Catch up

I feel like I sort of dropped off the face of the earth blog wise. This last month or so has been kind of crazy. Hubby over worked himself and was consequently in pain so I got him a hot water bottle. Heating pads are nice but there aren't always electrical outlets in reach. While filling the bottle it "burped" spilling boiling water over the back of my hand. I had blisters right where the tatting thread lays across the back of my hand.

My sweety was diagnosed with Meniere's and some days he gets to feeling pretty dizzy. On a scheduled trip to the hospital we took a cab and the cab driver closed the door (not just pinched, the door actually latched) with my hand still in it. My left hand was swollen for a while so not much tatting or typing got done.

Then I got news that my brother was in the hospital and we kind of hung around the phone/computer waiting for updates. So again, not much got done. Then we got the news that he had passed away. The first funeral was in Connecticut where he and his wife have lived for that past 11 years. Some of the family made it down to the States. His wife and kids and 3 of my siblings were there. My BIL officiated and had some of the service taped.

The following week there was a service up here in Canada and we saw the taped portion of the service from the week before. It was interesting that his boss from IBM was at the funeral and he spoke of Bob in quite glowing terms and mentioned that the team he was working with set up programs for IBM globally and each person knew their own section well, but Bob was the only one who understood how all of it worked together. He seemed at a loss as to how he was going to replace Bob. I can understand it. Bob was brilliant, capable and well able to organize other people and encourage them to tackle and surmount any obstacles.

There was some talk at the funeral on Thursday of cancelling the family reunion, but we decided to go ahead with it and the whole tribe except for Bob's family attended. Sue probably wasn't in the mood for a festive occasion, but had she attended, the mood would have been more subdued, but we would have just closed in around her and comforted her. I think 2 funerals after a month of camping out in a hospital was just too much for her and I expect she just crashed with the kids.

Knowing that I'd have a long car ride going up to the camp where the reunion was held, I decided it was a great opportunity to sew some tatting onto my bag. I mentioned in an earlier post that my jeans are black and the 2 craft bags I use are also black so I figured that I would eventually add tatting to all of them. The other day I was cleaning up and had to move some tatting aside, so I slid it onto one of my bags and decided that it looked pretty good. I used the ride to sew it all down. I had intended to attach this to a pillow, but in 2 years I haven't attached it yet, so a bag is as good a place as any to display it.

Attaching tatting to a bag already filled with lumpy stuff makes it difficult to do anything neatly or accurately. I noticed after I had it all sewn down that there was a big blank spot in the middle so I filled it in with a butterfly that happened to be stuffed in one of the bag's zippered compartments.

It doesn't show very well in the picture, but the flowers are 3D. I tacked them down around the edges but left them so that they still stand out. One bag done, 2 more to go.