Graduation

Just a quick note to put up some photos from Brooke's Graduation last night. A beautiful, meaningful commencement and a beautiful graduate:
 the happy family

 Happy grandparents and graduate

Today we start our journey in ernest. We are embarking on the train trip that will take us from Dar es Salam, down through Tanzania and into Zambia. It takes 46 hours plus delays so will be interesting. If you want to follow our travels in Africa, please go to:  Where are we today?

The only things that I brought with me for while I travel besides my camera, are:
~ Knitting - my silk scarf.   I will get this finished sometime for sure.

~ Crocheting - my granny square coat squares. Now that I have all the wool, I can go to town on them. I forgot, however, a needle to sew them together so will end up with a bunch of finished squares with loose tags of yarn. 
~ Needlework - 2 Christmas Crackers. These are the ones that I gave Mom for Christmas. They are just not for her in her current state. So I promised to complete them for her and then make them up into crackers. I believe that she wants to give them to my sister Lauri for Christmas, so I had better get going on them!  

Celebration of February

February is a great month for Danny and me: both have birthdays, Valentine's Day, and anniversary. To celebrate this year we took a quick car trip to Port Aransas on the Texas Coast. We also decided that this would be a great place to bring the grands for Spring Break.

 The weather was cold and rainy most of the time but it sure was refreshing. The skies were grey, overcast and often times rainy.

The car tripping allowed for more knitting on the second cowl. It is slowly getting to the right length of 54+" but I did have a visit from Mr. Rippit. Had moved the ribbing by one stitch and boy what a look that gave. LOL  Am inching slowly forward as we move the RV however, and now only have about 10inches left to do. Being a "car/RV trip only" project, and no further tripping after this one in the foreseeable future, it might take a bit to get it done. Our RV moving will only be around one area within a radius of about 25 miles.

Hoteling it when the evening weather outside is cold and blustery allows for more work to be done on the Christmas cracker as well.

I got all the beads on and finished to the point where I have to gather or ruffle some flair. As I have never done this, it will be an interesting learning experience. There are no instructions on how to do it so will be doing some trial and error I am sure.

My main focus for this month will be trying to complete a UFO Monkeys Jumping on the Bed and doing another mug-rug for the month of February with Love being the moniker. For the quilt, I am doing some playing with Superior Threads Glitter and the different embroidery motifs on the machine.

I had gotten to the last square and Miss Betsy started to squeak on me. I called a service centre and got "Oh Oh, you better bring it in" which I ended up doing once we got to the Corpus Christi area. In the meantime I inched my way along trying to finish up the basic square and inner border on the quilt so that I could do the outer border on Mr. Brother. Also had Miss Betsy serviced and yet, horrors upon horrors, had it back within 36 hours. Can't beat that - didn't even have time to get out Mr. Brother in her stead. So now Mr. Brother is now in being serviced. The only thing left on the quilt is the outside border, the binding, and the label. Can I do it?

The mug-rug will use up some of the fabric FQs that I got at the Waco "Winter Wonderland Quilt Show" - Stonehenge's Sweetheart grouping.

 This is what I have to work with.

I have an idea but am not sure how it will work out. Here too time will tell.

 basted, ready to work with. I was going to put hands being held on it but I didn't ave any flesh colored stash and as I want it all to be stash, .....

As we are planning on being in one place for greater lengths of time this month and next, I got out Rainbow Jane and restarted her. I have updated the website found on the right of the blog. I actually finished the second block

and printed off instructions for 2 more blocks, one square and one triangle, but not the templates. The templates come from the software and I think that is still in the storage unit. Drats! Maybe I can copy them from the book. When I reviewed the blocks found in the first series I found that I am probably going to get over my aversion to curves in quilting piecing - there is lots of it. But for now, more traditional piecing. Man, the pieces are tiny, fiddly and hard to match up even with paper piecing. I can see why people take forever to make one of these. I even managed to get the template onto Photoshop where I can add the finished blocks to it.

Now that we are settled in for 10 days, I will hopefully finish both the quilt and the mug rug and start a couple more of the Rainbow Janes.

busy hands, little work

Little, well maybe not so little work, I have been very busy just not posting, nor doing much needlework, quilting, or anything of that nature.

So what have I been doing? Well let's see: a trip to Canada to see my nephew graduate from university; back to the Appalachian Trail; off the AT; visited Ashville, NC; visited Blue Ridge, GA; back into the RV where we visited Little Rock, AR; then on to Panama; and now in Costa Rica; all the while I have started back to school online to obtain my MSN. Oh yes, I applied for a volunteer gig as a Nurse Practitioner in Somiland for this fall and also for another Peace Corps gig for next year. Phew!!!!! and here it is only the middle of July.

Father Frost: I am all done but the beard and the beads. I am not looking forward to the beard and as of today, it sits by my chair, waiting to be finished.

I got my pillow for the bed back when we returned to Texas. Sure adds some color to the light mint green of the covers and the pillows.

 Then I finished up a donation quilt called "Will you be my friend?" I will wrap a teddy bear in it for a friend...

 and add some washable markers to color the hearts or leaves, which ever they call them.

I treated the b&w fabric so that it can be colored and then washed out for multiple colorings. This was actually an experiment in this technique as I have some different b&w fabrics to make into donation quilts but I had to be sure it would work first.

Canada: I went from gorgeous sunny warm weather to snow and cold.

Apart from the amazing accomplishment of my nephew,

we traveled by motorhome into Saskatchewan where he was going to school. We stopped at a history museum and I found my new hummer:

We just thought things were bigger in Texas - How about an Ukrainian Egg and cowboy coffee.

Georgia: While visiting with friends we became reacquainted with Elliott. He opened his heart to us and then we left. The morning that we left he wouldn't say good morning, nor would he talk to us.Boy can he pout!

 He wouldn't look at us as we left.

 Then we finally got back in the coach. Seems like we had been gone for ever.

We parked on the river right in the middle of Little Rock, AR

We saw an immensely large statue of Christ We have seen one in Rio, Montana, Colombia, and now the Ozarks.

While in Ashville, NC I found a cute little knitting shop that sported the window theme of Star Wars (it was owned and operated by a young man in a kilt). Needles = light sabers...Darth Vader = black stocking doll...ObeeOneKinobi = stocking monkey

Here I bought 1200m of lace weight silk in a variegated pink to blue. I plan on hitting a lacey scarf to wear with jeans in the winter. And believe me, if things work out the way I would like them to, I will have lots of time to finish it.

Then on to Panama where we attended a 50 years of Peace Corps reunion. What fun. Our balcony overlooked the start of the Panama Canal giving us a constant view of shipping - drags, no cruise ships however. 

Met old friends:

 Surprise, Bob was on our bus!

 Diana

 Our "daughter" and her moms

 Danny, Shirley, Katie, Bob

 going over the Bridge of the Americas

We saw a fiesta parade for John the Baptist, the patron saint for Chitre from our balcony

And then headed over to Volcán our old stomping grounds. Here I attended an exhibition in Boquette by the quilting group that we started. What a proud day to see how far they have come.

 They got real creative with the local Ngöbe dress using cute children's cotton prints.

 This is how they normally look. Two of the women in the quilting group who are doing very well.

 This is but a sample of what was exhibited, and still there was even more to replace the sold items.

As one can see, not much done in the way of crafting but I have sure have had a great time with all of this "work".