The Mother's Day 6 a.m. get up

the furry four legged child in this household has no concept of the idea of "sleep in" -- nope, this morning I got my usual 6 a.m. wake up call -- a wet nose on whatever bare skin she can find -- got to love dogs!

but before I launch into what I got done yesterday, I just want to say Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there!
feeling pretty good about yesterday's work in the "studio"

one half of the red beads and pewter necklace is strung up

the way this came together is pretty amazing -- I hope to get a lot of the other half done today then I can think about exact placement of the center stone


I have only four more petals to put on to the last sunflower -- which means I need to get busy with figuring out what the next flowers will be on this piece

and the Christmas sweater is 23.415% complete

oh yes, and I finished addressing the 97 postcards for the charity auction!

while I was in the store this skein of yarn just hopped into the basket -- you may recall back at the end of March I gave a baby afghan to the dental assistant that helped me out, so my baby gift stash is need of replenishing

I think this stuff will knit up into a very nice afghan -- and it should be a quick one to do since it is a bulky yarn which means the really big needles will come out


picked these up too -- one can never have too many wash cloths in the house

and there are still patterns on embroidery stitches of my sewing machine that I haven't tried, so I'll be giving some of them a whirl on these

(just because these were inexpensive doesn't mean they need to look "cheap" when I get done!)

then there are these

an office supply store is a dangerous place -- I have always liked markers and recently I've learned that many of them -- these especially -- can be used on fabrics to do art work and they even wash pretty well without fading out too much

the plan, however, is the use these as more accents on the Out of Africa pieces


for doing more detail on this sort of animal --

these would be oryx

a sort of ox like animal with very cool markings and amazing horns

since I'm using rubber stamps to create the basic animal shape on the fabric, the highlighting has to be done with something else --

all those new colors of sharpies should make this fun
maybe well try this one too -- very colorful

and I haven't done any birds for this yet

this would be a Hornbill


-- got to get a couple of other things finished so I can get back to these!!