Time Warp and A Sign of Things to Come

I swear, I am stuck in some sort of time warp.  After Christmas, it seemed like time stopped.  The days were dragging on, it felt like each day lasted 3 or 4.  This last week has flown by so fast I'm not even sure what happened.  I'm speeding ahead toward this next weekend when my husband will finally be home after a 6 month deployment.  I can't wait to see him.

I've been crafting this past week, finished up another cross-stitch saddle pad, probably my last one for a little while.  I've told myself I won't make any more until I record the patterns on the ones I've made and get them all finished and photographed.  I'd like to get them listed up for sale or otherwise decide what to do with them - I'd like to donate at least a few.  Then and only then will I embark on making more of them.  That's the plan anyway...

The newest pad, done stitching:

All six of the 18-count pads I've made so far.  The stitching is done, but they all still need to be cut out and finished:

Last night I started working on my big horse head cross-stitch again (the one that I'll probably finish about the time I'm 80 - along with the Stagecoach project).

Yesterday I spent SIX hours in the Studio room, moving things around, throwing things away, and resisting the urge to give up, sit down, and start making things in the middle of the mess.  I made a lot of progress with the (latest) overhaul, but there is still more to do.  This was after I'd been underway for an hour or two.  As usual, things looked way worse before they got better:

 

 

Moving on to a subject which I will no doubt be posting about more - and one that will eventually have its own blog is...  The Laser.  In a (VERY brief) nutshell... ever since way before I met my husband, he has wanted a commercial laser cutter/engraver.  We had talked about it for years and last summer, we had one of these big machines delivered to our house.  I have been playing with the machine a bit while he has been away.  Tonight I made a few things with it, including this little design, a stylized Arabian horse.  I did a quick, freehand drawing in our graphics software and then made it an oval cut out.  It will be part of a new greeting card that I'm hoping to make tomorrow and then post to ArtFire.  That will make it the very first tiny laser project that we will offer for sale: 

 

 

Very exciting things to come with our laser adventure!

 

 

One last bit of exciting news from the last week...  I present...  a baby apple tree!  This little one was started from a seed that had sprouted inside of a granny smith apple.  I read about how starting an apple from seed most likely won't produce the same type of apple, due to cross pollination and grafting, but I wanted to see if I could get one of the sprouted seeds to grow, just for the heck of it.  Well, here are the results so far!:

 



It will be neat to see if I can get this wee little sprout to grow into a tree!  I don't even care if it makes apples, how fun would it be to raise up this little one from tiny seed to tree?!