More Vacation Pictures and couple of the hounds

While we were in South Dakota we visited Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Monument. Everybody knows what Mt Rushmore looks like but not that many people know about Crazy Horse Monument. MR is a big bas relief on the side of a mountain while Crazy Horse is eventually going to be a statue carved from the whole mountain. Here are a couple of shots

And here is another shot looking from the welcome center at a prototype of the finished piece and in the distance you see what has been finished


It is very hard to get a since of scale...

This will eventually be a complex of great size. When leaving there are gates of the native animals and here is a picture of them with my mother in law, Eileen. These are all polished brass coloured and very impressive.
We also visited the Pine Ridge Reservation a couple of times and went to their new casino, Prairie Wind, very new and really nice. One of the visits we went to Wounded Knee and the mass grave and grave yard that are there. Here are a couple of snaps....

And here is the Monument with the names of the Native Americans massacred and interred in the grave...

The corpses were gathered from miles around as the people were killed trying to escape being gunned down. If you have not seen the new HBO special, "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" it is well worth seeing. It is very sad to see the neglect at this very important site but with many things there is no agreement with the different factions and so nothing gets done and the site and history suffers. Once again this is set on a bluff and for miles around there is nothing but land a prairie. The mass grave is surrounded with later burials.


There are still more pic and stuff to come. My stitching suffered as I do not a bit while away. Here is a couple pictures for Donna of the puppies, they went also and were good as gold.

Here is the Peach, and she is still very scared of the camera....


And here is Pete....

Hope all is well with everyone, thanks for stopping by, leave a comment as they are always appreciated!!!


take care,
edgar

Back from South Dakota, Part 1

Well, we are back form a great vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This is an area that I had never been to before and I was just blown away by the beauty of the area. The Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument, Sturgis, Dinosaur Hill....there is tons of stuff to do and then some. The trip from San Francisco, to Rapid City, our base of operation, took about 2 1/2 days to drive. Going into Salt Lake City driving east you run into the salt flats. These are miles and miles of white, dry, flat salt covered land. It is were speed trials were done.
It is hard to imagine but all around you in this dry area are mountains and dry flat land covered in crunchy salt. The air is hung with a fine dry powder of salt. We were travelling with our three chihuahuas and even they wouldn't venture out on to this land. The picture was taken at a rest stop.

We made it into Rapid city a day later. I think that our excursions into the Badlands were really the most eye opening. You can see for miles and miles, nothing but buttes and dry desert and mountains. It is very hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the vistas in a picture. It is also impossible to imagine the quiet the surrounds you out there. Living here int he city you are inundated with so much noise day in and day out. In the Badlands it is so quite that your ears ring. Walking out on a butte it was so quiet that you could hear the crickets/grasshoppers hitting the blades of dried grass at you feet. A very humbling experience.


I have lots more pictures that will go on as I get to them.

Thanks for stopping by, leave a comment if you have the time.

Take care,
edgar

"Serenity" stitching night

Last night while watching Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind" I worked on Serenity. I have finally finished up all of the designs for the body of the piece and this picture is the best of the bunch for the over all effect. I did change the "J" that was in the lower right hand side to "IV." As I am the fourth in my family to carry my name and I put an IV at the end of my name. Just a little more personalization. I did leave the "H" in the heart on the bottom as both of my middle names start with an H. This is a picture of the lower right hand side:


Here is the lower left as you can see I have started to do the border.


And, here is the overall effect of the entire thing, or I should say that here is the best picture of the entire thing that I got. The other ones all were blurry and not worth posting. I was wondering if I should when finished frame this sucker up or not. It is a really big piece of work and will cost a fortune to get framed. I don't have to decide right now and it can sit with the rest of the finished thing that are not framed until a decision is made.


This will probably be my last post for a while as we are travelling to South Dakota on Saturday, in fact driving all the way from San Francisco to Rapid City. We will be back around the 28th or 29th...... such an adventure, we are all excited about. I will have lots of pictures and tons of stitching done, I hope, that the posts after I get back will be heavily photoed. I wonder if that is a word???

Well, thanks for visiting and leave a note if you have the time, I always wonder who is surfing the web reading these things. I read lots of blogs and drop notes here and there, but for the most part I think we are very anonymous out there. I hope you are all enjoying what I have to say, as silly as it gets sometimes.

Take care,
edgar

Just one more thing, did you notice that I did not take on the movie....very technicolor and very Douglas Sirk. If you have not had the chance to see "Written on the Wind", you should take a look. Especially if you like the soap opera style of the 50's in which he worked. All I can say is if you liked the Lana Turner version of "Imitation of Life" you will totally like this movie.

Big Hat Party, and Finis Sopranos

On Saturday evening a very good friend of mine, Dale (in fact we have been friends for about 23 years) had his "Big Hat Party." A very festive evening with lots of hats and head coverings. The picture is of.....from l to r Dale, the Host,Brunhilde (Allie) and Big Mama (Rico). We had a really good time and I heard that the festivities lasted to well into the wee hours of the morning. .As most of the population on the planet knows by now the Sopranos aired the last ever episode on Sunday. I am a real fan of this show and although there was not the expected bloodbath ending the show kept you on the edge the entire time. Although it was not the ending that I or a majority of people that I know wanted it was a good ending as it lets the Family Soprano go off and live their lives in TV land as they have been doing over the last few years.

With the party and the get together around the Sopranos not too much x stitching got done this weekend. I did not even touch BP SAL. This Saturday we are leaving for South Dakota and I will have lots of time in the car and while there to get lots of x stitching done, I hope.

Thanks for taking a look.....

edgar

Stash buying and an Ebay aquisition

On Wednesday my LNS, Needle in a Haystack over in Alameda called to let me know about an order for floss that had come in so last night we trotted over there, boy the traffic on the Bay Bridge was gruesome..... anyways..... and I couldn't pass up a chance to get a few other things. The floss I had ordered was for Serenity, specifically the border. As I near the end of the bits in the body of the piece I will be starting the leaf border. I wanted the floss to be from the same dye lot since this is that over dyed stuff that can be so different from dye lot to dye lot within the same colour. The ladies in the shop are so nice and I had them order it for me. The two colours are "Sassy Brass" and " Camouflage." I also picked up some of those gold needles that I really like . There was also a trunk show of Halloween and fall things out, my favorite time of the year. I picked up from Cedar Hill a small kit called "Autumn Bouquet." It will be a quick stitch but a lot of fun for Thanksgiving. The last thing I got was a pattern from The Workbasket called Quaker Odds, surprise something Quaker inspired.

I just got this yesterday in the mail. I won it on Ebay. I am really a nut for these Quaker patterns (could you tell) and "The Goode Huswife's" patterns are just great. The only problem is that she is no longer designing and so I have acquire them on the secondary market, and sometimes they are just really expensive to get. I have been trying for months to get this one and have lost it a couple of times. The next one I am after is the 1798 one. I have lost that a couple of times but will eventually get it. If anyone out there knows of one that is available then let me know. That's about all for now. This weekend one of my friends is throwing what he is calling "The Big Hat Party." There should be some interesting pictures taken.....we will see come Monday.

Take care....and thanks for visiting,
edgar

B Potter SAL update

I did no x stitching over the weekend and even had to move the BP SAL to last night. It was just a very busy and socially committed weekend.
Here is the growing BP sampler. I am liking the spidery effect of the flower bunches.

I also got this weekend a copy of ROOTS the 30th anniversary addition. I remember this when it first aired on the TV, boy does that make me feel old, like in "where's my walker" kind of old.....
So I started to watch it last nigh and got through the first instalment. It is amazing what the audience of yesterday would buy as Africa the audience of today certainly would not. I will get through the entire thing before I go on about it. I also got to see this weekend a movie form 1950 called, "Three Came Home." It stars Claudette Colbert as a writer living in Borneo on the eve of WWII and after the Japanese takeover of the island she and her family are thrown into internment camps. Very well acted by Claudette .... and worth a look. It is brutal in places but nothing like the graphic brutality in the 1997 "Paradise Road." PR was very realistic where TCH was a very cleaned up version of the camp experience, both very good and worth a look.

Rebbeca's Sampler & The Aviator

Well here is the 1800 sampler medallion center looking like something. I think it is supposed to be a morning glory, but it certainly looks like a great blob of grey silk. This is a pretty big bit and took almost the entire skein of floss to do. If you look to the bottom left you see the start of another bit with a little more colour in it.Last night bit the big one for TV so it was another Green Cine movie night. I watched The Aviator, 2004. It was a really long movie at almost three hours but never was a drag and I did not look at the clock to see how long it had been going on. I really liked Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, another stellar performance IMO. I always like CB in just about everything she has done. The movie really showed that Howard Hughes was smart but what a nutburger!!! If you get the chance and have the time take a look. Thats about it for today.....


HAPPY WEEKEND!!!!!!!