Molly and the oven thing!

Our poor Molly has a hard life.... It is her sole responsibility to protect our home from any disaster resulting from oven neglect.  She immediately panics when she hears the "ding" when the temperature  is set and begins to spin and bark when I open the door and put a pan in the oven. 

She then lays close by and can hear the timer start the final second countdown.  When it actually goes off she gets hysterical, running and barking, fetching me from wherever I happen to be and will not stop until a pan is out of oven, the temp is off and the door is shut...  And to her credit there have been occasions when I did not hear the timer and our dinner would have burned it she had not fetched me.

There has also been many times when something has been done early and I've taken it from the oven and neglected to shut the timer off... When the timer does go off she goes through the whole running, barking scenario and she will persist until I physically go to the kitchen and "pretend" to take something from the oven and shut the stove off.  Then she can relax.

   Molly is a rescue dog and had been returned 2 times before we took her so we knew she has "issues".... among which are that she panics if she has to walk on a hard surface,  when anyone speaks too loudly, a car or plane passes, the phone rings, etc. etc. etc.  If one of us coughs or sneezes she come running in a panic and we have to assure her that "I'm okay!" We have had her six years and this is her forever home but  I often wonder what happened to her before we got her.

She is always on full alert and has 3 beds and they all have to be protected on three sides and where she can dash out to prevent a disaster... one is in my bedroom corner between the wall and the bed and another is the living room between the couch and the wall and third is in my workroom corner where she vigilantly protects me from her post in the corner. If I pull one of her beds out to vacuum she immediately pulls it back into the corner.  She is much loved here though - issues and all..

Not life threatening but definitely life changing.....

In early February my eyes took a drastic turn for the worst.  I immediately went to my Macular doctor and the dry macular has reverted to wet and there were large pockets of blood inside both eyes.  I was sent to another specialist ...  

 

They super dilated my eyes and then injected a dye into my veins and with a scanner with a   bright light tracked and photoed  the dye moving through the veins in my eyes.  This identified exactly where and how much blood was leaking from the retina veins plus the dye contained a drug activated by the light that helped reduce  retinal bleeding. 

 

Finally they injected another drug Avastin into both eyes.  Ironically this drug  used for leaking veins was discovered by accident during use in chemo for cancer....around 2010.  Without it I would be blind within a year. They can't make my eyes any better but hopefully slow the decline..  I go every month at first for this procedure  and then if all goes well, every other month.  It is inoperable and incurable.

After the procedure I'm unable to see and  totally miserable for about 12 hours. Stitching has been hard even with magnification so I can only do it for a short periods of time. I'm determined to finish the cottage series and anniversary CQ and as many CQJPs as I can. After that I'm not sure what I will do to pass time without stitching. So I am doing more things physical and am even cleaning house (which I find hard to believe)  If you spray enough Windex on a window and rub it with towels long enough, it will be clean even if you can't see it....same with vacuuming.  Thank heavens I have my wonderful magnifying lamps and giant computer screen... I can still drive if there are no other cars on the road... LOL which means I can drive to my neighbor's house and back.  But time and time again in my life when one door closes another door opens.

March cqip2016

As usual the blocks are taking a different direction than I had envisioned.  I was all primed to do a lot of goldwork techniques and use a lot of my gold trim..   Most of the trims are too large and the lace as become demanding and bossy...so I comply... who can argue with lace.

Ahh that light that occasionally comes on!!

Sometimes I am amazed that it takes me so long to see the light.  I'd blame it on senility but it has been a life long problem....  For years when I am stitching, I put a brown paper bag  on the floor to my left to put all the scraps etc. into... But I often accidentally knock something off the table and it falls into the bag... So it is a ritual to check the bag before I toss it....   Then after all these years I had a moment of brilliance and realized  I always was holding my stitching with my left hand and it was the left arm resting on the table that was knocking items off the table.  I moved the paper bag to my right side and the problem was solved because my right arm never touches the table......  Duh!!!!

I have a piece I have been trying to finish for Pam Kellogg and  had a bothersome patch.  It for just too big for anything I could think of and it was too large to leave blank... I was like a big hole in the design and I kept trying to think of  something to fill the space.  The again the light finally came on....instead of trying in vain to fill the space.....just make the space smaller by widening the seam with a piece of contrasting ribbon.   Duh!

Below is an old post on modifying the shape of a patch.. Enjoy!:

I had three areas I wanted to change..

1. I wanted the orange patch to appear bigger and make the lavender patch beneath it a little more interesting shape. 

2. The teeny tiny corner patch upper right was just too small so I either had to make it appear larger or disappear.

3. The long narrow patch lower left just had to disappear..

First the orange patch.... I put a purple ribbon on a very wide orange ribbon and stitched it at the very lower edge of the orange patch making the orange patch look larger... By putting it at a slight angle it changed the shape of the lilac patch below it.. You don't have to ALWAYS follow the seam//

 

I used the same treatment to solve two different problems (#2 and #3)... an extra large bold seam.... 

and it made #2 (tiny triangle) seem larger by again putting it on the very edge of the patch. and #3 (long narrow strip) seem to disappear.

The bold seams are always an excellent way to draw OR focus attention on a block