Royal Wedding

We – me, Elizabeth, Tanya, and Ellen – had an early-morning tea party Saturday.  We got up at four-thirty am (!), and turned on our commercial-free public television channel to watch the wedding of Prince Harry and Rachel Meghan Markle.  We dressed up for it, including hats   We ate crumpets, which turned out to be amazingly like pancakes, and Scotch eggs, and drank good black English tea.  What a beautiful ceremony!  The English are brilliant at ceremony, especially Church of England services.  The final blessing was the one given at my Episcopal wedding.  “Let their love for one another be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads.”  Beautiful.

Traveling

When you read this I will be in Miami, probably with an umbrella, but if the weather reports are wrong and the sun is out, I’ll be on a glass bottom boat off of Key Largo.

I am trying to come up with some blurbs for the next two crochet mysteries. I always have a hard time coming up with a motive for killing someone and an interesting way of doing it. It’s particularly hard when I like the character who has to die. One of my editors talked me out of killing one of my characters in the Yarn Retreat series because she liked her too much.

I have had several eureka moments when I thought I had it, but then the plan fell apart. And I know that trying too hard to come up with something is the kiss of death.

So maybe I’ll put it on the back burner for now and maybe as I’m hunkered under that umbrella or looking at fish swim by on the glass bottom boat, the perfect plot will appear in my mind.

In the meantime I have pushing ahead with Inherit the Wool. I had another one of those moments when a character took over and did something unexpected. And of course it made perfect sense.

This will be my first time in Miami, beyond my stop once in the Miami airport on the way to Writer’s Police Academy when it was in Greensboro, North Carolina. I ended up with window seats on the flight to Miami and the small plane to Greensboro. I remember being excited at looking down at the Gulf of Mexico and seeing a ship and then when I flew up to Greensboro, looking down on all the green and imagining swamps and alligators.

My seat of choice now is an exit row on the aisle. When nature calls, I don’t like having to climb over a stranger who invariably gives me a dirty look. I have a travelers number so I get through security without having to pull out my computer or take off my shoes. I have a computer bag that fits under the seat, so no fussing for overhead space.

Flying is not what it once was. I remember when people got dressed up and passengers were treated like guests. It was a different world.

Next week I’ll have pictures of rain drops or fish.

Cricut Easy Press

I've been wanting to make shirts for my family to wear to Disney World in December and have been putting it off because of how difficult/time consuming it was to use HTV (heat vinyl transfer) to add names to Santa bags. It took a few hours to adhere the HTV to the canvas bags. And to generate enough heat with the iron, I had to put a metal cookie sheet under the bag where the name was placed and use the floor as an ironing board wasn't firm enough. The bags came out nice, but it wasn't a fun crafting time. I was not looking forward to having to do this process for sixteen shirts times two for our trip.  (I had planned for two days of matching...now I might make more.)

For my birthday, my husband got me the Cricut Easy Press and this weekend I played with it. I like how easy it is to adjust the temperature for each project and loved the tip sheet it came with the temperature and amount of time for each project, though I found I needed a few seconds more for the projects. The auto shut off feature is another huge plus. No fear of accidentally leaving it on all night. Because of how large the heat plate is, I'm able to heat up a large portion of the t-shirt design at one time, allowing me to finish each project quicker. I also bought the Easy Press mat (it's a thin pillow-like mat that gives a smooth surface for using the press) to protect the surface I was using to press the iron-ons.

 I love the Easy Press! It has made ironing HTV so much easier. I even used the HTV on a cotton canvas to make a print for my daughter. I completed a few shirts on Saturday and then had intended to scrapbook on Sunday, but couldn't resist the Easy Press's pull and did a few HTV projects also. Now, I'm struggling to get my work done today as it's once again calling me to come play.

Here are a few of the projects I completed this weekend:

And More

Okay, I'm still at it--doing lots of things relating to my quickly upcoming deadline, plus promoting Pick and Chews, the fourth book in my Barkery & Biscuits mystery series, that just came out.

So once again, I'm just saying hi and bye here.  Hopefully I'll have more to talk about soon--and more time to talk about it.

And again, wish me luck!