Oh that there were more hours in the day!

There's so much I want to get done, and there never seems to be enough time.  I guess lots of you may feel the same way.

I've started going through and sorting the boxes of photos I brought back from Orlando after my father died.  I'm making great strides but certainly still have a long way to go. I'm also going through old papers. 

Today I found a file with very old wedding announcements and invitations.  How much fun it was to read the announcements!  Years ago the announcements had so much detail. In particular,  I love reading the decscriptions of the wedding dresses and flowers.  One of the announcements I found today was dated December 4, 1901.  I wasn't sure who the bride was, but I suspected she was a relative because of the last name Justis, which is a family name on my mother's side of the family.  After a little digging on Ancestry.com, I discovered that the bride, Nannie Justis, was my grandmother's cousin. 

Hmm--I wonder what other treasures I'll find as I go through all the old papers and photos.

I've been making great progress on Hannah Lancaster (reproduced by The Porcupine Collection). 

Little Hannah was pretty regular when stitching her floral border.  But my goodness--when she got to her verse she was not consistent with the number of threads she skipped between the individual letters and words. This made it a bit challenging to stitch the verse and also to read it afterwards.  At first glance, the whole area appears to be just a jumbled mess of letters. Perhaps you can make out the verse (which is probably the one most often seen on old samplers).

 In the next photo you can see what I've stitched so far.  This is a pretty good-sized sampler.  I'm about at the halfway point.

Tonight I hope to start work on the very large house.  The thread colors look different than what is shown in the chart photograph, but I'm sure that in the end everything will work out okay.  (Keep your fingers crossed.)

My friend, Barbara, sent me this link to an article  in Antiques and the Arts Online about the recent Betty Ring needlework collection auction.  I found it very interesting to read a description of what was going on in the auction room.  From my computer, I could tell that most of the items were bought by just a couple of bidders.  However, all that I could see on my computer was the auctioneer.  I hope you'll find the article as interesting as I did.  I've printed off a copy and will put it in my catalog along with the sale price list.

Well, time to get back to sorting through photos and papers to see what new treasures I can find.