! She's almost done :)

Happy Fall Y'all! Yippee!!

oh dear

To be honest, sometimes I think about deleting this blog. Not sure why I feel the need to tell ya'll that, but like Ree says, "just keepin' it real". Told my husband that (again, as it's an ongoing thought of mine) last night and he told me that he loves to look at it from work, makes him feel like he's home, when he's wishing he was but instead has to work to bring home the bacon.

And since we love the bacon here at Chez Cupcake, guess I'd better just leave it alone...keep the bacon maker happy and all that.

Melissa, your comment on my last post made me laugh, because I've often thought the very same thing....I need to spend less time looking at blogs (and flickr) and stitch more! Seeing so many beautiful finishes makes me want to work on a million things at once and then nothing gets done.

So I guess it's no help to post this finish then, ha. It's not a new one but it came back from Tobie last month after she made it into a pillow for me and I just forgot to post it then.



This is Shepherd's Bush "Hive" and I stitched it on the recommended fabric with the threads and buttons it called for. It was a joy to stitch!



Thanks so much (again) for my few sweet peeps that leave me nice comments. Sometimes I'm discouraged with this blogging business, so it's nice to hear a kind word sometimes!

counting them twice

Finally able to get some pictures, although fourteen hundred skeeter bites were acquired in the process! All of this rain has not helped in keeping the mosquito population down.

Anyway...here's My Quaker Garden, by Blackbird Designs:

(all pictures are clickable for a larger image)




I was so happy that the frame for this was reasonable, after so many expensive choices I've made this year on other framed items. The molding is from Honeywood (not sure of the spelling), there were a lot to choose from, but I'm happy with this one.

A few months ago I sent a pile of stitched things to my friend Tobie, as she's been helping me finish things into pillows, etc. Well, imagine my surprise when, things I was expecting to pay her for, showed up in my mailbox with a sweet birthday card...she'd done the finishing as a present to me!!

She made this wonderful tuck pillow out of denim for my CHS "Land That I Love". It was hard to get a good shot and this one really shows that I need to press it better. It also doesn't show the wonderful cord hanger with bead accents that she made.



And this one she made for my Bent Creek's "Wahoo, Life is Good"....isn't the fabric perfect for it? I need to straighten the stitched piece up some as it's pretty crooked in this shot.



This one is a pillow and has a very pretty bow on the upper left hand corner but out of several shots I took of it, none of them show the bow! Dang it. The skeeter bites were starting to itch though so I had to hightail it inside, bow or not.



Tobie, thank you again! I love it all!

Today is a little (well, a lot to be honest) sad for me as I should be in New Jersey on the beach, visiting with friends from the ME group, but due some health issues (with me and my DH), I decided it was better to stay home. I'd already purchased the plane ticket and gotten other things for the trip, and really did want to go, so it surely wasn't an easy choice to make. I'd sorta like to cry again over the whole ordeal, but instead decided to just count my blessings.

Like this one:



A puppy who loves me so much my heart swells with joy. Not to mention my family, my good friends...being surrounded by people I love and things that make me happy like my stitching. Oh, and the fabric...let's not forget about that. There's a quilt store that's going out of business...you won't believe the amount of beautiful fabric that I got for half off! AND, my nearest quilt store, Suzy's, here in Garland, is having a sale this coming week...they have a lighted transfer thing that I need for another new hobby of mine (well, not new, but something I'm going back to doing), embroidery. I have Jenny Hart's book and lots of projects and ideas lined up.

Have a few days off from work coming up, that were originally scheduled for my trip, so I'm going ahead and taking them. Hope to use those days to organize my stash some and hang some samplers that have been needing a spot on the wall for months. Other than that, just stitching, quilting, and embroidering. Maybe some baking. Yes, anything under 90 degress this time of year is downright cool to me.

again with the peace thing

For some reason I seem to be obsessed with Peace in my stitching...




This time of year has never been my favorite, although my oldest daughter was born in April, some 21 years ago which I am thankful and blessed for. But even that was a traumatic experience for everyone involved...a difficult pregnancy followed by a stressful delivery, and a big brother none too happy about the new addition to boot. Anyway, seems like so many bad things have happened in April. Not to mention the beginning of tornado season in our state...we've already had two big storm systems move through this year and we're not even out of April. So maybe the Peace things I've stitched recently really do reflect what I'd like for this time of year, in my life and in the world. Hmm.

The above sampler is by Birds of a Feather and it was stitched on 32 count BOAF Sandpiper linen over two with GA and WDW threads. It was fun to stitch, but when it was done I was pretty happy about it, lol. Didn't realize just how happy it made me until driving home from work the other night and I thought of what stitching awaited me at home and when I remembered it was a new project, it made me very happy!

Here are two pillow finishes from Tobie. The first one is an old Mosey n Me design, I really can't recall the name of it. It's stitched on a huge count of Tula with Thread Gatherer's Sheeps Straw...it was so expensive and although it was OK to work with, I'll don't foresee ever using it again.



It was a birthday gift for my daughter this year.

This one is from Homespun Elegance...Spring Patchwork pillow or something like that.



It was stitched on several different pieces of fabric and then pieced together instead of the prefinished form pillow that the design called for. Those things were $30 at the time and I thought that was too much!

Do you see the honeysuckle in these pictures? It's taking over some ivy surrounding the tree in our front yard. Somehow it migrated from the trellis in our back yard and I'm having a really hard time getting it out of the ivy...it just keeps popping up!

Anyhoo, here is our Astro Dazzle, tired from a long hard day of entertaining his peoples.



He really does get this tired...so much so that he can't keep his eyes open, lol!
He's 6 months old today, time for a birthday bone!

bluebirds and boys

Here's my finished Bluebird's Message.
I like how it turned out and took
Deborah's advise to not fiddle with the wing.
Actually did try a little backstitching in between the two colors and it looked worse, so that's when I went with the advise, lol.
My finisher is playing around with a couple of ideas for this, I know it'll be turned into something beautiful!

And here are my Birds of a Feather "Spring" and "Summer" finished pieces that Tobie
made into pillows for me!
Aren't they adorable? I found the pom-pom fringe at Hancock Fabrics

And the fringe for this one too. She used a hot pink velour fabric on the backs of these, so perfect! Thanks Tobie!

Here's the little man, out for his walk on this cold Sunday afternoon:


Those wee legs cast a long shadow

Here he battles the big Dog, Scooby, for the HoHo Froggie (you can see a little of the pillow backing in this picture too
More chasing and tormenting of the big dog. Poor Scoob.
You might think I'd be embarrassed by all of the shredded paper on the floor (thank you puppy, love ya!), the dust, the piles of books, magazines and stitching stuff in the background, but you'd be mistaken. I am too tired to care, much less be ashamed, lol!