My baby went back to school today. And she's not really my baby any more */sigh/*.

And today is the last day of my vacation */even bigger sigh/*. This was my stay-at-home-and-relax vacation. We didn't do much -- spent a day at the beach and another school shopping and a movie. We also went down to the ocean on Friday. I've always wanted to watch a hurricane blow in, or in this case by, so I decided to brave the holiday traffic. It was pretty cool and I wish now that I'd taken the camera. I also wish I'd forced Randi to wear shorts. We got caught in a bad spot when a big wave rolled all the way up into the dunes and she ended up with extremely wet jeans. The bottom of my shorts got a soaking as well, but that was much easier to shrug off. So I succumbed to her pleading and we got off the beach.

And now for the cross stitch updates. First is Calling the Crows. I absolutely love this image and wish the design wasn't so huge! All I have to show at this point is three wing tips. I really like how the background is looking so far though, the colors are blended together so nicely.

Next is Celestial Dragon. I completed the bottom left corner. The knotwork looks lovely, but it surely is a pain to stitch!

Then I worked on Cirque des Cercles. And completed the bottom right corner. Just the bottom row of circles to go!













And finally, I started Curl Up With a Good Book. I tried out a new technique with this one and stitched by columns. I don't know if I'll keep with it, though. I think I may have gotten more done than usual -- 5 columns of 98 stitches each (4900) in 4 days plus about 3 hours. And I like having a larger chunk of the image done, rather than narrow bands. On the down side, I lean toward carrying threads and this way may not be as conducive to that. I carried some pretty far! Also I was working from four separate pages since I need to have it blown up. Since I work with my chart to the right of my stitching, I'm going to run out of room for all those pages pretty quickly.