Retreat with Friends

On Friday, March 4th, I took off with 2 friends for Colorado Springs where 3 other friends were anxiously waiting for us to arrive. We got there in time for a nice dinner and an evening of sharing birthday and retirement presents and plenty of stitching, laughing and talking!

The hotel we stayed at had a wonderful inner courtyard/atrium area and on Saturday, we gathered together 6 comfy chairs and stitched most of the day away - it was heavenly!!! I decided to work on my Wigham wardrobe design by Judy O'Dell. It's barely started and I'd already found a mistake on it. That Saturday morning I finally sat down to see if I could figure out the mistake and how big it might be. As it turns out, it was only one small section that had been done separately - and further good fortune, was all one length of thread!!! So, that fixed, I kept on stitching and almost finished the first panel!

The circle of "dots" at the lower right is a flower that will have a couple of leaves and a pot underneath it, then this panel is done. It's a side panel for the Wardrobe and there will be another one (a mirror image) for the other side panel. The brightness of the overdyed floss isn't showing up too well in this photo-might need to take a picture in sunlight instead of lamp light!

Sunday, we went visiting to the home of another friend of the group who is also celebrating a birthday. We had such a lovely day of stitching, eating, visiting, playing with kitties and helping to feed the horses. I worked on my Janet Gibson's Scottish Swan Sampler, reproduced by Whimsey & Wit. I've misplaced one of the colors of silk and so jumped around on this piece. There's still quite a bit to do and I don't think much progress is visible from the last photo I put in the blog on Dec 30th 2, so I've decided not to include an update this time.

We had an awfully wonderful cake for the party girls though!

Yummy lemon cake with a cream layer between multiple layers of cake - it was wonderful!!!

Sunday morning before we left for our visit, the mountains were just beautiful and I just had to take a picture to share with you. I just love living in Colorado!!!

Great progress has been made on my "mystery" piece. I'm going to end for today so that I can get busy. My hope is to have the stitching finished by the end of the weekend. Then it will be time to go look for fabric for the actual finishing! With any kind of luck, there will be a finished photo within a couple of weeks. (I'm having friends over next Sunday for another time of food, fun and stitching which means that cleaning will be on my agenda for Saturday!!! Not sure how much of the finish work I'll be able to do next weekend. But after that................................)

To all those who have been so terribly affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I will keep you in my prayers. Life is fragile - be kind to each other and to yourselves.

Debby