Angel Update

Two years ago today, I showed you my progress on my Angel ornament for the Bride's Tree Stitch-a-Long. While I continued to make progress, this project was put on hold around November of 2008. Here's a photo of where it was then.

I'm planning on working on this some more over the next two months, as I have a fair amount of travel happening and will hopefully have some quiet stitching time.

On Libraries

Two articles about libraries came to my attention today. The first brings some joy.

4 Reasons Why the Library Should Affect Your College Choice

The second makes me see red and purple.

Libraries fading as school budget crisis deepens

The second is particularly maddening since public libraries are also suffering deep cuts in staff and hours, making access to information and resources even more difficult. Grr.

June SBQ

For the June Stitching Bloggers Question, Lee asks:

So many great things happen in the month of June. Graduations, lots of weddings, the First Day of Summer (for those of us in the northern hemisphere, anyway). Flag Day in the U.S. and St. Jean Baptiste Day for our Canadian friends. And for many of us, the third Sunday in June is Father’s Day and it’s a pretty big deal. We celebrate our fathers, or we remember our fathers or we try to treat our children’s fathers to a special day. So I decided that this month’s SBQ was going to have fathers in it in some way.

And here we go:

Tell us about something that you have stitched or plan to stitch for any father in your life. Maybe it’s for your father, your father-in-law, your children’s father, your grandfather, your godfather, or someone who was or still is an important father-figure in your life. Why did you choose this particular piece of stitching? Tell us the story behind it.

And because a simple one part question is never adequate, let’s go some more:

Often times we identify our love of needlework and our skills with our mothers or grandmothers or other women. It’s understandable because often they were are first teachers or role models. Now let’s think about our stitching life as it relates to our dads. Is there anything about our approach to stitching that we can recognize as traits of our fathers? For instance, does your dad (or any other important man in your life) have an approach to one of his interests that you can observe and think, “Hey….if I substitute the word “needlework” for “fly fishing”, we’d be pretty darn similar!” So tell us about it.

Coincidentally, today would have been my PopPop’s 101st birthday. He’s passed away almost 30 years ago, but isn’t it so odd that I always remember his birthday? And I can barely remember my own phone number some days.

~~~~~

This set of questions made me realize that I don't really do any significant stitching for the men in my life, or at least not the one's who are fathers. Sure, I've done a few ornaments here or there as Christmas gifts and that type of stitching, but nothing truly special. I don't think wedding samplers really count, especially not in this context. So, no stories.

Now, the second part of the set is more interesting. All the men in my family tree were handy. They were mechanics, electrical linesman, and those types of professionals. In general, they were very precise and methodical in their approaches to projects and could build or repair nearly anything as far as I could tell. I'm nowhere near as coordinated or practiced as they were, but part of why I've chosen the crafts I do is because the crafts offer the types of projects that allow me to be precise and methodical while allowing me to express my creativity. So, I cross-stitch, rubber-stamp, and basket-weave.