Black Friday

It truly is Black Friday at my house today. We are busy cleaning up from yesterday's feast and putting away all the Autumn decorations, and I HATE IT! I don't want the season to end, I don't even want to decorate for Christmas yet. Even though I do love putting up Christmas lights and hanging ornaments on the tree. I'm just not ready yet, I need another month of fall!

I took some photos of the Autumn/Thanksgiving decor before putting it all away. This little turkey is off of a Dianne Arthur's chart "Harvest Blessings".

This one is of course a Bent Creek "Thankful Row" I love the red lettering and the vine behind it.

This one I am not sure who the designer is, I purchased it off of ebay. It came framed already, and I love the little pumpkin on the corner of the frame. If you know the designer i'm all ears?

This is of course a Lizzie Kate design. These square IKEA frames are great to pop in little seasonal designs. I have two or three that I just rotate my smaller stitches in and out of.

This one is "Autumn leaves", a pretty quick design just using DMC thread. Since our leaves don't change color here I like to pretend still. And really it's what leaves, we have palm trees and cacti!

Slow nut to crack!

Still dragging along on this one. I like it, I do. I just have other stuff I want to be working on, but i'm determined to finish this first. Fingers crossed it will be done this weekend. My other projects that are calling to me to work on before Thanksgiving are Bent Creek's Uber-Turkey (i'm about halfway done) and I want to start Bent Creek's Gobble. I always like their seasonal charts, and I love putting up different cross stitch for each season.

We spent our Veteran's Day exploring. We drove down to Tucson and on the way stopped to check out the cotton fields. We don't have as many cotton fields up around Phoenix, so it was neat to see it and tell them how their grandmother used to pick it by hand for like a nickel a bag.

I knew they were my kids, when the found seeds inside the puffs and were excited over "all the money we will save stuffing pillows if we grow our own cotton!!". So we are going to try, not sure if we will actually get any cotton out of it but it will be neat to see if the seeds even sprout.

Being an Arizona girl at heart, I like to "visit" winter. I wouldn't want to live anywhere with real snow for several months of the year, but I can admit it is fun to play in the snow and be out in the chilly weather for short (very short) periods of time. And yes I do call that half inch of snow you see in the photo snow. Anything more than this and I would be bunkering down to hibernate and putting snow chains on the car.

And this is down at Mt. Lemmon. It is amazing to go from the base of the mountain with saguaros and cactus to the top where there is snow and pine trees.

And this is my youngest, Zoe and I on the ski lift. I have never been on a ski lift before (again I live in Arizona, winter sports aren't my thing). I temporarily forgot I was scared TERRIFIED of heights. And sweet boyfriend had reasured me "don't worry it's only 10 feet off the ground". That was a lie, and then the chair was swaying in the wind, and bouncing when ever it went past a pole. If my youngest hadn't been on with me, I would have made them stop the ride and get me down! Never again! Yes the mountain was pretty, but that ground underneath looked hard and sharp.

How is this taking so long!!!

Uggh this has taken me all week just to get this far. I like the design, but in my head I was thinking small=quick. So far this one has been dragging a bit. It is Cricket Collection, the chart is from 1997 (I graduated high school that year!). I like the folksy look of the little acorn.

These are my two fall exchanges for the Seasonal Exchange. I stitched the little squirrel and finished it as a flat ornament. The pumpkin pillow was stitched for me by Laura. I love the gold beaded trim she used. It is a Bent Creek design, I know because I have wanted to stitch this one for myself for a while now. .