What I've Been Up To The Last Four Days

 We had it very foggy with wild wind and pouring rain here in our corner of Ontario this weekend. There was a fog and rainfall warning -there are always weather warnings these days it seems. It is still very gray and windy this morning. Ned and I were sorry to see so many of the trees have lost branches. The white snowbanks are littered. But it is an old forest here on the property and we have to have these March winds to bring on those May flowers...eventually. The path along the left fence line always floods in spring. It's the spot where, with one step I went up to my thighs in icy water one spring. Though a pretty walk normally, I don't venture down that one when it looks like this.

I've been busy in the house and actually did a lot of sorting of old stuff in the basement. And "stuff" it was. A lot of things came down from the farm with us that probably should have been sorted then. There are the 9 bankers boxes of Tony's old business papers that came with us, for instance, and have still never been opened.  He just might be ready to have rid of them. 

I've been stitching too. My Queen has her crown.

I caught up with several of my favourite flosstubers while stitching yesterday. That includes, Country Stitchers, Deb and Liz, who share their love of all things flossy. And for you American stitchers, they host a lot of fabulous giveaways. 

That is my cross stitch basket there for toting the current project and this bad photo is actually showing the true colours of this motif. 

 That reminds me of all the practicing Princess Elizabeth had to do before her coronation ceremony. The crowning crown weighs almost 5 lbs so there is a trick to keeping it balanced on a head especially when it has to stay there for 20 minutes. 

Meanwhile,in my mundane life as far from crown anxiety as you can get, I've also been adding to my EPP stars, steadily turning them into hexagons. I'm still mostly working on the February Blues with a couple of March yellows in the mix. These are fun slow stitching too. You can see lots more lovely yellow stitching over at the So Scrappy weekly party. 

I am so sad to see the Crabapple Hill Studio folks are retiring. I've stitched many of their projects over the years and am currently stitching their Snow Day project. I did take advantage of their sale and downloaded five PDF patterns...no paper ones left at this point. The link is this one Crab Apple Hill Studio PDF if you'd like to check out those. Btw, I bought these online one after the other which triggered an alert with the credit card folks. I spent twenty minutes this morning in a telephone queue before speaking with a very nice lady that helped clarify the situation and release the hold put on my card. She told me it was the small amounts plus number of transactions in a row that caused the issue, just a heads up there. 

I put on this audio book to listen to while I pinned another Liberty's Birds block.  Alice McDermott's After This and I am enjoying it. 

It was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Families are seldom easy it seems. I read one of Alice's books back awhile, really enjoyed her interesting writing and then forgot about her. In my old days, that would never have happened. 

LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color asked, in light of St. Patrick's Day, what is our favourite shade of green. I had to think. I don't wear green very often but I use it a lot in various stitching. I actually love all the shades ranging from the sages to the deep forests. I love trees with all the leaves and the needled trees too. When I lived in Canada's far north on Baffin Island, I really missed trees and all the beautiful greens they add to a landscape. 

Hope you had a good weekend and your week is off to a good start too!

And it's good to share...joining in wonderful linky parites at Songbird Designs, Kathy's Quilts, The Inquiring Quilter, Life in Pieces and Quilting is More Fun Than Housework.