Tug Boat Blessings

Today's blessing block is for my husband :)
He is the captain of a tug boat and tows logs up and down the coast from all of the different logging camps so I thought it would be fitting to make this block a tug boat. He loves to be on the water and actually began as a commercial fisherman.

When we first met he was in between fishing seasons and decided to try his hand at shake blocking. This was back breaking work. He and his partner would go into remote areas in the forest where it had been logged and they would salvage cedar that they would find amongst the clear cut. There they would cut split and stack them into piles that would be strapped together in slings so that a helicopter could fly in, pick them up and eventually they would be loaded on a B train to be taken to the mill.

He did this for a couple of years. It was nice that he had a 9-5 job and was home every evening but the ocean called *grin*. After the birth of our first son he got a job as a deckhand with a local tug company and well the rest is history. He worked his way up through the ranks, went back to school and got a ticket so he could run the tugs himself and now he's the captain. We've gone from him being home every night to seeing him for a couple of days every 1-2 weeks but he LOVES his job and I'm happy that he's happy :)

I am so blessed to have such a wonderful husband that works so hard for his family :) I am also blessed that this allows me to stay home with my 3 children and to be able to homeschool them. So many blessings can be tied into this one little block *grin*.

I love felt as many of you know and I find it so easy to work with that I just had to use it for the tug as it was going to take some work to piece it all together :) The black circles along the bow and side represent the rubber that is all around his tug and I used french knots to hold them on and I just love how the water turned out with all of the french knots clustered together like that. If you're wondering why I chose the colors of black and maroon instead of something brighter it was because this is the actual color of my husbands tug. I would have stitched the name on it to but it was just to tiny *grin*.

I'm starting to get a little bit of a vision as to how I'm going to complete my blocks to which is great. I wasn't quite sure what direction I was going in when I started but now I have more plans :)

Happy stitching!
~ Rosina

Umbrella Blessings

Ooh, I'm on a roll! Two blocks in two days *grin*.
Thank you everyone for all of the kind comments you left yesterday on my Clothesline Blessing Block :) You're all so sweet!

Today it has been raining like crazy and it made me think about my umbrella and how blessed we are to have such a thing so that we can venture outdoors and explore nature even while the heavens are pouring down on us.

I have been smitten with bunny rabbits ever since creating my white rabbit embroidery and mixed media piece for the Alice in Wonderland swap I participated in so I just had to make my little person a bunny *grin*. A pretty little girl bunny dressed in a ruffled sundress amongst the flowers.

This is exactly where I could have been found today.... stealing moments in the flower beds between rain squalls LOL.

Happy stitching,
~ Rosina

Clothesline Blessings

Hooray! I finally have another block or in this case 4 more blocks to share for my Count Your Blessings stitch along :)

I am crazy about my clothesline and can often be found actually searching for things to wash during the summer months just so I can bring in the scent of sunshine *grin*.

I wanted to keep with the three dimensional theme that I started with when I made my garden block so I sewed some miniature clothing to hang on the clothesline :) An apron and a little pair of pants blowing in the breeze. I stitched the little pink socks and then added little french knot flowers just to give it a little more pizzaz. Can't you just feel the breeze blowing as the apron flaps in the wind? Heehee, I love it *grin*.

Happy stitching,
~ Rosina

First Block Finished

I did it! I finished my very first block *grin*.
I decided that my first one was going to be about what a blessing my vegetable garden is to our family :) Every spring we start seeds indoors and outdoors, growing radishes, carrots, beans, peas, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes and more. We try to eat as much organic produce as possible and being able to grow some of it to save money is a great help. I love to can our vegetables as well and my pantry is quite low this spring so I'm really counting on the garden to bolster our winter supplies. Plus it is so gratifying for myself and my children to watch those little seeds sprout and fruit before our eyes :)

As I created my block I thought of those aerial scenes of farmland that you see with the perfect little square patches of greens and browns and thought that would be a great way to do my mini garden. Of course you can't have a garden without something growing in it! So I used french knots for my little veggies and then ran knotted green thread through the finished french knots to create the green tops on the veggies. I really like how it turned out :) Now I need to come up with a new block!

Don't forget that you can find all of my stitch along blog entries in one convenient place on the special Count My Blessings Stitch along page I created!

Happy stitching
~ Rosina

Stitch Along Update

Oh my I don't know what happened to the color of my photo but my beautiful yellow is not so pretty looking here is it :(

I'm just about finished stitching my grid. Yay! I took it along in the truck today and worked on it while hubby drove us in :) I'm just doing a simple back stitch and it's coming along nicely. Only a few more rows to go and I'm finally going to tackle my first block!! Slow and steady wins the race right? *grin*.

We were hauling our travel trailer behind us today to have it checked over before heading out camping for the season and I thought I'm definitely going to have to stitch a camping block. Perhaps a cute little teardrop trailer would be perfect :) I've always thought they were the sweetest little things LOL. Much to small for our family of 5 but so cute just the same :) Hopefully tomorrow I'll have something much more exciting to share with you!

Happy stitching :)
~ Rosina

100 Block Grid

Wow! 100 blocks. I decided to go ahead and create the entire grid of 100 blocks for the stitch along after all *grin*. Talk about indecisive!

Thank goodness I've got a nice long quilting ruler. It made creating the grid much easier as I could line up 6 inches at a time of the one inch intervals consecutively across the ruler using the markings and keep watch to make sure I wasn't getting off track and crooked with each new row :)

Even with all of the checking and re-checking it is slightly out but not noticeable and I made one little boo boo and drew a line to long but I'll just have to cover it up with some creative embellishment *grin*. Tomorrow I'll tackle stitching up the grid and covering the pencil lines!

Happy stitching,
Rosina

Getting Ready

I'm ready to start!
I finally got into town and picked up some pretty yellow linen and an assortment of brightly colored embroidery thread for stitching with :)

I'm not sure though if I'm going to start by drawing my grid of 100 blocks. During the last stitch along I had noticed that some of the gals used up two block spaces for larger blocks and I really liked how it looked and I'd like to incorporate that into my sampler. So I think that I may start with just one line of 10 blocks and then see how it goes *grin*. That will be my project for tomorrow and hopefully I'll get a block completed to!

Happy stitching,
Rosina

Count My Blessings Stitch Along

Amy is hosting another great stitch along and this time the focus is to stitch all of the wonderful things that make our lives so blessed :) I was to late to join in her last one but not this time! I am so excited *grin*. The goal is to create a grid of 100, one inch sized squares and to stitch an image of something or someone that blesses our lives inside each of the squares. What a fantastic way to take stock of all that we have, to appreciate it wholly and to realize that what we think is less can quite often be more!

I love the following quote that she shared and it sums it up perfectly:

"I murmured that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." -- Persian Proverb

Photo courtesy of Zannestar via Flickr

I've started a separate page on my blog just for my 'blessing' updates so that you can quickly find new entries and photos to my stitch along blocks without having to sort through my entire blog to find them :) You can see it over on the right hand sidebar up at the top underneath the 'Counting My Blessings' logo. Each time I post a new blessing entry I will put up a photo and a link to the original entry there so you can click over and read it easily. Looking forward to stitching along with you and to read more about Amy's challenge visit her blog at Counting My Blessings :)

Happy Stitching!
~ Rosina