Hallelujah!!

I just put in the last few stitches on my page which has brought me to the halfway mark on the top row of my piece!  That means I've finished 9/42 pages.  As a reminder the piece is 14 pages across and 3 pages down so I'm making progress.  It feels so good to reach this point.  I finished like 3/4 of this page in 2 days. 

Last time I was here:

And now I'm here:

My needle marks the halfway point.  If you're wondering about the writing it's a show of solidarity against people who download/upload designer's charts for free.  Most people show a picture of the chart with the stitching but since mine are all digital I put the company and my order number. I realized I was messing up counting on a couple of numbers and so far I'm 5 stitches too far to the right so I'll have to fudge the lettering a bit in the rest of that line.  No biggie since I caught it now I'll just do the N and D one space left and then shorten three spaces until the next word.

I need to focus on school again.  I got an 86% in my first class which was Composition II.  I've started American History and got a 94% on my first exam but it was open book.  All of the tests are open book except the final and unfortunately I had to use it quite a bit because my brain just doesn't do history well.  I'm more of a math/science girl but mostly math.  I really want to finish History in my next several days off but I need to schedule my final with a proctor so we'll see how far I get.  I still have 12 more chapters to read and 4 tests including the final.  Then I have World History, Nutrition and American Government.  The only one I have confidence in is Nutrition. 

I was supposed to have 6 days in a row off which was going to be my major study session but I found out today they took off my day tomorrow and added the 4th.  Unfortunately it means a lot of people bitching about heat/firework viewing areas/anything else because people just like to complain.  I just hope it doesn't rain.  On the bright side they overstaffed the areas so as long as everybody shows up to work we'll have 7 people working which is more than double the regular staff.  Fortunately it means I have a day off tomorrow which is my mom's birthday but also starts QVC's Christmas programming so I'll be vegging all day tomorrow and I'm aiming to get at least 1 test done.  If I do the rest of the day will be stitching on the next page in the second row.

Well that's all in my life for now thanks for reading!  We've given a moving date of 8/8 so we need jobs before then (hopefully in Colorado).  Wish me luck!

See you guys next week and I appreciate all of the comments!

SFS June Check-In and Giveaway Goodies

Hello again my lovely followers!  Hope everything is going good in stitchy world for you all :). Today I'm sharing my SFS update as well as what I gave Katie for winning my giveaway!

SFS is run by Mel at Epic Stitching.  We are not allowed to spend more than $25 a month but anything we don't spend gets carried over to the next month.  We can earn money for stitching stash but I don't count that.  This year is in two parts so this is the last month of this part and I've got quite a bit left I didn't spend.  Yay!

June Allotment: $25

Carryover: $94.30

Spent: $67.67

Total: $51.63

Not bad but I'm glad I had that much saved up since the tilton sale nearly broke me lol.  What did I buy?  Well you saw the 6 charts already and I also got some new scissors for my travel project case and some new fabric.  

This will be dyed for Merida.

And the fabric I already dyed for Hocus Pocus which was the Orange and black from my last post.

When I dyed that fabric I dyed the pieces for my giveaway at the same time.  When I asked what colors you all liked she just said bright colors so that's what I did!  

I've decided to start naming my fabrics when I dye them and keep track of the colors I use in case I ever decide to sell them.  So the Orange and black I did is Halloween Havoc.

Pic is washed out.  Orange and black are much truer to Halloween shades.

And I sent Katie a piece of Sleeping Beauty:

  

A piece of Storm Clouds: 

And a piece of Under the Sea which is my fave of the bunch:

I forgot to take the pic until after I trimmed Storm Clouds but I was too excited lol.  I also sent her a puzzle, a China cat which is supposed to being good luck for her son Jeremiah who is healing from surgery and some Disney cell phone charms which she can use as scissor fobs.   And some floss lol.  I forgot to take pics of the rest before I shipped it but she has pics on her blog.

She was thrilled with them so I consider it a win :)

Thanks for stopping by next time we'll see some Paradise progress!  I haven't done much but I've been busy lol

P.S. One of the reasons we were busy was because we went to the Goo Goo Dolls concert at Universal.  Here's some pics:

I got video too but can't upload it from my phone.  Blah lol.  Ttfn!

June Gifted Gorgeousness Just in Time!

Why is it just in time?  Because I received some stitching goodies today!  I won the giveaway that lovely Linda was having on her blog Such is Life!  She sent me some pretty things.  Thanks again Linda!  What did she send?
A really cute card:

 A cool dragon pattern:

 And some pretty sparkly blue fabric:

It's difficult to see in the pic but the fabric is an opalescent from Crafty Kitten.  It's called Sunlit Water.  It's my favorite count to stitch on but it's a Brittney which I haven't stitched on before so it'll be fun!

The dragon pattern is quite large!  It's 300x230 stitches and has some lovely oranges in it.  I can't decide if it would look better stitched on black like the picture or a blue fabric with sky blue on the top and darker blue/green on the bottom.  I have time to figure it out though :)

I also stitched on my Paradise piece for my cousin's wedding.  Unfortunately it's not a lot of progress because my dad was in town but that's okay we had fun :)

I also dyed some fabric and it turned out awesome.

It's a little more orange than the pic shows but this is for Hocus Pocus.  I'm still deciding on my colors for Merida.  I'm thinking dark green, royal blue and teal but we'll see.

Thanks for stopping by see you next time!

And We Have a Winner!

Drumroll please...

The winner of my Blogoversary Giveaway is Katie at Jeremiah's Mom!  My random number generator picked lucky number 8.  Congratulations!  I need you to send me your address please and I'll have something in the mail soon.  I need to do a little work on it first though since I had to wait until I knew who the winner was :).

A big thanks to all of you for playing :)

I can't believe I've been blogging a year.  It still feels like yesterday!  And I haven't had a finish in all that time except the gifts for friends ie Tinkerbell and Zelda lol.  Oh well I've spent plenty of money :D

Including 6 new charts I bought!  Tilton Crafts has a sale going on right now for buy 3 get 3 free charts.  It's an amazing sale and she has some beautiful designs.  So what did I get?

Big Cats:

Family:

Hocus Pocus:

Merida:

Owl of Knowledge:

Owl:

I showed you Merida before when I asked if she could be charted and Shelley did it for me!  I was so excited!  And I've had my eye on Hocus Pocus for a while.  The total for 6 charts was $48 which is a great price but I'm glad I had some SFS money saved from previous months lol!

Thanks for stopping by hopefully I'll have more stitched for my GG post on the 15th.  See you then!

Disneyland and Colorado Trip Report

Hello again faithful followers!  There will be no cross stitching in this post so if you're here for only for that see my previous post :). This will be a pic heavy post as well as I'm doing my whole vacation in one post.  Two weeks ago I was on vacation.  We went to see my family in Colorado for a week and then to California to see hubby's family for a week.  The pics here will be mostly Disneyland because it was their 60th anniversary and they premiered new fireworks and a new parade.

Backstory:  My hubby and I met on a Disneyland fan site and a couple of years later we met in real life at Disneyland during a scavenger hunt the site was hosting.  He lived in California and I lived in Colorado so it was long distance until we decided to move in together in Florida so he could stay working at Disney and it would be cheaper to live.  Long story but there's the gyst of it :). We're now "fighting" about where we're going to live permanently since he graduated and my graduate school is online.  So this trip was supposed to be looking at housing and jobs (turned into more fun but meh that's what the internet is for!)

First up: Colorado!

Not a lot happened there.  We met up with family and my cousin highlighted my hair.  She's in beauty school so it was cheap and she did a great job!  My mom threw us a little party and we had my older niece and nephew spend the night. They still had school so we only took them for the weekend but it was fun.

Lol that's my dad in the background.  And my mom!  We took them to mini golf and on the bumper cars.  As you can see they had a blast!  That's all my pics from Colorado which is really sad but I'm not much of a picture taker and we'll be back in 4 months for my cousin's wedding.  I had a blast though! 

Next in line:  California!

As I mentioned before, it was Disneyland's 60th anniversary which is the whole reason we went to Colorado first.  The first four days we stayed in the valley going to all his doctors appointments and such.  The last four days was nonstop chaos!  The first day we were in Disneyland they were open 24 hours straight.  6am til 6 am.  There were people camped out from the night before to get in early and around noon they stopped letting people into the park due to overcrowding.  They didn't let people in again we heard until around 1 am.

We got there at 6:30 am.  We were one of the first cars in the parking garage (the overnighters and 6:00ers got a different lot).  The lines to get in weren't bad when we got there and the lines for the rides weren't bad either if you know how to work their fastpass system.  Even so the longest lines for standby were only like an hour or so.  Most of the people there have annual passes so they were there for merchandise. The merchandise lines were triple the rides in some cases!  Our worst line was for breakfast.  I don't know who made staffing decisions that day but not all lines were open and our restaurant ran out of food early!  Luckily we still got breakfast, but we had to wait almost 2 hours for cafeteria style food.  Totally ridiculous!

Luckily we met some friends who were waiting for the parade for 6 hours and they had enough room for us to squeeze in with their group.  We still got there a few hours before it started so it wasn't like we were there right at the start of the show or anything lol.  The people are friends of my hubby who he knows through a different site than the one we met on.  Some of the people I met the first time while we were there and the owner of the site I've met a few times.  

We ended up watching 5 of the 6 parades there and 3 fireworks in 4 days and 3 nights.  That's a LOT of walking/running back and forth.  Especially since the last night we ran into the sister park for a show there in between parades.  

On to the pics:

The parade was breathtaking and the music was fun!  I really enjoyed it.  One of the cool things they've done is made ears that change color along with the shows which they implemented a few years ago.  What they added for this was you can buy a paintbrush which allows you to change the colors of people's ears and also change the colors of the lights on the floats at certain points in the parade.  We saw the parade so many times because my hubby likes to video it and edit the shots together to make one great video.  It's not up quite yet but look for it on his YouTube channel.  His name is almandot.

Between parades they had fireworks.

They updated the fireworks some in that they project images onto the mainstreet buildings, the castle and the Matterhorn mountain which were cool.  The fireworks were kind of subpar.  I liked their 50th ones better.  But they turn the mountain into a volcano during the nemo scene which is cool.  And it's a different experience no matter where you watch from so I liked that aspect as well.

My new ears :). Don't worry we got plenty of merchandise still including the paintbrush lol :D

The best part of our trip was 2 days after the 24 hour day.  A lot of people don't know it but Disneyland has a secret exclusive club that you must be a member to enter.  It's expensive and the waiting list to get in is a few years long.  It's called club 33 and it was Walt's idea so his VIPs could have some quiet time while at the park.  Well I'm excited to say we got in with one of our friends!  I won't say who since they don't want to be bombarded with requests (can't say I blame them) but I'm so grateful to them!  They have a dining room but we just had drinks at the bar.  They just finished renovating it and they added a lounge and made the whole place a lot brighter and I loved it!  We had been to the old one once right after we got married and I like the Renoed one more.

Ready for pics? ;)

The entryway

The dining room

The hallway to the dining room

The hallway to the lounge

The lounge

The girls restroom 

My hubby on the balcony :)

The lounge was really cool.  It had some subtle special effects.  The piano is a player piano but it's a special one.  There is a TV that pops out above it and if there is a concert going on and they have Bluetooth, they can make it so the that when Elton John or whoever plays their piano, the one in the lounge plays the exact same way.  So it's like he's right there with you :). It can also be played live.  We didn't see anything like that of course but my favorite effects are the ones when there's nothing special going on.  Remember the picture of the four ghosts?  Go ahead you can go back and look ;). Well as the player piano plays, whenever one of their instruments starts playing that ghost will disappear from the painting and his instrument above the bar will subtly move and the keys will play.  Sometimes they will appear in the globe over the bar too.  Or the bottles at the top of the bar will randomly bubble.  

The booths that are in the hallway to the lounge are special too.  There are 4 of them and each one has a different thme. One has the haunted mansion, one a sailing ship, the third has huck Finn and the mark twain riverboat and the fourth has a stage painting.  Well in each picture things happen.  The stage has plays that come on and the riverboat will have parties that happen on it.  The mansion will have a ghost horse appear and the moon rides across the sky.  It will also have a storm that happens inside the booth which then travels to the sailboat booth (across from it) and sinks the ship. The ship belongs to the captain who died and resides in the mansion.  Clever huh? I didn't get to see any of that but the idea is so cool.  Just the subtle little touches that make it Disney but still really classy.  I could easily just sit up there for hours having a few cocktails and listening to the  music.  I told hubby that if he makes me live in California then he's getting me a club 33 membership.  

Our last night in Cali we spent at the Stanley cup playoff game between the ducks and the Blackhawks.  

The ducks won in the first 30 seconds of overtime which was good because we had to fly early the next morning. Unfortunately they lost the playoffs.  The last game was just horrible for them.  But our game was very entertaining.  

All in all we had a great time.  At Disneyland we were pretty much there open to close every day except the last day since we went to the game (we were there for early open though at 7) and the 24 hour day.  We weren't planning on staying all 24 hours but we did stay til 2:30.  All that was left that day was rides and we already did our faves and still had 3 days left.  I wish we had done Colorado after so we had some time to rest after but it wasn't too bad.  This isn't even close to all my pictures and I still have to get hubby's too.

Hope you all enjoyed my post :). Next time I'll have pics of my new stash ;).  Thanks for sticking with me!