StitchyDonDesigns: April 2015

Hello poor neglected blog how have you been ????!!!!!! Life has thrown me a few curve balls this year and my blog has suffered for it. Last year I spent a lot of time being miserable in my job and a lot of my time was spend reconsidering what I do. Towards the end of the year I found a new job and I am soo much happier. I had to do a lot of training which meant I went away from my family (something I have never done before by myself) Everything is going really well so far and my new company is just so much better to work for. I have a much better life/work balance and although it is a challenge starting a new job it has totally been worth it.

Just as things were starting to go really well life had more knocks to give. In the second week of my new job my dad was rushed to hospital. My sister and I were called up and told that he had died in the night and been resucitated but we shouldn't expect him to make it through the day. This was an utter shock, dad had been in hospital the week leading up to this with a chest infection but he had been released from hospital just 5 hours before this occurred as the doctors told us he was fine. Thank goodness his partner was with him. His lungs had failed and he was put in ICU on a ventilator. He spent five days in ICU before moving to ITU. He is such a fighter and managed to pull through, although at several stages it was touch and go. The doctors were still unsure what was causing him to be in such distress, my dad was a smoker and has COPD but he has a very mild case of this and they were surprised at his reaction to the infection. After ten days in total he was released because they no longer had a bed for him as he was well enough to be out of ITU but they couldn't find a ward for him (understandably this is a cause of anger for us). Three weeks later he was readmitted to hospital with pneumonia and two blood clots (one on each lungs). Once again he spent another ten days in hospital but he again pulled through and is now home and back to work (although part-time). He has done really well although he has just been diagnosed with another chest infection.

This has therefore been a really rough beginning to the year but I am hoping and staying positive that the rest of the year well be better. My sewing is always my comfort and I was hoping that having a structure to my blog would keep me blogging but I have ended up blogging much less than I normally do so I am going back to just posting whenever I want.

Now onto the sewing:

I have been sticking to my rotation but while sewing the second page of HAED Autumn Owl Trio I discovered that I had started stitching in the wrong place and didn't have enough fabric to complete the design. I was very upset so it went in timeout and I replaced it with HAED QS Seahorse. I love this design, it goes very quickly as it is just black. I am stitching 2 over 1 on 25 count lugana called Sunlit Water by The Crafty Kitten. This is page one completed:

Then I moved onto my dolphin design and finished page six:

Now I am working on my dreaded linen butterfly project (dreaded because of the DMC linen threads I have to use). Although it is actually going well so far. Linen Butterflies will be worked on till completion and once I have finished I will restart HAED Autumn Owl Trio and complete page one of that.

I have had a couple of small finishes since my last post:

Be Ewenique: