Hugs to All

A big thank you for all the happy birthday wishes on my last post. You sure know how to make a girl feel special! Dash does too ~ look at the gifts he got me:

Both seasons of Downton Abbey and a companion book...plus the first season of The Walking Dead and a book about it as well. I'm half way through The Walking Dead Chronicles already ~ very interesting!

I had a lovely day out on Friday. We had a lovely lunch at a brick oven pizza place in downtown Tulsa called Joe Momma's. I won't bore you with the craptastic pictures I took there. We had a basket of fried button mushrooms, a fat calzone and each had a couple of beers. It was lovely! Then we went shopping:

I bought some finishing fabrics. I especially like the red striped mattress ticking. I found loads of new charts. Absolutely had to get La D Da's A Bird in Hand because I was chosen by Nina to stitch this using her over-dyed threads. I could have borrowed Nina's but I wanted my own copy anyway. The Prairie Schooler ones both had partridge-in-a-pear-tree designs and I could not resist. Yes, I was able to control myself during stash shopping...I only had two beers!

A little close-up of the Just Nan pin I bought:

I can't resist ladybugs either! Counting pins are too handy. One can never have enough. Here are the ones on my desk:

Forgive the stray thread clippings...this IS a work area, after all! 

What are counting pins and how do you use them? Easy...say you have a long border to stitch and you want to be SURE you have it counted correctly. Or you are counting for center placement on a new start. Use your counting pins to mark every 10 or 20 stitches so save the place. No more mis-counting! You don't need fancy pins of course but they make it fun. 

I am still having a great time for my birthday weekend. I've been catching up on my blog list, doing some stitching on  projects for Theme-a-licious and WIPocalypse and even a bit of housework. *gasp* I can't believe I just said the h-word!

Thank you for visiting my blog today!

xox