Happy July 4th!

I hope everyone enjoys their July 4th celebrations.  As for us, we're having a quiet, relaxing day and most probably will go to a friend's house to view the fireworks tonight.  I made a patriotic trifle to take with us and these individual ones for us to eat here at home.  I'd intended to use an angel food cake but only found pound cakes at the store.  Since I had some of my here in our freezer (that probably tastes better than store-bought anyway), I chunked up some of that to use in the trifles.  My original intent was to bake another blueberry galette but decided it's way too hot to turn the oven on. 

I've been working more on Hinzeit's Sweet Land of Liberty and making some progress.  I really think I can finish this one soon if I keep working on it.  (I'm itching to start something else, though...my stitcher's ADD kicking in.)

I also finished and "cubed" LHN Old Glory for a patriotic LHN sal:

I took some time out of patriotic stitching to stitch a Halloween ornament for the Halloween ornament blog.  It's Trick or Treat by Plum Pudding Needleart and published in the JCS 2013 Halloween issue.

Happy stitching!

Stitching again...and a PSA

Now that our daughter's wedding is over and we're back to empty nesting, I've begun to start stitching again.

Here's current progress on a PS  bunny design (book 111):

Next up is LHN's Old Glory.  (I'm participating in a LHN patriotic sal.)

I dug out a long-standing wip/ufo (bowing my head in shame) from Hinzeit...Sweet Land of Liberty and stitched a bit on it this week:

Since the picture was taken, I stitched an elephant below (left side) the whale.  Funny story about this one.  I was on my way out the door after buying some stitching stash at a LNS in Berlin, OH when I spotted this one as a model.  I immediately turned around, asked where it was in the shop, and bought it.  Maybe I'll finally finish this one this year.

Now for a brief PSA:  I visited a new dermatologist (previous one retired last summer) shortly before the wedding to have some AK's (actinic keratosis--precancer lesions) frozen off my face.  Since it was a new dermatologist, I showed her a mole on my leg that I've always had.  She got a little excited, biopsied it, and it turned out to be a melanoma.  Thank God an early one!  I hadn't noticed any changes in it since having it checked the last time and almost didn't show it to her.  I had it resected and danced at DD's wedding with 15 stitches in my leg.  I just had the stitches removed and the pathology report showed that they got all the cancer out.  Get those skin checks done, everyone!

Happy stitching!