In The Doldrums

Things at work since I went back after my op have been getting steadily worse again and this last week I've spent a lot of the time near to or in tears, and taken to having early nights as all I want to do is hide away and sleep, which I know for me is a sure sign I'm depressed again.
There were more redundancies at work last week and everyday we seem to hear more doom and gloom about the housing market etc, so everyone I work with is at rock bottom and the atmosphere is awful. I think my job is probably safe for a while due to my length of service, experience and qualifications, but dealing with the atmosphere on a daily basis is getting hard to bear. When you spend so much of your life at work it becomes impossible to turn off after work when things are so low whilst you're there and I have to admit that I'm really struggling. I'm trying to take it one day at a time but earlier today I was so close to handing in my notice and just throwing in the towel...
I have had one nice day though. At the weekend DH and I took Erin to Gulliver's World in Warrington which is a theme park for young children. Erin absolutely loves it there as she can go on the rides as many time as she wants. This time she was also tall enough to go on the three rides she's missed out on before, a roller coaster, a runaway mine train and the log flume, and loved them, especially when I got soaked through on the log flume lol. We had an absolutely wonderful day, the weather was gorgeous, the queues were short for the rides surprisingly and it was just so nice relaxing and being a family with no worries for a while. DH and I said we definitely need to get away for more days like that, as I felt like a weight had been lifted off me for a few hours.
Stitching wise I've nothing to show I'm afraid. I have done the stitching for the Just Nan Boo Tin, but have yet to pluck up the courage to attempt the finishing. I've done none besides that and to be honest the rotation has fallen by the wayside, so I've decided for now that when I do actually feel like stitching I'm just going to grab what's calling and see how it goes. It's typical that when I'm stressed or down I usually turn to my stitching, but at the moment I can't even be bothered with that.
Here's hoping I'll snap out of it in a few days.

How Does Your Monday Go?

I've got the usual Monday blues, not helped by still worrying about the Paypal fiasco. We managed to get all the cards stopped so now it's the waiting game while the new cards come through and we see if we will get the money back from Paypal. We have decided that if/when it is resolved, if we get our money back we are in future going to use an old bank account we have never got around to closing just for Paypal, and just keep a small amount in it for that purpose only, so this can never happen again. Thanks for all the messages I received, it makes me feel a bit better at least knowing people care.
Now onto what this blog is supposed to be about, stitching! Here are my HAED Alisha QS and the Papillon mystery How Does Your Garden Grow with Part 4 now complete. I've also done a little more on Cirque but want to wait til I finish the page til I take another pic.




The past couple of weeks I've carried on with my rotation but have missed quite a few nights of stitching which isn't good for my sanity lol. Anyway, I've finally finished the round and I'm pleased with what I've achieved, especially on HDYGG.
I've been wanting to start the SALexandre with Sally and we had planned to begin this month, but I couldn't help thinking that I shouldn't be starting another big project at the moment when I want to make more progress on my wips. So we've decided to put it on hold for now and we'll see how we're both set in another few months or so.
In the meantime I've decided to keep my slots in the rotation as they are, but rather than a set time on each project I'm just going to stitch on it for as long as I'm enjoying it. If it's one I'm not particularly enjoying I can move on, but have to have at least put in a few stitches. I'm hoping this way that I can make much more progress on my focus pieces, Cirque and HDYGG, and maybe even finish one of them before the end of the year so I can free up a slot, whilst still making some progress on my others and mostly not getting bored.
So it's back to slot 1 today, which is smalls, and I get a new start which I'm really excited about! With halloween coming up next month I couldn't resist the new Just Nan Boo Tin and Needlebook when they came out, and have been dying to start one of them since they arrived. I have plumped for the tin first and now have everything laid out at the side of me on the sofa for when Erin has gone to bed!
Hope you all have a good week. Thanks to all my readers and those who take the time to leave a comment. And welcome to my new commentors, it's lovely to see some new faces here. I've been very lax in reading and commenting on blogs this past couple of weeks, have just been finding it hard to settle, but I hope to rectify that soon.

Argh! Paypal Fraud!

Sorry for my screaming, but this afternoon has been a complete nightmare. This is nothing to do with stitching so please feel free to ignore my post, I just need to vent.
I got an email earlier from Paypal to confirm that a payment had been sent and my bank account debited.... Now only DH and I use the account so I wondered what DH had ordered. When I looked at the amount, $1,150.00! I knew immediately that it couldn't be DH, but by this time my bank account had already been debited with £659.57!
I then got an email from Paypal to say that they had flagged it up as a suspicious transaction and I immediately followed this up by reporting it as an unauthorised transaction, which will take 10 days to either resolve and for us to get our money back, or we're over £650 out of pocket.
Now I don't know how you girls that use Paypal use your account, but for ours when we buy something the money comes straight from our bank account, and if there is not enough money available it is charged to a backup credit card.
So we've had to ring our Bank and credit card companies to stop our bank and credit cards, and on doing so we found that someone had tried to charge £6,000.00 to our credit card as well! Thank god they had immediately flagged it up as suspicious and when we rang it was then rejected. It's going to be 7-10 days before we get new cards, so until then we can't get any money out or buy anything!
In the meantime our Paypal account has also been frozen and I don't want to give anymore bank/credit card details until I know if this is going to be resolved.
I feel totally sick to my stomach right now, can't stop crying and am really worried that we're not going to get the money back.
So another reason for my posting this is to ask if anyone can give us any advice to help stop this happening again. How do you use your Paypal account? Do you have a bank account registered as well as a credit card, or just a credit card? Do you use a separate card that has a small limit on it specially for things like Paypal and Ebay? Right now I just want to close the account I'm so worried and scared because I don't know what I'm supposed to do....

Finishing Fun

Well, my first week back at work wasn't too bad thank goodness. I was a nervous wreck last Sunday and then Monday morning I felt physically sick, it was like being the new girl again! Anyway, once I'd been back a few hours I settled down and now it feels like I've never been away.
As it's DH's and my Wedding Anniversary on Wednesday I thought I'd better try to get Always & Forever finished finished this weekend to give to DH.

Now I've only made one flatfold before so was still quite nervous about doing this one. I had to choose backing fabric from my stash and didn't really have much choice of suitable pieces, but didn't have time to go shopping for something else. The finishing took less time than I expected and although it's not perfect I am pleased with the finished result on the whole. I have to say that flatfolds aren't my favourite finishing technique, can't quite seem to get on with them like I do with pinkeeps etc, but as an alternative to framing a smallish piece of stitching I think they're a great idea.

This week I've been working on Celtic Autumn for the first time in a LONG time lol. The pics are before and after so I'm pleased with the progress I've made this time around. The most recent pic is also a much better colour match to the real thing, the original pic was awful. I have Spring, Summer, Autumn and Xmas in my stash and would like to stitch them all eventually, so I figured it was time to give Autumn some regular attention so at least one of them might get finished one day. I'm not a great fan of beading so am trying to do it as I go along. I've tended to do a bit of stitching then add a few beads and so on and it's not too bad that way. She will be up again in my rotation in about a month so you'll be seeing more of her then.

Yesterday I stitched on Cirque and made good progress, but don't want to risk boring everyone with a pic showing just one day's stitching every week so think I'll probably post a pic every couple of weeks instead.

Next up in the Papillon mystery again for a couple of days. I'm hoping to finish Part 3 this time around!

Hope everyone is having a good weekend and all my fellow UK'ers aren't suffering too badly in all the rain we're having. It's sunny here right now but daren't put any laundry out as it's sure to be raining again before I know it.

I'm Back!

Well we got back from holiday on Wednesday afternoon and things are slowly returning to normal. I can never get over how long it takes to empty the caravan and put things away, and the amount of laundry there is! We had a good week away and were very lucky with the weather as it was lovely a few days, and we only had rain during the day on the second to last day. Saying that, I came down with a stinker of a cold on the 3rd day and felt dreadful the rest of the week. The last two nights I had to dose myself up with cough medicine and prop myself up on pillows in the caravan to get myself to sleep, so it was nice to come home to my own bed.
Stitching wise the rotation went out of the window for the week which I knew it would, but I still managed to get some done. Firstly I finished my LHN Always & Forever for our 10th anniversary next month, and then I made some more progress on Cirque. I've now done half of the page and for some reason that's given me a boost that I might actually finish it one day lol.
The pic of Cabin has only just been taken, but it's a couple of weeks since I worked on it last. I've now actually reached the cabin itself and it's SO good to be able to stitch colours that are not blue. I'm looking forward to working on this again soon.
Back to the rotation, and I am going to tweak it slightly. There have been a few days when I haven't stitched for one reason or another and this has meant certain projects have missed out on stitching time. So I've decided that rather than have the set days of the week I'm just going to do 4 days on slot 1, 1 day on Cirque, 2 on the mystery, and then onto slot 2 for 4 days, and so on. This way if I miss a day's stitching it doesn't matter, I just don't move on until I've done my set day/s on that project. I'm hoping to get the Papillon mystery back out tonight for a couple of days, don't really feel in the mood for stitching but hoping once I pick it up I'll soon get back into the swing.
Well, only 2 more days of freedom and then it's back to work for me after 5 weeks. I had 3 weeks sick leave after the op and then 2 weeks holiday leave, so this is the longest I've had off since having Erin over 5 years ago. I'd be lying if I said I was happy about going back, right now I'm dreading it and feel sick when I think about it, but there's nothing I can do so just got to try not to think too much about it til Mon lol.

Flying Visit

Just a quick update as we are going away in our caravan tomorrow for a week so I won't be able to post while we're away.
Haven't been able to take update pics of my wips today as the batteries for the camera are on charge ready to take away with us, but I have taken a quick pic of the Papillon mystery with my phone to give you an idea of progress. It's not a brilliant photo but you'll get the idea. I've now finished parts 1 and 2 including adding the beads, and I made a start on part 3 earlier.

I made good progress on Cabin In The Woods in the 4 days I worked on it last week and finished another oval in Cirque when I worked on that for a day, but you'll have to wait til we get back for a pics of those lol.

I've managed to sneak four wips into the caravan to take with us. The mystery, Cirque, Celtic Autumn and Always & Forever. A&F is to work on during the day if I get chance at any of the activities Erin goes to, and the other three are for in the caravan or sitting out in the sun if we get any by some miracle. Sometimes when we go I get loads of stitching done, other times hardly any, but I can't risk having nothing to stitch can I?!

So til next time, I wish you all plenty of frog free stitching (hugs).

I Love My New Rotation!

Well 11 days in and my rotation is still working lol. I don't want to jinx myself as I've tried so many different ones all for them to fail eventually, but I really am enjoying this new set up. The pics I've taken were taken before the weekend and the colours are all wrong as it was so dull, but you'll get the idea.
Cirque is great to work on for just one day a week as I'm keeping making progress, no colour changes means it's easy to pick up and get going on, and I don't get bored of it.

How Does Your Garden Grow is fast becoming my favourite project. This pic doesn't show it but I've now finished Part 1 except for the beads and have made a good start on Part 2. It seems to stitch up very quickly once you get the hang of each stitch, and it's so pretty.

Last week Mon-Thur I made a good start on LHN's Always & Forever. This is for DH for our 10th Wedding Anniversary with is in September. I've been going to stitch it for a while but then he does something to annoy me and I think "I'm not wasting my stitching time on him" lol, then he does something to get back in my good books again and I change my mind. Anyway, I love the design and it will be displayed in our lounge when it's finished so I'll enjoy it as well, so figured I might as well just go ahead and stitch it. I had the silk specially dyed by Vikki Clayton to go with the browns in our lounge, and although I wasn't wild about it when I first got it, I just love it stitched up. I have to say though that by Thur I was glad to put it away as I was getting a little bored. This will be coming out again before it's next slot though as we're going away next week in our caravan for the week and I'm going to take it to stitch a little on when I'm watching Erin doing the activities, plus I need to get it finished and made up somehow before 10th Sept.

And finally as it was smalls week last week I made up the Alphabet Tree freebie I stitched a while back into a floss ring tag! I'm not wild about how the eyelet setting worked out on the back, but I guess it's practice I am very pleased with the finish on the whole.

This week is the turn of HAED Cabin In The Woods and I've managed to get a good bit done the last 2 days. I'll take a pic before it goes away again.

Health wise I'd say I'm back to about 80% now. I'm still having trouble bending over and the main incision is uncomfortable and placed perfectly to catch on anything I wear, plus I still can't drive so am stuck at home when David is at work, but other than that I'm managing to do a lot more and feeling better.

I have til next Wed on sick from work and already had 2 weeks holiday booked from work which starts next Mon, so unless something happens in the next couple of weeks I'll be going back to work on 1st Sept. Right now I feel sick when I think about it and am dreading it, but it's got to happen so I'm trying to not focus on it too much and just enjoy the time I have left and get myself to 100% before then if possible.

Hope you're all having a good week, thanks to everyone who comes and visits my blog and especially to those who take the time to leave a comment. I still haven't figured out a way to track my visitors like some can do on their blogs, so I'm just hoping I do have other visitors besides the ones who comment lol. Til next time!