Sept 23/18

The weather has been glorious recently, beautiful days with cool nights and lower humidity. We spent last weekend at a rental cottage and this was my view for 4 days. I spent alot of time sitting on the deck of the cottage with a book in hand, looking up on occasion at this view. We could not help but relax!

The fella' spent alot of time getting into the lake with the dogs where the water was still warm enough for swimming. We had a great time throwing sticks into the water for the dogs to retrieve and horsing around in the lake with the dogs. On day, Tillie went walkabout on us and wandered into a seasonal trailer site that is rented by a guy that has worked with the fella`. Despite the naughtiness of our dog, he let us use his kayaks and dock to enjoy the lake even more. There were few people at the campground because the summer camping season is almost over so it was glorious to be the only people out on the lake with the heron that hung out nearby.

Crafting wise, not much cross stitch has been done recently as my attention has been turned to knitting up dish cloths to replace the ratty and unraveling ones in our linen drawer. Bernat has a wonderful collection of free patterns for dish cloths so I am merrily knitting away while watching the new Sons of Anarchy show, "Mayans MC". I also altered one of my favourite dresses today to make it much more flattering and work appropriate. The dress had an oddly placed tie on it that made it unflattering and caused a big display of cleavage. The removal of the tie makes the dress more like a tunic and I am much happier.

Another project that has been keeping me busy is something I call my Positivity Project. I recently did some therapy to deal with some post traumatic stress that had reared its ugly head  and one of my healing strategies is to journal about 5 things for which I feel grateful at that moment. I am trying to build more positive pathways in my brain so that the negative stuff has less influence and I can better cope with stressful bits in my life.

On that note, I hope that all is well with you and Happy Stitching!

Aug 26/18

Stitching has been part of my sanity maintenance program this past week. The fella's two youngest children are visiting for 2 weeks and it is an adjustment to go from 0 kids to 2 kids. Our days are jampacked and busy as we try to cram in as much time 'doing stuff with Dad' in a meaningful way. For instance, our base community centre organized a whale watching tour for today for an incredible price so we spent the day out on the Bay of Fundy, looking for whales. All of the fresh air and fun with the children of friends of mine who also went on the tour have worn us out. The kids fall into bed every evening with the fella' only moments behind them. I enjoy the few hours between their bedtime and mine to stitch and to have some Me Time as I am more of a night owl than the fella'.

The full cross stitches of floss have been completed tonight after much squinting at the pattern and the stitching to fill in all of those stitches that somehow I overlooked when I did the first round of stitching. No matter how careful I am about counting, I always miss a stitch here and there and end up filling in the spaces while doing the back stitching. Next, there is gold filament to cross stitch and then the back stitching. Hopefully, these will be done in time before Christmas! There just seem to be so many other things to do right now like the kids' visit, my continuing education for work and fun things like book club and walking the dogs.

Speaking of fun things, I did this last week:

A co-worker of the fella' called the other night to see if I wanted to go to a paint night with his wife. It was totally last minute and I was totally intimidated because she is an artist who paints, but I am always game to try something new so off I went. While this painting is so very badly amateurish, I did get lots of compliments from the other people who were also at paint night so perhaps I am not as hopeless as I had thought.

Well, tomorrow is another day of refereeing and entertaining kids while trying to wrangle our two dogs and two cats so this stitcher should take her behind to bed! Happy stitching!