Of Thanks, Frames and Sisters

All of you sweet stitchy bloggers deserve another giant THANK YOU for all of your kind and thoughtful messages this week. I so appreciate your understanding.

Look what was ready at the framer this week! Yep, it's Lo How a Rose making her framed entrance!

I'm very happy with the way it turned out, and it's now ensconced next to my bed. Lo fits in perfectly.

So now I have to ask you a question. Do any of you, like me, have a knack for choosing the most expensive mouldings? Truly, every time I'm in there to pick out a frame, it's always some hideously expensive moulding, and after seeing it next to my stitching, I can't live without it. I'm somewhat envious of those of you out there who frame your own things. I say somewhat because I don't really wanna do that. I'm stingy with my time, and framing isn't how I wanna spend it. Until I'm retired and have more extra time, I'll keep trying to earn enough money to pay for my framing. I'm still secretly laughing about my dad thinking that my mom and sister and I can frame all three ATS's for $500 (hee, hee, hee). We can never, ever let him know the true total price of all three frames. He'd never recover from the shock.

Wanna hear about a couple of new Sisters? The Sisterhood of the Rose has welcomed two new stitchy buds: Melissa in Vancouver, Canada, and Hazel in England. Exchanging a couple of notes with them has been very fun. Adding these two sweet ladies has put us up to nine members! I'm wondering if one of our members will win Edgar's copy of LHaR. We'll see.

When/if you email me about the Sisterhood (or anything else), it occasionally gets caught in the spam net. If I don't answer right away, I'm not being rude (like usual), I just haven't checked my spam box yet.

Did you see the fabulous prizes that the BBD ladies brought back from France for the lucky winners of their contest? Outstanding items. I want to fondle them. The items, not Alma and Barb. In fact, I'm feeling rather covetous (that feels like a word, but I'm not certain) of those items. But I'm very happy for the winners, and surely they'll enjoy their new treasures.

OK, I'm off to stitch in the purple chair. Wanna know what tomorrow's number is? 3. Yep, three weeks 'til the last day of school. Work has been somewhat drama-filled this week, and I've been less than willing to deal with it. Hopefully, it's just temporary emotional overload, and my serenity will return soon. The end of this school year is bittersweet, as they'll be closing my morning school. I'll save that for another post. Adam and Eve are calling me.

Happy Friday tomorrow ... make some fun.

Little Sampler

Here's my little BBD sampler.

It's stitched over two threads on 40-count linen from my stash that I coffee-dyed and baked (my new favorite pastime). I used three purples: dark is WDW Eggplant, medium is WDW Purple Haze, and light is DMC 452. The little birdie came from BBD's Sarah Tobias.

I'm happy that I jumped on the big bad Blackbird bandwagon last week and stitched this sampler. The opportunity came along at the perfect time, as I explained to Alma and Barb. My youngest child, Rebekah, was born on April 29, 1991, so I immediately thought of stitching this project in her honor. She would have been 18 this Wednesday, but she died in February of 1996. Because this year seems (to me) like a big milestone year, I felt like I should mark it in some way, but I couldn't decide what to do besides the things I do every year. Stitching this little piece provided me with some much-needed stitch therapy.

I think of Bekah many times every single day, as you mothers out there would guess. Since '96, I've worked her initials (they're in the lightest color in the little sampler) into most of the things I've stitched. It's my little way of keeping her in view, I guess.

I hesitated to write about Bekah here, because losing a child is such a profoundly difficult subject to discuss, even after 13 years. And once the subject is open, some discussion has to happen. While we constantly feel her absence in our family, I think we do a pretty good job of continuing to live in a way that would make her happy and proud of us. Living life as victims with bitterness and despair wouldn't honor her or celebrate her life. We all talk about her and have pictures of her everywhere, not because we need reminders, but because we have great memories of her that we want to share.

I could write a book on this subject, but I'll end by saying that losing Bekah has taught me (is still teaching me) an incredible number of lessons I wish I didn't have to learn in this way. My self-appointed job is to learn and live the lessons as gracefully as possible, so that something good can come from something that feels so wrong.