A Much Needed Break

Wow, where to begin, it's been a busy couple weeks!  My sister and I drove home with our dogs for a week.  It was such a nice break from my crazy busy life here in Colorado but it's also nice to be home too!  Here's a picture of me, my mom and sister out on the boat with the dogs.

 
While home in Wisconsin I of course got to go to Lynn's and I spent 2 hours there, I think my family was ready to send out a search party!!  But, I had such a good time!  Jean who works there had just finished stitching Susan Rambo so we were looking at frames for that and also for my Mary Roe.  I did a little shopping for charts and then Jean and I pulled a conversion to overdyed threads for Dutch Beauty.  I guess this means that I'm going to stitch on Dutch Beauty!!  It was really fun! 

Also while I was at Lynn's we looked at other options for the gold house in Grace Bridges and found a really pretty BS Pecan Pie.  I tried that and it was the perfect blend of a light gold but still being gold enough for my taste.  Here's a picture of Grace with the new gold in the chimneys and a little in the house itself.

 
By the time I finished that much I needed a break from this sampler (and I admit that I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of that whole house) so I did something that is uncharacteristic for me and started a second project.  Here's my start on Ann Sandles. 

I'm stitching Ann on 36 count Vintage Meadow Rue and don't have much to show yet except how I zig zagged my way through the border to get all the way around.  I tend not to love borders like this so I like to get them out of the way.  My sister was nice enough to drive a big stretch on the way home so I could get the borders to meet.  Yay!  As of this writing the border outline is done but that's as far as I've gotten.  Ann is going to be a fun sampler to stitch once I get the flowers in the border done and can move on to the inside. 

Sorry for all the wrinkles in my photos!  I'm using some Belle Soie silks on Grace which I've seen run so I'm waiting to iron her until she's done but really I'm just too lazy to fire up the iron for every post.  If I had to do that I'd probably never post on this blog! 

The rest of our vacation was nice.  It was hot and humid while we were home so we couldn't spend as much time outside as we would have liked but it was nice just to spend the time together as a family.  I'll leave you with a photo of me playing ping pong with my Dad.  We had some helpers while playing, one who thought it looked like a fun game and the other who figured if there was barking going on then she should probably bark too!   :)