Mom, Gardening, Stitching and Reading

I feel like I have been spending all my time lately in the garden. I know that this seems idyllic to most and don't get me wrong, I do like a pretty garden, but I am done. My mother on the other hand doesn't seem to ever be done. She is in fact planning another plant buying expedition for this Saturday. Well I guess all I can really do is smile and be thankful that I still have my mother here to aggravate me with all of her plant buying.

I guess I am an enabler because I bought her two miniature roses for Mother's Day. One was yellow and the other lavender. They are just tiny things but she has a real hand for making them grow. I also finished up the key fob for her and also stitched her up a Mother's Day card.

I'm not sure where the weird shadows came on the pics. I tried from a couple different angles but couldn't keep them from showing up, so I just went with the bad pic ;0) 

All of my carefully created tabs for HoHoS and OSADS are woefully out of date, but I do have the pics, so I just need to get them updated (this is on my list to-do today). My really good news is that I finished page 3 of BAP-T *wee-hee*

This picture is a little dark, but that is mainly because I didn't remember to take the pic until the wee hours of the morning and I didn't want to wake anybody up by turning on lights. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it is turning out. It is only through comparison with the original that you can see discrepancies. I keep reminding myself that this is a stitched replication and to stop sweating the details. I must admit that I am fairly sick of shades of grey, beige, and brown. I also must admit that I will probably not make my deadline. I think it was always overly optimistic but we are now heading into the middle of May and I have over 46 pages to do. At the beginning I was able to work at a pretty fast clip but over the past several weeks it has slowed down to a crawl. I am doing approximately the same amount of stitching, it's just that in some of the area the color changes were ridiculous. I have slightly changed my stitching style and am hopeful that I might be able to increase my stitching. I completed page 3 on Sunday night and when I was stitching on Monday, I was able to complete a little over 100 stitches in about 2 hours. There was a fair amount of color changes, so I am hopeful that maybe changes will increase the stitching speed. 

On the reading front, I completed Angel's Ink and must say that I really enjoyed the book and will definitely keep with the series. Right now I am reading Darynda Jones Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet in preparation for her next book Fifth Grave Past The Light. If you have not read her books, you need to immediately start. I love them. I am particularly fond of books where the characters make me laugh out loud and Charley Davidson is that character. I have been trying to read/listen to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and have not been having great luck. I know it is a classic but I wasn't fond of it 20+ years ago and not so very much fond of it now. Why oh why can't I like these characters. I think this will be another classic book that I will bail on from my Goodreads groups. Maybe I'll have better luck with June's pick which is Solaris  by Lem Stanislaw.