In Stitches: PIF

Oh my word! Saturday was spent at the spa at Hanbury Manor (*more on that below) and finally I arrived home, tired, pampered and hungry with the prospect of opening the wonderfully large box which Hazel had sent containing the PIF gift she stitched for me. I am truly amazed and delighted and really touched at the effort Hazel went to – not only did she send me an enormous and totally over the top package full of lots and lots of goodies, just look what she stitched for me!!

It’s a lavender-filled heart-shaped beauty, a Tournicoton design called ‘Le Temps d’un Thé’, and it is just fabulous – Hazel has stitched it so beautifully, and the finishing, well, you can see for yourself what an amazing job she did. I feel so very honoured to have some of Hazel’s stitching to hang up! I haven’t yet decided where I’m going to hang it – somewhere it can be admired (both to look at and to smell), but not somewhere in a high traffic zone where it will get knocked or bumped…thinking cap on! The reverse is, by the way, an excerpt from a poem by Théodore de Banville (isn’t Google amazing…).

Here is a very busy photo of all the wonderful extras that Hazel included - thank you so much Hazel, your generosity is so much appreciated!!

It was the lovely Carol’s birthday last week, and she sent me a very kind email to let me know that she likes birthday gift I sent to her ages ago (I didn’t think it was going to arrive that quickly – but how did she let it sit there wrapped up for so long?!? I wouldn’t have been able to!). I know that Carol has been on a Brightneedle kick recently, so I elected to stitch her a sort of hanging pinkeep sort of, um, thing. Anyway! She tells me she likes it so that is the important thing :)

Marne has kindly nominated me the Kreativ Blogger Award – I’m a terrible one for sticking to rules, but I feel Jen would be disappointed if I didn’t include some links to blogs I read, so, in no particular order, have a look at these wonderful blogs if you don’t read them already:

Claudia
Rachael
Marie
Simone
Linda

*For those of you interested in the spa weekend update, 5 of us went to Hanbury Manor in Hertfordshire – it’s a beautiful manor house with lovely grounds and set in the middle of a golf course. Very picturesque! We each booked ourselves in for treatments – I had a super deluxe amazing wonderful manicure, and a pedicure. I’m just hoping my nails don’t chip before the wedding on Thursday. Hmmm, it looks like that means no washing dishes for this beauty queen (imagine me sobbing in disappointment – oh, no, wait that’s H sobbing because he has to do them instead). We then had a fairly pleasant dinner which was so late in arriving that we didn’t pay for it (actually, that might have been the best part about it, but the hotel was in the middle of catering for 2 separate weddings so I think they were fairly flat out). We were out on the terrace enjoying the beautiful views over the lake and one of the golf holes, so we didn’t really mind about the delay. A few drinks were had, a few stories were told, and all in all we had a great weekend catching up. A nice break before the rest of my busy August!

The girls! L-R in back: Louise, Emer, Helen, front: Desiree and me