Bookmarks the Spot

My goodness, this has been a busy week. Since I committed to attempting to write 50,000 words as part of nanowrimo, my time has been completely taken up. I am a slow, slow writer. Sometimes it takes me all day long to reach my daily goal of 1650 words, the amount I will need to average if I’m to reach the 50,000 mark by midnight on November 30th. Yesterday was a bit of a bust.  My entire morning and early afternoon was taken up by the last minute decision to check out the Shuswap Needle Arts Guild. Of course, I came home in the mood to stitch, not to write, and I only managed 700 words. Argh. Well, it’s the spirit that counts, right? It’s all about balance.

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So to rid myself of the stitching urge, I made this sweet little bookmark after supper while we watched Man of Steel, which Mr. C brought home from the library yesterday.

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She is hand embroidered on tone-on-tone quilting cotton. I used heavy Pellon interfacing to give her some weight and backed her with this sweet 1930s repro print.

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The pattern is from Little Stitches by Aneela Hoey. I’ve had this wonderful book for an entire year. I got it for Christmas last year and this is the first project I’ve made form it.

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What’s keeping me away from the keyboard this morning?

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…a fresh loaf of sourdough artisian bread, fresh from the oven.

What are you procrastinating about today?

The first 300 words of WriMo 2014

Kat Russo turned west, leveled the wings and gave a final tweak to the trim before settling back in the left seat of the single-engine Piper Cherokee. It was a bit of a gutless wonder, she thought, but then she was only being paid to deliver it, not love it. And actually, she had to admit, it was a good trainer. Slow. Stable. A good airplane for its new owner, a guy in Winnipeg who had hired her to deliver it from where it was hangared in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The “guy” was a friend of her brother; a brand new private pilot with less than 100 hours in his log book. Yeah, she knew her brother was doing her a favour when he suggested his friend hire her to ferry the plane. She was grateful; she needed the money. More, she needed the reminder that she was capable of functioning in the real world again.

She’d been living with her big brother and his family in Winnipeg since she’d been decorated for bravery and then mustered out of the Canadian Forces a year ago. The brass said the back injury she’d sustained in Afghanistan had left her unfit for duty, but she knew it was really because of the PTSD she’d been diagnosed with. It wasn’t easy, living in her brother and sister-in-law’s basement suite in the West End, trying to pretend everything was hunky dory when what she really wanted to do was scream at her little nieces’ thumping footsteps on the ceiling above her room. At night she would lie on her bed and listen to the voices of her brother, Mario, and his wife Cecily rising and falling in soft rhythm above her. It lulled and infuriated her in turns. She knew they were concerned for her, and she hated it. She hated being a burden to them. She hated their solicitude, their kindness and their watchfulness. Most of all she hated herself for hating them.

My WriMo work space

Starting tomorrow, I hope to be spending a lot of time here:

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Yes, this is where my sewing machine usually sits. It’s been temporarily displaced…

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And here’s the overlord ready to keep me on track for the month:

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She has her work cut out for her, but she looks up for the challenge!

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WriMo here we come!

Getting ready for NaNoWriMo

Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to write a novel (or 50,000 words of a novel) during the month of November. That’s about 1800 words each day. When I retired at the end of last November, one of the things I looked forward to doing was to spend time writing. I haven’t. Written, that is (unless you count blog posts, which I really don’t.)

Now, I’ve been visiting a friend in Ottawa for the last two weeks, so haven’t been able to do much in the way of preparation. In fact, I’m dashing off this little post while waiting to board my flight home! Anyway, according to the NaNoWriMo calendar, today is the day to publicly state your intention.

I am going to give this my best shot. I’m going to put my head down and see what happens. Good or ugly. Maybe no one will read it but me, and that’s okay.

If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo too, you can find me on their site under the name nitadances. Hope to see ya there!

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