PLUM STREET SAMPLERS

Hey Cuz

Bre came home for Mother's Day this past weekend, and brought her new puppy with her. At long last, Tasha had a friend to play with!

Home!

What a lovely time I had in Dallas! I can't express well enough how warm and welcoming the ladies and gentleman of the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild were. I found myself wishing I could come to every one of their meetings, just to spend more time with them all.

When Ann Weissler (and my dear friend Michelle, who was my gracious chauffeur for the day!) invited me to present a workshop to their guild, I was thrilled to be asked, and set to work designing a sampler and two coordinating accessories that I hoped everyone would like. The name of the sampler is called Crowned Bird Sampler, and model stitcher Sharon Schutjer did an amazing job on it, returning it to me in a very short amount of time, given the density of it. (And her stitches are perfect! Thank you, Sharon!)

I designed it to be stitched with Belle Soie and Needlepoint Inc. silks, and I chose Lakeside Linens' Vintage Meadow Rue in 36 ct. for the fabric. (The pattern will probably not be released until next summer or fall.)

And here are the accessories...the first is called A Miniature Sewing Tray and the second is called A Berry for your Scissors:

And here are some of the guild members, working hard on their pieces:

I say "some" of the guild members because I couldn't fit the entire room into my camera! We had a full house, and it was a lot of fun.

This is part of a trunk show I brought, with the workshop sampler set up as well...

After the class, we all headed to a fantastic restaurant called Via Reál. If you're ever in the Los Colinas area, be sure and check it out. It's beautiful, the service is excellent, and the food was outstanding! (Thank you, Ava, for organizing our dinner and making all the reservations!)

I am so happy I was invited to spend the day with all of you. What a joy it was to have gotten to meet you and chat with you and just spend the day doing what we all love to do. :) Thank you so much for making it such a fun day for me! I sure hope it was fun for you too.

(My sister met us all for dinner that evening, and then I went home to her place to spend a few days with my family. What a great trip all around!)

P.S. Thank you again, Michelle, for working late the night before and getting up early to pick me up so far from your house! You're such a sweetheart. :)

Plea

I'm off to Dallas tomorrow morning. I'm so excited! See you when I get back!

Wings

Sabrina will officially be moving out on her own this weekend. No more college dorms in which one can barely move, no more parking permits, and no more mom telling her to keep her room picked up when she's at home. My girl is finally at the point in her life I never thought she'd be... not because I didn't have confidence in her; but because when she was my little thumb-sucking Bean, she would always say to me, "Mom, I'm nevuh going to gwo up and move out becuth I awayth want to thtay home and wiv wif you. Okay Mom?"

Homework.

Sabrina was home last weekend, and got her baby sister to help her with an assignment for her Environmental Communications class. The class was split up into teams, and each team needed to come up with a campaign ad to encourage others to be more aware of what we're doing to God's green earth. So Sabrina's team came up with a fun slogan for reducing and reusing all the plastic things that most of us are guilty of accumulating:

"Unplasticize UNL."

I loved the little 30-second video Sabrina and Sophie did to help out the team. And the professor loved it as well!

 

 

I hope you all have a great week ahead! I leave for Dallas on Friday, and I finally got all the charts mailed out last week. And just so you know, all those plastic bags that Tasha was sitting in came to good use: I always use them in lieu of bubble wrap when sending out anything that needs extra padding. So take that, Environmental Communications class! ;)

Big D

One more week and I'll be in Dallas! I'm very excited to be presenting a workshop at the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild there, and I'm hoping to meet a few familiar names. ;) One name in particular has volunteered to chauffeur me around, so I'll be having a fun time for sure. Thank you, Michelle!

I've been working since January on the project, and I hope you all like what I've come up with.

All of the kits have finally been shipped, along with charts and tutorials and supplies and trunk show. I can't wait to meet you all!

And thank you, Mom, for always encouraging me when it comes to my design efforts. I love you.

Coming Soon...

Hi there! I've been so madly getting things prepared for the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild in early May that I almost forgot I've got a new release coming on the first!

Hopefully this is being released in time for those of you who would like to stitch it for Memorial Day or Flag Day or Independence Day. Here is Betsy's House:

Stitch Count: 98w x 90h
Fabric: 36 ct. Vintage Examplar by Lakeside Linens
Threads: GAST
Shaker White
Old Covered Bridge
Wood Trail
Aged Pewter
Grecian Gold
Endive
Espresso Bean
Brethren Blue
Cherry Bark
and
WDW Baked Apple

I made an embarrassing omission on the back of the chart and forgot to give credit to the fabulous Sherri at Total Framing in Fairfax, Virgina for her perfect framing of Betsy! She used a gorgeous combination of moulding to create a double frame, and I'm in love with it! If you'd like this frame for your Betsy (or any other type of moulding), give her a call at (703) 426-0660. Total Framing has a very fast turnaround time, and they do hundreds of cross stitched pieces each month. (I was shocked at how quickly I received Spring Jack back from them as well!)

Another important bit of information I left off of the chart (I'm forgetting so many things lately!) is the stitch count. As you can see above, it is 98 x 90, so it's not an overwhelming project at all. Rindy Richards did a gorgeous job stitching the model, and I can't thank her enough!

Today I'll be giving things the final inspection for packing and mailing off to Dallas for the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild retreat. I'm very excited to be teaching there this year, and it's a huge relief to know that my head is attached to my body so it doesn't get left behind.

Enjoy your day!

Duet

Any time a song comes on the radio (or pops into Sophie's head), Sophie and I usually start singing to it together. She will belt out the lead to any song, and I usually take on a background singer's role, which seems to work well for us.

It doesn't, however, work as well for others in the house; on a recent visit home, Bre finally had to ask, "Do you two always break out in song?"

Why yes, we do. And usually for no good reason other than to pretend we're famous singers.

 

You should see us when we break out in dance.

ETA: The song is by Bruno Mars, and these are the lyrics:

I shoulda brought you flowers,
and held your hand.
Shoulda gave you all my hours
when I had the chance.
Take you to every party cuz all you
wanted to do was dance.
Now my baby's dancin',
Now she's dancin' with another man.

It's Been a While!

I've missed sitting here and "chatting" with you guys! I guess it's not really chatting, since I'm the one doing all the talking, but it feels like we're chatting sometimes. :) I've been wanting to sit here and post something for a long time now, but I've been extremely busy with getting class pieces designed and releases organized, and have not had many chances to update this poor neglected blog of mine.

And since my older girls are away, and my Sophie doesn't like to be photographed very much, there isn't a whole lot to post about except for the animals that live here. ;) But I did manage to find a few pictures I took over the Easter weekend, which made me smile.

My silly girls.. it was so nice having them all home again for a day or two.

Tilly-Roux loves Bre's soft voice, and if you could have heard the purring going on here!  But then, Sabrina came into the room, and Bre turned into a different creature.

Don't you just love it when a photo would have been so sweet, if not for one person with ideas of their own?

We love to flex our muscles around here.

That one was actually taken a few weeks ago on one of Bean's visits home, but I thought I'd include it.

I love my girls. And it's possible that, since they've spent so much time apart, they may actually kind of love each other a bit as well. ;)

I may have just jinxed myself.

Thanks for checking in here, even though more often than not, there's not much new to read. I sure have missed you all though!

Heart Attack (with a video)

 Spring break was quite an eventful one for Sabrina this year.. and quite a nervous one for me. She decided to go skydiving with a friend of hers, which completely surprised me, as my Bean has never been quite the adrenaline-junkie her dad and Bre have been. Mind you, Sabrina is a crazy-on-the-mountain ski bum, and all 90 pounds of her joined the women's rugby team last fall, but I never thought she'd be one to jump out of an airplane, 10,000 feet off the ground.

I was very much mistaken.

Here she is, waiting her turn in the plane, alongside her crazy, skydiving friend Nate. (She said she was fairly calm until the door opened, and the sudden rush of air and noise was more than what she was expecting, leaving her wondering what she may have gotten herself into.)

And here is my middle child's leg, hanging out of the side of the plane. I suddenly feel a need to go hug her blanket and her pillow and all her clothing to me and snivel. Don't you dare drop my baby.

And then the jump...

No way, no way, no way, not in a million, gazillion years. Not even for a Venti Vanilla Spice Latte.

But throw in a Pumpkin Spice Latte on the side, and we'll talk.

Some of you may remember Big Papa's skydive video, but this one was filmed differently. In Mike's, there was a videographer jumping next to him taking the video. In Sabrina's, the guy who was doing the jump with her was taking the video himself. I thought that was interesting, and quite a different perspective. Either way though, for the rest of my days my feet shall remain planted firmly on the earth, as God intended them to be. 

 

Sabrina Skydives! from Paulette Stewart on Vimeo.

By the way, Sabrina said that the wind you hear on the video is deceiving; once the chute opened, it was extremely calm and peaceful, and there was no sound at all, besides their voices. :)