Gifts, a Lovely Weekend and New Technology

It was my birthday last Friday and, in a private birthday exchange I was spoilt by my friend Julianne who stitched this beautiful box for me, Prairie Schooler's "F for Friend. Both her stitching and finishing are just exquisite. Julianne also included the thread holder and book of English teatime recipes.

Julianne also sent me this lovely Prairie Schooler Santa ornament.

Here it is in pride of place on the top of my ornament tree.

My son, Paul, and his girlfriend, Carla, made it up here to Staffordshire on Friday afternoon. The journey, which normally takes three hours, took them six. In the evening we all went out for a lovely meal at a pub about five miles from us to celebrate me becoming 53! On Saturday, after Mr. L. and I braved the snow and went into Stafford to do the shopping, we had Christmas. Paul and Carla gave us a great present, a DVD recorder. We only had a DVD player before, and now we'll be able to transfer recordings from our Virgin+ box onto a DVD disc, so that we won't lose them if the box packs up like it did last year. Paul set it up for us and then I had to learn how to use it. Later, while we settled down to watch the Strictly Come Dancing final he set about tranfering all our e-mails, favourites and documents over to the new laptop that we had bought a few weeks ago. He also set it up to print remotely, and installed Picasa on to it. We also have a new camera, so you can see that I've a lot of new technology to learn how to use again. Just when I'd got used to using the old pc and camera too!!(LOL) Anyway you can see that I've been playing on Picasa as I have a new blog header photo, a collage of some of my stitching. I'm relieved, too, to say that Paul and Carla made it safely back to London yesterday in the awful icy conditions that we are experiencing.

My own stitching has taken rather a back seat at the moment. I had joined the December SAL that Chris and Sally and some other ladies are doing. I was stitching LHN's Winter Wonderland on 32ct Permin, a big mistake! The linen is so stiff and just won't stay nice and taught on my frame and I was being really slow because of it. I was having a busy week with housework and so spent only a little time working on it, but then discovered that I had made a mistake and had to frog about two hours worth. The air was slightly blue I can tell you, and with that I decided to bin it and I'll start again on some 28ct Cashel linen. (Chris I'll be e-mailing you about it soon.)

I'd like to finishing by wishing all my readers a very happy Christmas and New Year!

Nicola