Lucky Me!

I won a giveaway and my prize arrived in the mail yesterday. The drawing was held at the blog By Your Hands and the hand carved crow stamp was made by Kristal from Rags-n-Tags. She has a lot of cool stuff on her blog and website - including a couple free patterns that you should check out.  She's really talented and I look forward to having fun with this. I'd like to try carving myself someday - maybe this will be the inspiration I need to get started.

This & That

My mom was here for a visit recently. She mentioned that she always uses a polyester fleece blanket to snuggle under when she watches TV or reads a book in the evenings. I convinced her that a quilt is so much nicer, so she chose a blue color pallette from my fabric stash and we worked out a design - simple appliqued hearts. I got this much done before she left to go home, and I will finish it up and send it to her at a future date - maybe for Christmas, or for her birthday in February.



She turned 81 on her last birthday and has never been to Yellowstone before, so a trip to that National Park was at the top of the list of reasons for her visit. We got to see lots of these big guys,

and of course Old Faithful performed as always, right on schedule.

This was a great time of year to go because there were absolutely no crowds or traffic jams. The weather was perfect and we really enjoyed ourselves.

I was at Sam's Club the other day and picked up a new issue of Country Home magazine, and what a surprise it was! Beautiful homes and not one single advertisement! Shocking, huh? If you haven't seen it yet, you should check it out for yourself - it's really nice.

My daughter took the new baby to have his pictures taken a few days ago and they turned out so cute I just have to share. Click here for the link to the photographer's blog where she has them posted. I can't wait to get some prints made. DD#2 had a dentist appointment last Friday so I got to spend some quality one-on-one time with the little guy while she was gone - YUM!

It's been a month since I injured my arm & shoulder stripping wallpaper and it's still giving me fits. I've started physical therapy and the therapist told me I had done damage to my rotator cuff and have a case of tennis elbow. He assures me that no surgery will be necessary, but I sure wish there was a magic wand I could wave to have me back to normal quickly!