Sweet Summer Gift

Hi friends! I was able to go to the 4th of July parade. Our parade is at 7 in the evening, and it was cool that night and I did not get a headache either!😄

I received the most sweet surprise in the mail from our friend Stasi. Stasi had a piece of her stitchery that she wanted to give a good home. She offered this to anyone who wanted to make it up into something.  I entered this giveaway as it is cute and PINK! Well  our friend RJ won the giveaway. I congratulated RJ and that was that. Not so! Sweet RJ told Stasi she would like her to give it to me since she knows I love pink and RJ is now gone on a 2 month long trip.  THANK YOU RJ! THANK YOU STASI! Here is the piece. I have made it into a pin pillow.

I am working on Happy Birthday, the  next chart in chronological order for AotH. As you know, the DMC suggested is not always matching up to the pattern cover pictures. So over the long weekend I stitched up the house. I had a bad feeling about the color. I should have stopped. Yes, SHOULD have. I told myself it will be okay. I don't know why!! It just kept eating away at me. Here is how it DID look. I took a picture of it next to the pattern picture for you. My stitched house is on the left. Pattern on the right.

NOT THE SAME. NOPE. So.... I stared at that completed house for two days. And then ripped out all that recommended off brown/612 and put in 3864. I used this in Pink Hill Manor with these same pinks that are being used here again. It looks good there, it looks good here. Take a look. Here is the new, improved house.

I am now working on those trees! Oh lazy daisy stitches don't go quick for me.😵

A few of you recommended All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer to me so I put myself on the waiting list of Over Drive, our digital library. I borrow all my audio books from my library.😊 I like free!😉 This was an excellent book. I was very surprised by what I thought was an abrupt ending. Maybe I was too immersed in the story while stitching? I actually went back to the first five minutes of the story and listened to it again for the sake of clarity.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

I do hope you have a wonderful weekend whatever you are doing my friends! Thank you for stopping by and leaving me such nice notes of encouragement.

Stitching and praying,
Vickie

Miss Mabel sunbathing