Incoherent Scribblings

This week’s SBQ was suggested by Ami and is:

For those of you who use hand or over-dyed floss, how do you store it?

I currently don’t have enough hand/over-dyed floss to warrant a special storage method. What little bit I do have is still attached to the cards the skeins came on and merely tossed into a Ziploc baggie.

First, let me start off with the long-awaited picture of my Summer Exchange from Natty. She stitched me this yummy strawberries and cream-themed piece and turned it into a little pillow. Doesn’t it just look good enough to eat?
And now, for today’s big news: I finished all of the stitching on Mary a short while ago! Hip Hip Hooray! The girls are now too big to fit onto my scanner, so I will have to photograph them from now on… please forgive my photography skills. Right now I am alternating between this piece and my needleroll, so with only the kite tails and the backstitching left to go, I might just get “Catch the Wind” done by the end of the month!

I still have a little packing-related chore left to do this evening, but then it is back to “Catch the Wind” because I am in just too good of a rhythm to put this piece away today.

“Catch” you all later!

Since I figure my rotation will be all shot to hell this month anyway, I decided to work a little while on “Catch the Wind” this evening. I would love to finish this piece this month, but with everything else that is going on, I am not sure it will happen… Then again, I am really close to finishing Mary and once she is done it is just the kite tails and the backstitching. I guess only time will tell.

Anyway, I have some more exchange news! Not only did I receive my Summer Exchange from Natty on Thursday, Christine also got her Replacement Recipe Exchange piece from me too! Yipee! I still need to photograph the Summer Exchange from Natty, but at least I can show some pictures of the Recipe Exchange.

This picture actually shows the first piece that I stitched for Christine. Her blog shows the replacement. If you look closely, you will notice that the first piece had some little bows in the corners of the pot holder, but otherwise it is the same thing. I was really never happy with the bows on the first one so I decided to leave them out the second time around. I really like the way (both of) the pot holder(s) turned out and I am glad Christine likes it.

The photo also shows an example of a Guglhupf. This is a German/Austrian bundt cake and is the recipe that I included. I have made this cake quite a few times, but the recipe comes from a German cook book: So in order to translate the recipe into English for Christine I made a “sample” cake as I translated along.
I have also started my Needleroll Exchange for XXX. I like the design I have chosen and will give a hint that a good part of it is stitched over one. Considering I don’t do it a lot, the over one stitching is going pretty smoothly and as I have designated the weekends as packing-free days, I hope to get most of the over-one done tomorrow.

But now I am off to bed! Good night.

How do I start writing about one of my life’s most significant decisions? I refuse to focus on the negative feelings, the bad days when I could barely function, or on the reasons that I believe things fell apart.

I think I should start when I began to realize that I was torn in two. I didn’t want my marriage to join the statistics of another that ended in divorce nor did I want to view my marriage as a failure. However, no matter how much I wished that those things wouldn’t happen, I could no longer ignore the fact that I was miserable. I was sad that we just couldn’t seem to get along or make each other happy anymore no matter how hard we tried. I was tired of getting angry about the most insignificant things. I didn’t want spend the next five, ten, or twenty years living in despair. I just wanted all of the unhappiness to stop.

I knew that hard questions needed to be asked and that the questions deserved honest answers. When the answers finally surfaced, they weren’t as heartbreaking as I thought they might be. I suppose I had known the answers for quite sometime, I was just afraid to be honest with myself.

I had taken a long walk and was taking a break under a tree on the evening that the answers came to me. I am not sure if I would call it a full-blown epiphany, but when I got up and started home I felt that a fifty-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. There was a confidence in my step that had been missing for quite a long time.

Arrangements needed to be made and I briefly toyed with the idea of staying in Germany. But when I considered it, I knew that without A. in my life there was really no future for me here. I didn’t even know how I would go about building a life for myself here and quickly admitted that the best place for me to start over would be at home.

Once I made the decision to return home I felt strong and reassured. Of course I feel a little anxious about what the future holds, but somehow I feel like myself again. And that is all I need to be certain that this decision, no matter how hard it was to make, was the right one.

I haven’t had much time for stitching so far this week because I have been making moving arrangements and packing like a woman possessed! If you are interested, you can read a little bit about what has been keeping me busy over on my main blog.

As I looked over the top of the box that I am sorting my stash into, I realized it was time for the SBQ. So, here is this week’s question as suggested by Carol:

Do you have a favorite needlework tool that you like to work with? What is it and why do you like using it?

My answer to this week’s question is brief: Not really. I just have the “standard” items such as needle, scissors, and hoop and though I count those items as necessary, I wouldn’t call them “favorites.”