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. 

Thanksgiving

We ended up getting a huge snowstorm that has caused lots of grief on lots of levels.  We ended up getting  at least 24 inches in less than 2 days. It is super heavy snow so trying to get unburied has been an ordeal.  On top of that we have gotten rain and then freezing at night so everything is like an ice skating rink in places where the snow has been cleaned off.  Thankfully the only real damage we have suffered so far has been extremely sore back and legs and the snow pulled off several gutters and flashing off the house but so far we have survived.

The next holiday I need to get caught up on is Thanksgiving.  I had an idea of beading a turkey body and using a piece of tatting for the “feather part”.  Due to the short amount of time between  the next couple of holidays I needed to hurry to get on the project.  My brain power is pretty much just being taken up with dealing with the problems at work and the everyday task of just trying to survive so I didn’t have time to try to invent a pattern or pour over the internet looking for one .  I was going through past projects and found, by happy mistake, that I could repurpose one of Mark Meyers , aka Tatman, patterns to work with the concept I was going for. I used this same pattern for my Thanksgiving 2016 cards, it's called back to school apple. I had my bobbin wound with left over thread from last years thanksgiving project  so I just used that thread which is Lizbeth called falling leaves in  size 10.

 I ended up making 16 of these but only ended up sending 9 of them out.  I have been so late in getting these out lately that I am embarrassed so I end up not even sending them out at all so I end up with extra motifs and have no idea what to do with them.

The card idea was my husbands this time,  I always come up with the picture and I have recruited him to help with the sayings.

Halloween

I was going to try to take advantage of our snow day off and get another post out of the way. I started several posts but I didn't get them finished on the snow day but at least I made the attempt.   It snowed on Sunday night through till Monday morning and as I work for a service company that runs service trucks and live in an area that is not equipped for snow removal my boss made the decision to not even open the doors. We actually got about 6 inches on Monday and we stayed down in the teens all week so the snow didn’t get much of a chance to melt so when we had an anticipated storm set to hit the area again on Friday my boss decided to not open on Friday either. We did end up getting about 4 more inches which is huge when we don’t have snow plows or sand trucks so it was probably a good idea that we didn’t have the guys come in and take the chance of getting stuck and being snowed out of home.

Anyway, up next we have Halloween. Since there are several months between 4^th of July and Halloween you would think that I would have plenty of time to come up with a fun motif and have plenty of time to get them done but apparently, in my world that is just not the case. I remembered seeing a spider web motif somewhere in my cyber surfing but it was a bit difficult to find it again. I remembered that it was probably “tatman” site that I saw it on but since he has taken the site down it was quite difficult to try to find. For some reason I had it in my mind that that was the next pattern I wanted so I searched for a long time trying to find the pattern. I did end up finding a picture of it and it took me several tries to figure out the pattern.

  I am terrible at figuring out what I need to change about the counts in order for my project to lay flat. It took me several motifs before I remembered that you can climb out of a row with a split ring so that the web ended correctly.  My end product doesn’t look anywhere near as good as Mark Meyers (tatman) but I think the little beaded spider kind of redeems the project. 

I made 12 complete cards (not including the mess ups in the picture above). These are probably one of my least favorite projects I have ever done but at least I got most of them sent out.  The card idea was mine, my husband didn’t get the concept but I sent them out anyway.

No Easter just 4th of July

Calendar wise up next I should have Easter to post about.  I spent several hours digging through my tatting boxes and photos trying to find my Easter project. I finally had to come to the conclusion that I didn’t make or send any out. It is quite frightening that I seriously can’t remember why or what happened but the fact remains that I was lame and missed a holiday. I did find a couple motifs that I started that may have been a start of Easter but I can’t post them because they will eventually go out to family.

So I guess up next we have Independence Day.  It looks like I made 15 of these but I only sent out 9 of them. I feel like this year has been a terrible year where I started with the best of intentions but never followed through or finished any of my projects.  It seems like I made lots of motifs but then didn’t get them sent out. 

I tried to find where I got the pattern for the tatted motif from but I can’t seem to find it.  It makes me feel real badly when I can’t give credit to the artist that created a pattern that I used. I am fairly certain that I found the pattern on pintrest and the pattern had a picture of the final project with the pattern behind it. I used artiste thread in size #10 and the color is blueberry. I remember I had a big problem with this pattern with missed joins and I ended up ripping a bunch of stitches out which was not pleasant because trying to open a closed ring that doesn’t have a picot in it is not very easy. I didn’t love the way this pattern turned out but I couldn’t find another pattern and I was in a hurry to try to get them done.  

As for the pattern for the little beaded doodad , I have had most of my patterns so long that I can’t remember where I got them from. I have been beading for over 25 years and I have a huge accumulation of holiday ornaments that I hang on a display for each holiday and more often than not that is where I get my ideas for the tatted accents. 

Now the card however is solely my husband’s idea! It is kind of an inside family joke. My family has plenty of firework stories gone wrong and this was just his little idea of a reminder of those cautionary tales.

St Patricks catch up

I had every intention of posting three days right in a row , I was just missing one little thing...to hit the publish button two days ago...LOL. I am still playing the catch up game so up next we have St. Patricks day. Due to the short amount of time between Valentines Day and Saint Patricks day I ended up making and sending out only 10 of these. 

  I found a super simple shamrock called Irish for a day by Sharren Sarver Morgan that worked up pretty quickly. You can find the pattern here. The shamrock on the left is made with size 10 artiste thread called snow pea and the one on the right is made with size 20 Lizbeth thread called leafy green. It was quite interesting dong the same pattern with  2 different brands of thread.  I don’t often get to use the Lizbeth thread, for one it is much more expensive and for two it is hard to find around here. If I want to use it I have to plan ahead and order it well ahead of time which rarely happens.  Each thread had its own strengths and weaknesses so I am not sure I could pick my favorite. 

The beaded little leprechaun is a pattern that I bought on the site threadabead, you can find it here

This card idea was mine. .I am not sure if you can read the tiny print at the bottom of the card it says “Just in case that’s not what you wished for we have included another clover for an extra wish. I know, it is a lot on the corny side..maybe my husband is rubbing off on me.

Cards inside and out

So since I started looking back I realized that I could be sharing the inside of my holiday cards. My hubby has actually helped me out when I have a mental block and cant come up with a saying. He has got a quirky sense of humor that I absolutely adore so his cards really do deserve to be seen.

This Christmas card is one of his quirkier ones! He always cracks me up, some people may not get his silliness but I thought this one was super silly.

This valentines card was my idea but I made him fill out the personal sentiments on the inside. This one was actually intended for my stepson but it never ended up in his hand...I know I suck! Each card actually got a different sentiment but it was a variation on the Bon Jovi theme.

Moving forward I will try to remember to post both the inside and outside of the cards.