I am excited! I sold one of the lace butterflies that I create on my embroidery machine to a lady. She emailed me today and gave me this link to her blog where she is using my butterfly!!! http://modernmourner.blogspot.com/

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Boy life has been busy since my husband and I have both retired. That sounds weird! I thought only old people could retire. Everyone at church says we are tooooooooo young to be retired but let me tell you we are enjoying it. We have been able to help our son, Brandon, when he moved for his job to Sugar Land, Tx and that we great. Had David not retired I am not sure how that would have happened. It was super being able to go with him to find his house to rent and then helping him move. I helps for me to know where my babies are, so that when they talk about things I can relate.

Right now things have slowed down a bit and I have been able to do some projects for others. Below you will see a stole that I made for our church staff to give our pastor that was leaving. I had taken a picture of the cross in the front of our church. It is very special because we have redecorated our church and it has stayed the same. It is very comforting to look at the same cross that you have looked at for the past 45 years. We hope that it will be a special reminder to him of the time he preached at our church.

Our Associate pastor has just been ordained and her best friend wanted me to make her a stole. She wanted one that would help her celebrate this occasion. She also wanted a special inscription sewn into the stole. It expressed her feeling toward Shannon and how proud she was of her accomplishment. Shannon helped us by selecting the pattern that she wanted embroidered on it. I also had a selection of green material that she was able to choose from.

My Auntie Em has just had foot surgery and while I was visiting her she said that her book cover that her daughter had given her had worn out. So I borrowed it and used it to learn how it was made. I have found some cute material and ribbon to make some to sell on Etsy.com. I have made Auntie Em a new one to replace her worn out one. I am trying to decide whether to put her name or initial on it. The ones on Etsy I have decided need to be embroidered before I sew it all together. That way the back of the embroidery does not show and it looks better. I am offering several different color materials that can be chosen between. Please let me know how you like them
Here are some pictures of the one I have made and the different materials.

Some keychains I’ve been working on!

I have been very busy in the past month or so. I took my stoles to United Methodist Annual Conference in Baton Rouge, La. I had a table and a hanging display of them. I had 15 of them. Baptism, Communion, Wedding, Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, Red Patchwork for Pentecost, Green and Blue Patchwork, Green one with descending doves, etc.I also made several stoles with the stain glass window embroidery that I had used for Rev Ken Irby’s stole. I am posting pictures of them so that you can see them. I met a lot of people and hope to get with each of them to make their special stole.

Our assistant pastor wanted a new white wedding stole and also wanted a white communion and baptism stole. We decided to combine them and make the stole reversable. I hope you like my designs. The communion I designed myself and am very proud of it. If you know any church that would like a new stole made for their pastor please let me know and I will send them one of my brochures. Have a blessed day.

I am busy right now making stoles for pastors and lay leaders to see and hopefully buy at United Methodist Annual Conference that is being held in Baton Rouge in June. I started making stoles several years ago when our pastor at the time was moving to another church. The staff at the church wanted to give him something special and unique. My daughter, Kelly and I decided to take pictures of the stainglass windows in our sanctuary and digitize them so I could stitch them on the stole. These windows are at the back of the balcony and when our pastor is at the pulpit he sees them. It was so much fun seeing these windows come to life as I stitched them on the cloth.

We also got the signatures of everyone that had worked with him in the ten years that he was at our church. We digitized them and stitched a parting wish for him and signed their names to the inside the stole.


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I am making more stoles of different designs to sell at the Annual Conference. I am also hoping that people that attend will see my stoles and want me to design a special stole unique to their church. I will post other stole soon.

Well we have spent the last few hours looking for Kelly and David’s cat, Earl Gray. The front door had blown open and we felt that he had gotten out. Before we started looking we searched the house up and down and no Earl. We live next door to the LSU arboretum and so we had alot of ground to search where we thought a cat would be. I prayed that God would bring him home so David and Kelly would not worry all night about him and they could get a good nights sleep. Well after it started getting dark and we had looked everywhere I thought I would look alittle more intensly in the house. So I looked in all the nooks and crannies even in the kitchen cabinets. Well when I made it back to my bed room I opened my closet and no Earl. Well even though my husbands closet was closed I decided to look in there. Well guess who I found fast asleep. EARL GRAY. After 2 hours of looking for him he was found ! He had no idea of how worried we all were or how tired we were. But most of all we were thankful to have him with us. And we all will get a good nights sleep. Thank you God!

Have you been wondering what the fire pictures are all about?

Well several evenings ago about 12:30 am. I was in my sewing room and heard a bang, I went to check on my husband in our room, He was fast asleep. Then I came back to my room and heard another bang! I looked out my window and saw flames that I guessed were about 30 ft high. I felt that is was very close to our neighbors house so I ran out of our house screaming about the fire. Kelly called 911 and woke her daddy. I ran over to our nieghbors house and began ringing their doorbell and knocking on their door. They go to bed very early and I felt they didn’t know what was going on in their backyard. As I was knocking I saw that the flames were coming from a building on the other side of thier fence. That neighbors storage shed was on fire. But it was very close to the neighbors house. The fire dept came as I was knocking and my neighbors were so thankful that I had awaken them. The firemen got it out and stayed until about 3:00 am.

Kelly got out her camera and started taking pictures of the fire. If you look very closely you can see my husband in our backyard looking at the fire. He is at the very bottom of the fire. Pretty cool pictures!!!!


Thank God it was not our house! And thank God that it had rained that day. It had been very dry for the past several weeks and it would have spread horribly had it not been so wet. . We all had a time calming down enough to sleep that night…But we did.