No tats, just plants!

At this point I don’t even want to count how many days we have been in quarantine, I guess I shouldn’t count days because it has been months. The company my hubby works for (a company that builds carbon fiber guitars) “officially” had to go back to work last Monday. Up until that week he has been working from home and pretty much everyone else has still been getting paid but they haven’t had to go into work.   The company is located in the next county that has decided to move to phase 1.5 and allow a few more businesses to open. His boss decided he could go ahead and keep working from home  since a lot of what he has to do can all be done from home, so for now he only has to go in when he needs to.

The county we live in is still in full on quarantine because we were one of the hardest hit as far as cases and deaths go so I haven’t been able to find a job yet. Unfortunately, I haven’t really gotten anything much done around the house either. About the only thing we have really accomplished was a bit of yard work. My hubby loves rhododendrons and we have been meaning to plant some in our yard since we moved in (yickes has it really been 6 years)  but we never could find the time (or really the money)  to do that since we have pretty much worked every summer on the weekends doing concerts and festivals. I ended up getting one at Walmart on clearance and then the next time I went to Walmart I happen to ask if they were going to be going down in price and they said they were just going to throw them away so they sold me 4 more for $8.00 each…SCORE!! They had already bloomed and they were not looking so great but they are pretty hardy plants so we are hoping they will be ok.  Our property is about 2 acres and for some reason this stretch of land has never had anything planted along it. We are hoping that its not because nothing will grow there or since we have a power pole in the middle of that yard that it isn’t illegal to plant there. Wish us luck!

Valentine's Day

I am happy to post that the next holiday I am catching up on is Valentines day and I actually get to say that I sent them out. Unfortunately, there is some bad news as well. I didn’t send them out in a very timely manner which is a huge shame because I actually had these doodads done for last years holiday and just didn’t send them out. Part of the reason why they didn’t get sent out last year is because I didn’t love the way they turned out and partly because I couldn’t come up with a card and partly because of the shame of not sending out the Christmas cards.

This is the first time I have tried adding beads into the tatting project itself, it’s also the first time I had attempted split rings. I got the pattern here on Etsy.  I tried tatting the key a couple of different ways but because my picots are out of control since the last couple of projects I did I wanted big floppy picots and the thread I use doesn’t really allow for small picots to look good ( I used size 10 Artiste thread called cloud. ) I decided to omit the picots. I still didn’t love the way these turned out and adding the beads, especially the one that you have to add to the second half of a split ring, really was not fun so I only ended up making 12 of these.  Since I didn’t make enough of these and I wanted to give a few more people valentines I sent out a couple of the doodads that I had left over from previous years.

When I went to put these together I found that when I made the beaded hearts I didn’t account for a way to attach them to the tatting.  Usually I add extra beads or a bigger bead on top to attach them but for some reason I didn’t this time. The beads were so small that I couldn’t find a split ring with small enough wire to go through them, so I ended up making my own rings. They don’t look very good but at least I got them attached.

Here's to hoping that I will post again real soon!

No Christmas again!!

Things have been pretty frightening lately, I seem to have lost days, maybe even weeks at a time because we are at day 60 of self quarantine and I have no idea where the time has gone or what I have done the last couple of months. Apparently, I need to quit blinking because it seems to happen in the blink of an eye!

Anyway, I would love to be posting about the next holiday but alas the next holiday should be Christmas , and I seriously cant believe I have to say this, but I didn’t send out Christmas cards yet again! Maybe even worse than that is I can’t even remember why I didn’t send them out. If I had to make a guess I would say probably because it was beyond stressful at work. There were a couple of months that I seriously didn’t think I was going to make it out alive. As far as Christmas goes, about the only thing I can remember is that it was just me and my hubby hanging out alone for the day and since it landed in the middle of the week I only had one day off anyway.  So I am going to just move on past this holiday, pretend it never even happened and hope for a better one next year. The way things are feeling that may even feel Christmas will be here in the next couple of weeks.  

Thanksgiving 2019

It is impossible to believe that we have been in quarantine for 46 days, yet here we are. I have spent most of my days with my head spinning out of control, watching murder shows on ID and trying to come up with a new craft project (dang pintrest is a huge contributor to my stress) . I have an extremely difficult time starting new projects: what with trying to make a decision on what craft I want to do next, like tatting, beading, jewelry making, cross stitching or plastic canvas etc.  and then the fun of trying to choose colors for the project aggghhh! I have an okay time while I am in the middle of a project but then when I reach the end I have a hideous time completely finishing it. I actually have lots of new crafts I want to try but trying to pick one is overwhelming. I am a massive craft hoarder and I have a room full of supplies that would almost put hobby lobby to shame but that is completely overwhelming because there is so much and such a wide variety. I don’t know what my problem is but I feel like one big giant mess.

It is getting harder and harder to come up with ideas for my holiday tatted/beaded cards.  It is just as hard to come up with card sayings and ideas, in fact trying to come up with cards is a good part of the reason why they sometimes get sent out so late or sometime not at all. The next holiday is a perfect example of both.

These are the motifs for Thanksgiving  2019

I had already made leaves for a card a couple of years ago but I couldn’t come up with anything else, so I found this idea by Marilee Rockley. I don’t much like the little beaded guy so wasn’t super proud to send these out. I made 13 total doodads but I only sent 6 of them out, mostly due to the fact that I thought they were not so good and partly because they probably got sent out late. I don’t like any of the colors and the poor scarecrow is just sad. I used 2 different brands of thread and I was a bit surprised how different the 2 threads were size wise. The gold leaf is artiste size 10 as is called topaz and the red one is red heart classic size 10 and it is burgundy.

We couldn’t come up with anything witty to put on the cards so we decided to just tell it like it is.  You probably can’t see what is says in the parentheses but it says “insert appropriate number here”.

I hope everybody is staying safely at home and working on lots of fun projects. It is quite the feeling knowing that the whole world is doing the same thing and going through the same stuff. 

Halloween 2019

Time is just absolutely flying by. I am still behind on my posts so I am going to continue to try to catch up on posting about past holidays. As I have said before I rely on my blog posts if ever I want or need to go back to previous tatting to remember what I have done.

I believe the next holiday that I need to post about is Halloween 2019.

I ended up making 13 of these doodads but I only sent 7 of them out. I would venture a guess that they probably got sent out late because that’s the way I usually do things (I am not  proud of that but I am really trying to figure out why I have such a hard time completing projects). That would also explain why only part of them got sent out. I found the pattern for the tatting on pintrest, it’s a pattern by L. Shelby and you can find it here. I changed the pattern a little bit because she has the pattern listed as a dragon and I wanted it to look like a bat. This was a pretty fun pattern to work but it’s one you have to pay attention to while doing it because its easy to miss a join. In fact, I made 2 of them that are unusable because I forgot a small ring on one of the wings and on another one I missed a join. I used artiste thread, size 20 and the color is called pewter.

I have sent out Halloween motifs for the last 4 years and I haven’t missed a year since I started tatting so I have pretty much ran out of patterns for this holiday. I found a witch hat by Gillian Buchanan that has a written pattern and a diagram but for some reason I tried it and failed dismally. I can’t seem to figure it out. I may have to try it again because I can’t find anything else. I haven't been doing much tatting lately because I cant seem to find something to tat. Since I didn't send out any holiday ones last year I am ahead of the game for this year and Halloween 2020 is actually the next project I need to make stuff for. I have been doing lots of cross stitch because I realized that I never made a birth announcement for our grand son (my husbands daughters son) that will be 2 in June. I had made one for his brother so I figured I should do one for him as well.  I also decided to make one for our new grand daughter (Jeez she will be turning 1 this month) and she has 2 siblings that I am working on as well.  These have kept me quite busy but it has been way too long since I have tatted and I am starting to really miss it. I need to find a project soon before I forget how! 

Let go? Let go!

It sure has been a crazy last couple of months. I have hesitated to post something lately because I don’t even know where to start. I guess first off, I thought I would get some time to start posting a bit more regularly because I lost my job. My boss let me go toward the end of February, just about a week after my last post. It is pretty much a case of "be careful what you put out into the universe and extra careful what you put into writing!  I actually had asked for a meeting with him so I could discuss the way my job has been going but before I could talk to him about my concerns  he decided that things weren’t working for him so he decided to let me go. I may never know if we went into the meeting with his intent to fire me or if it was his “not thinking past this 5 minute personality” or him not wanting to hear what it is I wanted to talk about as he really hates to hear about any of his failings and he will go to great lengths to avoid having to deal with those.  I have been trying really hard to think of this as a good thing and that he did me a favor in letting me go because I have been desperately stressed and not happy at all at work lately but he paid really , really well and it is going to be pretty difficult to replace that.  

 I tend to pretty much bury my head in the sand and haven’t been able to deal with facing current events as I have been so stressed about just dealing with my own every day to day stress that adding anymore to my already beyond stressed life would probably push me over the edge so I really hadn’t even know that the whole world was falling apart around me with the pandemic. I took a trip to Idaho to go back home the week after I was let go. The trip had actually been planned  several weeks ahead of that so it was kind of a bummer about the timing of it all because had I known a bit earlier that I  didn’t have to rush back for work I would have been able to have a longer visit. It was during my trip that I started to learn about what was going on with the extent of the pandemic. A couple of days after returning from Idaho my husband’s boss made the decision to close down his business for the time being to participate in the social distancing practices and a few days after that Washington made it mandatory that all non-essential businesses close. My husband is working part time and he is down to making 20% of his salary but so far, he pretty much spends the largest part of his day in the back room doing heaven only knows what on the computer. I am taking it a bit personally that he doesn’t want to spend any time with me but I cant say that I blame him because I am beyond stressed and probably not a lot of fun to be with.  Its already been almost 3 weeks that he has been off and so far, we haven’t really gotten anything done. We have lots of things that needs done around the house, but I have been so depressed and stressed out that I find it extremely difficult most days to even get out of bed. The longer I just sit around the harder it is to get up off the couch. My head has been spinning and my self-esteem has been completely back in the dumps and  I have been feeling pretty worthless after giving my heart and soul to a job and boss and to have him find me not valuable or worth a crap to even try to listen to me or to try to work things out and to just want me gone has been devastating. I have never been let go from a job before and let me tell you it sucks! I know I just need to pull on my big girl pants and move on but that is also difficult when I know that I don’t even need to pull on pants because we are all stuck at home. I really just need to keep thinking that at least we are fairly healthy, and after all, I need to stay healthy because I don't have insurance anymore.   Hehe…maybe tomorrow will be a more productive day!

Really rough 2019

So I have a terrible confession and its one that I am super not proud of but here it goes.  Its not a huge secret that I haven’t posted anything for an extremely long time but it’s the reason behind why I haven’t posted is my dirty little shame! The next holiday I needed to post about was actually Christmas but the reason why I haven’t posted anything is because I had my motifs all ready to go out including the card but they just didn’t get sent out. Part of my family actually visited mid January and I was going to give them the cards at that time, but I felt stupid for being so late. But the biggest reason I didn’t give them out then was because after hearing them talk about all the Christmas gifts they gave each other like refrigerators and foreign vacation trips  I felt so horrible that the only thing we could afford to give out was tatted dodads I was beyond crushed. I was completely devastated that my sister was able to give such extravagant gifts to our parents and I was going to hand them a stupid card with a stupid lil thing inside, so I didn’t even bother to give them out.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of my massive shame. Come Valentines day I had my motifs ready to go but I couldn’t come up with a card and I was still feeling stupid about not giving out any Christmas gifts and not even sending out any cards that I was too embarrassed to send these out.

I can carry over this same shame clear into October. I had St. Patricks, Easter, and 4^th of July motifs all ready but I just couldn’t bring myself to send them out.  I guess the good news is I have a jump on my motifs for 2020 so I guess we will have to wait and see how that turns out.

I guess partly in my defense we had a pretty horrific 2019. My daughter gave me my first blood grandbaby in April.  She was born a month early under an emergency situation. Both baby and momma did exceptionally well under the circumstances and recovered fairly quickly and were released from the hospital within a week. Both did really well for a couple months until my daughter was in a horrific car wreck with baby in the back seat. Thankfully baby was strapped into a car seat (one of the safest rated on the market) and just ended up with scratches and hopefully no long-term issues due to shaken baby. Momma however ended up with several massive deep cuts and a pelvis that got broken and fractured in several places. I have never felt so helpless in my whole life as what followed in the next couple months. I live in Washington while the rest of my family lives in Idaho and I had already taken time off work for the baby shower and the birth and visiting just the month before, so it was extremely difficult for me to travel again. Thankfully my parents are both retired and have a house where they have a room that is wheelchair accessible, so they were able to take both momma and baby in. It was a huge undertaking because moms’ milk never came in so they had to run up and down the stairs making bottles. My daughter wasn’t allowed to stand up any longer than it took to transfer from the wheelchair to the toilet and then straight back to laying down so baby had to sleep with my parents which meant that they had to get up for the night feedings. My daughter ended up completely out of commission for 4 whole months which encompasses so much like getting her and baby to doctors’ appointments, all meals for mom and baby, bathing’s, jeez the list goes on and on. My daughter also has 2 other kids/toddlers that she has raised as her own for the last 6 years and that can be figured in that mix.

I was only able to go back once during that time so add more shame, guilt, remorse pretty much every demeaning adjectives you can use to my low self-esteem. My self-esteem has always been excessively low anyway but it is pretty much rock bottom right now.

 In the midst of all this our well house floor caved in causing the filter system to sustain damage which in turn caused electrolysis in our water system which caused leaks to start forming in the copper pipes in the house which means we had water spraying out behind walls . During the appointment for the estimate the contractor ended up finding our 2000 square foot deck was attached to the house instead of being anchored to a beam and that all the snow that we had during winter was so heavy that it had begun to pull  the deck away from the house which means it started pulling the house down the hill with it. Insurance got involved which covered replacing the deck and the damage to the house but not the plumbing. So while the work on the deck was going on we took on the task of replacing all the copper pipes throughout our entire 3000 square foot, 2 story house.  

We hired someone to do the plumbing and plumbers are in such high demand that they can pretty much name their own price…translation...freaking expensive and hard to come by. Since the plumbing was so hideously expensive, we took on the task of cutting out and redoing the sheet rock throughout the whole house. What a nightmare mess, I am quite certain we will be finding sheet rock dust till the end of time, I will be looking at the crappy job we did and kicking myself for not trying harder but at least we still aren’t done with all the rooms yet. The deck took the entire summer, April till mid-September so we didn’t get to enjoy it at all.

Quite a few of us suffer with major panic/anxiety attacks and severe depression and the accident has exacerbated them.  Several of our family members went through some very emotional stuff this past year. Its never easy to see the ones you love go through pain and heart ache and it was a very tough year for both.

Work has been extremely difficult on lots of levels. My boss is a very challenging person to work for. He is a very “this 5 minute” kind of person, he doesn’t much think beyond the exact moment he is in, he doesn’t think how  his actions or words from this minute will effect the next 5 minutes. He wants it all and he wants it right this second. He changes his mind and his direction so drastically and so often that it is very difficult to keep up. He has decided to expand the business into several different directions, like taking on general construction, doing pedestrian door and gates and doing commercial as well as residential work. So this translates into all of us learning  completely new things while trying to keep up with our already overwhelming loads of work.

I am sorry, I just realized I have been rambling on and on and whining when I should be very thankful that I even have a roof over my head, a job that pays the bills and a growing family that is fairly healthy . So I will quit ranting and call this a long enough post for now. Hopefully I will have time to post more soon. We have been working pretty much every single day for the last several months trying to get caught up on finances so we don't have much free time now days.