Swans A'Swimming

Betsy Morgan's Swan Bower is DONE!

The outside

One side of the interior needle case/pinkeep

Notice the neat pockets on either side of the case.

The other side of the interior needle case/pinkeep

Thread Keep, Scissor case, Scissors Fob

I believe this is one of the projects in Betsy Morgan's book, published by Inspirations, so if you have a hankering to do it, it is now available outside of a class. It's a lovely piece, like all of Betsy's projects.

The current issue of Inspirations also has a new project from Betsy, a Christmas Etui. I decided I loved it and I decided to order the kit from Inspirations because, as I get older, the less patience I have for sourcing materials for projects. Give me a complete kit with all the bits and bobs, and I am a happy stitcher.  And that is why I love shops who will package up all the materials for a project and send them to you in lovely, tissue-wrapped packages. It's like having Christmas year-round, looking forward to those boxes to arrive in the mail or the UPS truck.

Meanwhile, when not stalking the mail carrier, I went on a little road trip with Baby Girl a couple of weeks ago.

I have been raving about the Tenacity exhibit at Jamestown Settlement since I went to see it earlier this year. I have been bugging her endlessly about it  encouraging Baby Girl to go to see it and she finally succumbed to the nagging influence and off we went.

Now I had planned to go see the exhibits inside the museum, have lunch, and go home. However, it was a beautiful fall day, and Baby Girl wanted to see it all, which includes reproductions of a native village, the three ships that brought the colonists to Virginia, and the Jamestown fort. So we wandered around.

I took the camera and forgot I had it until we got to the ships. So here are the pictures that came out.

I did not go aboard. I have a wee bit of claustrophobia and a bad knee, so venturing below decks just was not going to happen. However Baby Girl explored to her heart's content and told me all about it. Meanwhile,  I had a lovely time people-watching and enjoying the fresh air.

It was a very nice break from the usual rut, and we've decided we want to find more things like this to do on the week-ends.

Poor neglected blog

And it's probably going to have very sporadic posts for the next couple of months.

There's a lot going on with work, and Mother has had a couple of mild "events", and I was knocked out by a sinus/ear infection for about a week, and on it goes. I wanted to let the people who have contacted me that I haven't planned to stop blogging--but it won't be very frequent for awhile.

If I could get my pictures to download, I'd show you what little I've been able to stitch in the last few weeks, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I finished the stitching on Swan Bower and started the assembly line to put it together, I got another panel for Tsubaki stitched, and I worked a little on the Queen Stitch needle case that used to be my travel project but has become my late Sunday afternoon project.

And I cannot believe that was all in just one sentence.

"See" you when things calm down!