Huge Success

Hi friends! Thank you so much for your kind compliments on my last piece, The Italian Baker. I gave it to the real Italian Baker, and oh my!, what a reaction. He was just speechless. He is 75 years old now. He is celebrating 50 years of being in business now. That is why I stitched that for him. When I came in with Brian to work at 11:30 p.m. he was so extremely puzzled to see me. Brian told him my wife has something for you. He said, "You made this for ME?" Long silence. "My hair is standing up!" "I cannot  believe it!" "Oh, thank you. Thank you."

He then proceeded to invite us to the family 50th Anniversary party on Sunday. We went. There was a lovely table set with two heaping  platters of  many assorted cookies. In the center there was a beautiful three tiered white and gold 50th anniversary cake. Next to this cake was..... my cross stitch on display! I was so surprised. All of his daughters stopped to thank me. The Italian Baker once again thanked me. What a warm, fuzzy feeling I got.😍

Wanna know something fun? The Italian Baker plays the accordion. We went back upstairs, but we could hear him play.😉

Last night after the shop closed, and we walked past with the dogs, what did we see? Oh my! My  cross stitch of the Italian Baker! It sits facing out, towards the end on top of the long counter/display cases. Exactly where I can perfectly look in as I pass when taking the dogs on their daily walks.

Last week I finished listening to a very looooong audio book called The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. Wow! I loved this book. Thank you for this recommendation Carol.😉
Julie Orringer’s astonishing first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater (“fiercely beautiful”—The New York Times; “unbelievably good”—Monica Ali), is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and the chronicle of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. At the end of Andras’s second summer in Paris, all of Europe erupts in a cataclysm of war.

From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s room on the rue des Écoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a love tested by disaster, of brothers whose bonds cannot be broken, of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Expertly crafted, magnificently written, emotionally haunting, and impossible to put down, The Invisible Bridge resoundingly confirms Julie Orringer’s place as one of today’s most vital and commanding young literary talents.

I am stitching on BBD Pumpkin Farm once again.

I appreciate your prayers. The pain has been increasing. The nerve must really, really be getting pinched severely.  I am counting down the days til my surgery. It is on the 15th.

Have a good day my friends! Thank you for stopping by.

Stitching and praying,
Vickie