Roses

Good evening everyone! Due to the cold weather and my mother's care to relocate our grandfather's rosebush, we have had a lovely number of roses this spring.



All of them a deep red color, expect for one!



Isn't it beautiful? It is quite strange to see a pink rose on a red rosebush. It makes me think of Alice in Wonderland. I'm waiting for the queen to march around the corner and demand my head for having a pink rose instead of red!!

Until next time ^____^

Project Restart

Good afternoon everyone! I finished watching a Korean drama called Autumn in My Heart this morning and decided to restart my Mill Hill design afterwards. Here is my progress while watching Downton Abbey on DVD.


Design: Kris Kringle, Holiday III by Mill Hill
Fabric: brown perforated paper
Threads,etc: DMC, ribbon, buttons, and beads
Restart: 4/10/2011

I would continue stitching on this design, but I find that I need some thread that I do not have in my stash so it will have to wait for a while.

Hope you are enjoying your Sunday.

Until next time ^____^

Book Adventure

Good morning! My aunt and I woke up early this morning to head downtown to the MPL's annual book sale. It was my aunt's first time going to the book sale and she was amazed by the amount of people there and the variety of books available. Books and other materials range from $0.50-$3.00 with special prices for encyclopedia books and older books. All the money goes to the local libraries.

My aunt came away with several biographies, sewing books, and a plethora of Debbie Macomber's books.

You might have already guessed what I came away with.



From bottom to top:
1. Sherlock Holmes in London
2. A Sherlock Holmes Companion
3. Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
4. The Cosmopolitan Volume XVII, bound volume of issues May 1894 - Oct 1894
5. The Cosmopolitan Volume XVIII, bound volume of issues January 1895 - May 1895
6. The Cosmopolitan Volume XIX, bound volume of issues May 1895 - October 1895
7. Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton, published by Appleton, 1927
8. Black Butler manga Volume III

All the hardcover books were a dollar and the paperbacks were 50 cents so I came away with eight books for $7.50. Not bad at all :)

With my love of Sherlock Holmes, you knew I would hunt out books on the series. I can't wait to read the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, which has 40 complete stories from contemporaries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote crime stories in rival magazines of The Strand.

The Cosmopolitan was a magazine published in 1886 by Schlicht & Field as a family magazine. It transformed into a literary magazine and then finally into the modern day Cosmopolitan (or Cosmo) magazine that we see today on newsstands. Imagine my surprise to see three bound volumes from 1894 to 1895 for sale! I was hoping to find more of them at the sale, but I looked everywhere and didn't see any. I love the inscription on the front cover of each volume from a mother to her daughter in 1908. I can't wait to read through the volumes and see all the beautiful pictures and advertisements of America's Victorian period. ^____^

The MPL hosts their annual sales twice a year, once in the spring and then again in the winter. It is a good place to find used books, ranging from discarded library books to books donated to the library for the sale. If you get a chance to go by and browse, it is well worth it and helps support the MPL too.

Until next time ^____^

Sneaky instructions and Red Riding Hood

Good morning! I decided yesterday afternoon to start a Mill Hill kit that I purchased from my LNS the week before.


Design: Kris Kringle, Holiday III by Mill Hill
Fabric: brown perforated paper
Threads,etc: DMC, ribbon, buttons, and beads
Start: 4/2/2011

I was stitching along and kept thinking to myself that the threads just didn't look as full as they did in the picture. At the same time, I had made a mistake in counting and was pulling out stitches and restitching when I decided to put the kit aside to give my eyes a rest when I noticed the other side of the chart!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Imagine my surprise when there was a 'chart 2' on the other side of the first chart, which detailed the cross stitch threads needed............sigh.

No wonder it looked so odd.....O_o"

Yet another lesson to be learned about crafting:
1) Always, always read all the instructions.
2) Just to be on the safe side, look on the other side of the page!!

I was good about following lesson #1, but didn't even think to look on the other side because it mentioned using 2 threads on the first page for cross stitching!! Blah!!!

I will probably not pick up this kit again today as my friends and I are going to theater to see Red Riding Hood. I'm hoping that it is better than the novel, which was sadly lacking in a conclusion! You were instructed to go online to the website and find out how it ended.................O_o" No, I didn't go online to find out the ending as by that point I didn't care.

Wishing you a good Sunday and work week. Hope you're enjoying spring weather in your area! The azaleas are in bloom here :)

Until next time ^_____^

A gem in the city

This morning I decided to wander over to a used bookstore in town called The Book Nook. It is situated downstairs in Spring Hill College's campus library. I've been there quite a few times over the years, seeing it move three times around the campus to its now permanent location in the campus library.

A beautiful little gem in the city of Mobile with an always helpful staff of volunteers, I never get tired of visiting it. I solemn come away empty handed from this bookstore as they have a great selection of books ranging from religion and philosophy to classics and folklore.

I came away with several books this morning, which I couldn't resist.

A hardcover two volume set from 1967 of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould. I'm a geek for all things relating to the world of Sherlock Holmes so I couldn't resist this beautiful set!



I also purchased a hardcover copy of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring-Gould published in 1962, Adventures of Gerard Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from 1961, Toujours Français Cours Élémentaire, a small hardcover textbook from 1930, and Snow by Tracey Lynn.



If you haven't been to The Book Nook on Spring Hill's campus, you are surely missing out on a lovely experience in Mobile.

Until next time ^___^

March Recap

March Recap

Read:
1. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
2. Before Midnight by Cameron Dokey
3. Violet Eyes by Debbie Viguie
4. Death Cloud: Sherlock Holmes, The Legend Begins by Andrew Lane
5. Library Wars: Love and War, Volume 4 by Kiiro Yumi
6. Gosick: The Novel Volume 1 by Kazuki Sakuraba
7. Belle by Cameron Dokey
8. The World Above by Cameron Dokey
9. Little Red Riding Hood and Other Classic French Fairy Tales translated by Jack Zipes
10. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
11. Wild Orchid by Cameron Dokey
12. The Deeds of the Disturber by Elizabeth Peters
13. Book Girl and the Famished Spirit by Mizuki Nomura
14. Gosick: The Crime that has No Name by Kazuki Sakuraba
15. The Amaranth Enchantment by Julie Berry
16. The Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George
17. Spice & Wolf novel Volume 2 by Isuna Hasekura
18. Conan Doyle: Portrait of an Artist by Julian Symons
19. Sherlock Holmes and a Scandal in Bohemia comic book by Murray Shaw, M.J. Cosson and Sophie Rohrbach
20. Dracula, My Love by Syrie James
21. Castle Waiting Volume 1 by Linda Medley

Quite a month for reading if nothing else! I've been diligent about reading the books on my 'to read' shelves of my bookshelf so a majority of the books I've read this year have been from my own collection though I must admit that I made a trip to my local library last weekend and this morning for more books ;)

My favorites for the month of March were Death Cloud and Castle Waiting. The former being the first book in a new young adult series by the British author, Andrew Lane. A man who fell in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes and was given permission by the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate and several of the heirs of the estate to write a fictional account of Sherlock Holmes teenage years. I won't give the game away by telling you about the book's plot, but for Sherlock Holmes fanatics, I think you'll love the mystery of the 'death cloud,' which deals with a theme from Sherlock Holmes' later pursuits.

Only book one of the Legend Begins series has been published in the United States to date, but if you check out Amazon UK, there are two other books in the series. One is currently out and other is coming out later this year. I might just have to order some books from the UK ^___^

The latter book, Castle Waiting, is a marvelous comic book collection spanning some 450 pages of a fairy tale world starting with the tale of Sleeping Beauty and moving on to the inhabitants of Castle Waiting, a legendary castle refuge. I picked up the book at my local library as I was intrigued by the fairy tale aspect of the book. (I love reading fairy tales and their modern adaptations.) It is quite a fun read and I promptly checked out the second volume of the series.

What's in store for the month of April. Hmm....a lot of library books and hopefully some more books from my own collection!!

And hopefully, I will stop reading long enough to start some cross stitch projects O_o"

Until next time ^____^