A week in review...

My goodness, where does the time go?  Is it really mid-February already?

Besides working on the directions for a couple of new With My Needle projects, I have been stitching up a storm on Hannah Lancaster from The Porcupine Collection.  Here are two photos of my progress so far.  Yippee!! This week I finished that large house!  It seemed to go on forever, especially the roof.

Some folks ask how I get so much stitching done. (It's not that I'm a fast stitcher.)  I typically wake up in the morning  several hours before my husband, and that is when I get a fair amount of stitching done.  We recently signed up for NetFlix streaming service, and boy is that wonderful company while I stitch!

This week I watched Sense and Sensibility and the  first season of Downton Abbey (only 7 episodes).  I'm now hooked on the series and will watch this years season next week since I have taped all of them.  After that I have in my queue Mrs. Brown, the story of the grief-stricken Queen Victoria following Prince Albert's death.  Hmm--am I on a British drama roll?

Yesterday I picked up Ann Rayner (from Threads Through Time) from my framer, Carol.  Doesn't Carol do a beautiful job?  Several of you have commented in the past about how good she is at getting those side borders so straight.  When one frames things so closely like I have her do, it would really be obvious if those side borders weren't perfectly straight.

I really feel like I've accomplished a lot this week. In addition to my stitching, I've been continuing to go through old papers and photographs that I brought back from Florida after my father's death.  (I've been able to sort through and organize about 2/3s of the photos.) 

I've also enjoyed reading old wills and letters, including letters my grandmother wrote my grandfather before they were married and letters her friends wrote her when her father died.  Then there was the cutest letter that my mother at age 8 wrote to her father when he was away on a business trip.  Mother wrote that her mother had pulled out one of her baby teeth, and Mother thought it would never stop bleeding.  Then she wrote about how she was playing school with her sister (who was a year younger).  Mother gave her sister a list of spelling words, but my aunt got "0" right.  Mother signed the letter, "Your little girl, Carolyn".  The other wonderful thing about the letter is that I have a photo of my mother when she was 8 years old.  Perhaps I should frame the two together.

I've also been reading old newspaper clippings.  One of the interesting ones I read this week was about the christening of the destroyer the USS Watts in December, 1943.  The ship was named after one of my grandfather's relatives, Captain John Watts, who was a merchant captain in the late 1700's of the Planter.

Also, one of my cousins recently sent me a cookbook from the Methodist Church in Wattsville, Virginia.  She told me she bought it for me not for the recipes but for the family history at the beginning.  Another ancestor, David Watts, was minster at the church in the early 1800's, and a window in the present church is dedicated to him.  The first known Methodists in the area were two circuit riders who took refuge in David Watts' home in 1795.  His home later became a regular preaching place for traveling Methodist ministers.  In 1811, David was licensed to preach, and in 1830 a new denomination was formed, the Methodist Protestant Church.  Under David's leadership, the Wattsville congregation became the first Methodist Protestant Church on Virginia's Eastern Shore.  The next time we're in the area my cousin and I are going to visit the church and some cemeteries with family graves.

Looking at the old photos and reading so many interesting things has made me even more interested in learning more about my family history. I've been having a lot of fun filling in some of the gaps in the information I have, but there is a lot more to learn.  I sometimes feel like I'm on a scavenger hunt as I piece together bits and pieces of information.