Everyone is reading Harry Potter

Everyone at my house is reading Harry Potter right now. We are sharing the new book while my daughter reads her way through the series from the beginning. As you can see from the photo, the humans are not the only ones who are interested in what happens in the book. Holly is very intently staring at the book over my daughter's shoulder. Maybe she knows that there are cats in the story.

I did some stitching last week but not very much. I worked on my monochrome piece for the Sumptuous Stitches class. It is coming along fairly well -- I like the pulled satin stitch but I am not sure about the random stitches in the top section of the background and need to work on the center more. I will see if I can make more progress this week. Lesson 3 deals with embellishment -- I will have to see what I can come up with.

Flower, Fruit and Vegetable share

I bought a copy of Photoshop Elements the other day to play with. Above you can see the results applied to a photo of my latest flower, fruit and vegetable share. There are pie cherries, blueberries, peaches, yellow beats, green peppers, dill, cucumber, basil, spring onions, zucchini, eggplant and lettuce.

Wednesday

Today is my 15th wedding anniversary. My husband is on a business trip to California. He has a late flight back so I hope he beats the thunder storms. It rained on our wedding day too -- we got married in southern Virginia at the Chamberlain Hotel on Fort Monroe. We had everything planned to be married in the gazebo with the reception in the hotel. We ended up getting married on the porch and the USS Enterprise came into port with all of the sailors in their dress whites on deck, saluting the flag at Fort Monroe during the ceremony.

I bought him a digital camcorder as an anniversary present -- now he can be a true karate Dad and videotape the kids fights and kata. I tried installing video editing software on my laptop and found out that I need to upgrade to Vista to make it work. I got the upgrade but decided that tonight is not the night to upgrade my operating system.

I did find a cool link on another blog you can create your own name or phrase at spell with flickr.

Catching up

I am caught up with my Take a Stitch Samples -- Sheaf stitch variations and Arrowhead in scraps of metallic ribbon and perle cotton left over from previous projects. I think that the small experiments came out pretty well and the metallic colors really jazz up the stitching.

I have also been working on concepts for Sumptuous Surfaces. I tried to follow Sharon's advice and develop the sketch of the book and coffee cup but I have not come up with satisfactory sketch. If I am still not there tomorrow night, I will start stitching the plain one. This one includes a stitching map. There is more movement in it but I am not satisfied with the size or the shape of the coffee cup. I drew another one that is 4 x 6 but I am not happy with the use of space. I posted the other one on the Flikr group.