Stephieface

I am still working on embroidered quilt blocks. The pattern I have in mind for the overall quilt is pretty simple:

and in the center (represented by the hearts and stars) would be the pieces of embroidery that I’m currently working on.

The embroidery squares are usually things that mean stuff to me in some fashion. An example of blocks I’ve made:

• a deer, because the boys and I are always looking for deer on the side of the road when we’re going places.
• a mushroom, because I am allergic
• a bee, because I am allergic to these too (but both mushrooms and bees can be just so darned cute)
• a red maple leaf, because autumn is my favorite season
• a little mill that bears a remarkable resemblance to Mabry Mill
• a cherry tree covered in pink blossoms, the things I loved best whenever visiting DC
• a heart that looks like it’s been carved in to a tree trunk with the Mister’s and my initials

All of them are sort of natural looking…. woodsy… outdoorsy… which is sort of the theme. I went to my fabric box, and started chopping up scraps and such. I have usually 12 squares per piece of fabric that I use. 8 of the squares go to my quilt, and the remaining 4 I keep… to hopefully make blankets for the boys, 1 square to each (which may or may not be hopeful wishing based on how this goes).

Otherwise – things are going as they go. You know… lol… the usual.

Some time ago, before I moved to where I am now, I had a vision…. I was going to make a patchwork quilt.

At that time, it was not so big a deal… I only had 2 kids at the time and was working on cooking the third… and I only had a queen sized bed then.

I was ambitious… many of squares were going to be embroidered… I just knew it… and I started right away embroidering squares with things like names… celtic knots… and dragons…

… but I never went beyond that… the blocks that I embroidered sat around for years and I did nothing with them….

The bug has now got up my butt again, but things have changed since then. We have 4 kids…  we now have a king size bed… I initially embroidered things on a diamond shape cloth, and now I’m favoring good old fashioned square shaped… I embroidered whatever held my fancy then… and now I’m sort of sticking to a theme (a loose one, but a theme nonetheless)- so I’m sort of starting over.

See? The quilt that never ends

Recently I was contacted through Ravelry by the lovely lady over at Geek Crafts that she posted up an article about me. You can find it , here. I giggled and spurted, because I read that blog… and there she was writing about me!

… and then I read further… and saw she linked to my blog… and then I was like “Crap… I haven’t written anything for years.”

So let’s play catch up once again…..

• The husband and I went on a cruise in September – sort of like the honeymoon we never had (pictures on my facebook page)
• I’ve been playing dek hockey since March… I’m not too shabby on defense (pictures also on facebook page)
• I’ve started work on something I can only refer to as the Quilt That Will Never End (more to come on that)
• I’ve knitted many things, if you check my Ravelry projects

• I’ve made many other things as well that never made it to Ravelry (pictures also on facebook page)

That’s all I have so far… more to follow

Let’s face it… I’ve been a bad blogger. Almost 2 years for a real post, right? Right about here I could entreat some excuses and whatnot, but the truth of the matter is that after I started the job, finding time to do the things I liked began to take over the time for things I used to do.

The first year at job, I worked an stupidly absurd amount of overtime. On a light week I worked my 40, then worked 25 hours of OT…. those were my light weeks. I did that for the whole year… for the weeks when I worked more OT, I would shuffle home like a zombie and just sit in my chair… staring blankly at the TV.

For some pictures from the last year… check out my Facebook photo pages . Some highlights include:

• An absurd amount of LARPing photos
• Photos from my hikes at Robin Hill Park near my house
• a Picture of me and the Fonz
• Pictures from when I was in highschool (pegged jeans… check….. big hair….check)
• pictures of beards and beard propaganda

Facebook became a sort of sub blog. It was far easier to post snippet statuses then to write whole posts. And… let’s face it… with an average 13 hour work day, a snippet was all I could manage. I’m pretty sure I was communicating in grunts and pantomime. There may even have been attempts to use mind powers to speak telepathically…. which may or may not have ended in people thinking I was just looking at them funny or trying to fart.

I’m not going to promise that I’ll write on the old schedule of Mon/Wed/Fri… because I would hate to end up a liar (again)… but I do promise I’ll try to write more often. Sound fair?

Made another trillium flower, with some mods. I wanted it to look like an actual trillium flower, so I knit the white petals in white dishcloth worsted cotton. I added some extra rows of knit and purl to make the petals longer. I knit the green leaves as per the pattern in plain old stashed green acrylic. The anthers I made with Soy silk yarn I also had sitting around in my stash.

I wonder if I can make up a trillium headpiece for a renn faire a la A Maiden’s Glory from the Anticraft… except without all the crochet.

Fussy…. fussy… crochet.

I needed a simple flower for an embellishment…. so some scrap yarn and an hour later…. voila!

TrilliumSquaredFlowerPattern

I got a new word today at work, thanks to the notes system:

First definition care of a co-worker, second definition care of me.

So last Thursday (March 5th) was my birthday, my first birthday after having been hired at the job. My coworkers are, in a word, awesome. They spoiled me.

First hurdle of the day they had to leap… decorating my desk at work before I get there. Frankly, I work a lot of morning overtime…. so whoever had to accomplish this particular feat must have slept overnight in order to beat me there…

You’ll have to forgive the quality of the pics… camera phone

Then when I came back from lunch, someone had left secret birthday cupcakes on my desk…

It was the bestest birthday I have ever had at a job!!

Something else from work that I wanted to share is the Vocabulary Word Of The Day. Its not one of those daily calenders with words that would make you seem smarter should you use them.

We have a system we use internally where all “notes” are kept. When people call, when an account is researched, when something is mailed… each and every thing gets an entry. There are no guides as to what you get to say in the notes. Basically you can say whatever you like, however you like (within reason). I have to go through a lot of these “notes” and I find some very interesting words as I read through them. Those I like the best get posted on my cubicle wall. Here are a few…

And my first and favorite…..

All of these words were used multiple times in notes… without a hint of sarcasm. Now… don’t you feel informated?

The Overtime is starting to slow, and thankfully enough my kids have started to remember who I am. I’m starting to see the light of day again… but only just barely.

My birthday is coming up next week- but the Mister already got me an awesome gift… Season 1 of Torchwood- which is fan-fucking-tabulous. We started it last night. If tonight wasn’t Battlestar Galactica night it would be all watched up now.

For a while there I lost my phone, and searched everywhere for it. I looked everywhere about a billion times. One of my work friends suggested I check my car, and I scoffed at her. I scoffed at her 1) because I had already looked in my car five or six times scurrying about it like a squirrel in a tree, exploring all its nooks and crannies and 2) because I drive a 93 Mitsubishi Eclipse… my car is so small that if I had left my phone in there it would be taking up the entire passenger seat and be playing with the radio stations . Tonight, while picking up nephew Darius for a weekend sleepover, I was installing his car seat in the back and low and behold… shoved between the seat and the car wall was my phone. I have no idea how it got all the way back there and out where it was since I have been the only person in my car since we purchased it.

Maybe my car is haunted… sweet… I hope the ghost likes Jonathon Coulton because that’s all I play when I drive.

I know I’ve said this a lot since November, but the reason for the quietness around here (did I hear crickets just now?) is because I’m working a lot of overtime

a lot of overtime

a plethora of overtime

a bunch of overtime

a gaggle of overtime

a shit ton of overtime

There are probably 3 hours from when I wake to when I go to sleep that I am not at work, and one of them is for getting ready to go to work. I promise though, at the very least, I’ll write once a week.

Until then, the Mister got his surgery done in November and today he received a Bone Stimulator… I informed him that she better not be blonde.