Fun filled day at the DMV/Emmissions test center/County Clerks office

So, after living here for two years, I'm finally officially a Tennessean. My Alabama license expires tomorrow and if I didn't get it renewed before it expired, I'd have to take a stupid driving test. I just didn't want to go through that hassle. So, yesterday, Jonah and I took a 2.5 hour field trip to make the rounds at the nearest branches for a) getting the license changed over, b) getting an emissions test done to be able to go c) get the tag renewed for the Forester (which Chris got a ticket for the other day and blames it on me, but I hold firm to my defense that if he hadn't been speeding, he wouldn't have gotten either ticket).

I can't help but think while I'm at the DMV about every comedian who's ever made fun of either the personnel or the patrons at said establishments. I swear they go out and find the weirdest or most redneck or most ghetto people and pay them to hang around the DMV. Then they hire nothing but Patty and Selmas to grumpily take care of your essentials while rolling their eyes at every question (or every time a toddler throws the bendy straw he was chewing on at them). I swear, I felt like I had somehow done something wrong just by going there to get my license. Luckily from here on out I can just renew it online. Same goes for the car tags now, except you still have to go get the emissions test done. But the emissions test center on this side of town doesn't seem very busy. I had to wait all of about 2 minutes there for the car in front of me to finish up. Then the 5 minutes or so it takes them to do the test.

But anyway, we're all legal now and for it being way past his nap time, Jonah was extremely well behaved through it all. Sure, he was antsy, and in playing with my cell phone, figured out how to turn it on and made a fortunately unanswered call to our old landlord. But there were no outbursts of frustration that he couldn't run around. He even sat nicely on the floor in front of me to let me take the picture.

Three things crossed off this week's list. Yay!

Making great progress on the embroidery

I'm really happy with how the embroidery is coming along. I worked on it quite a bit yesterday, feeling drained after a day at the DMV/Emissions test center/County Clerks office to get my driver's license and license tags for the car all updated. I just didn't feel like cleaning and the house wasn't much of a mess anyway. I'm working in a 10" loop right now (I might move up to my 12" when I finish this section). On this 10" or so of trim, I've finished the squiggly line couching I was using to fill in the gaps between flowers, as seen in silver here. Yesterday, I managed to run a line of chain stitch along the top of the trim in a thicker thread (DMC silver Purl) and fill in the petals and blank sections in the center of the flowers with just regular DMC silver floss. I finished two and a half flowers before having to go to bed last night. All of this work is going much quicker than the couching was, so I'm likely to feel like I'm slowing down as I move on to the next section of trim. Today I hope to finish the flowers and run chain stitch on the bottom scalloped edge (one line on the very bottom and one line at the top of the lattice looking stuff). I'm not sure if I want to mess with trying to "sparkle up" the lattice looking stuff or not. I'll see how it looks once I have all this done. I'm not even really sure what I could do that wouldn't be too labor intensive. I keep thinking, "whatever I do on this 10" of trim, I have to do on the rest of the trim". I may just leave it.

As for beads, I've decided to leave the bugles out of it entirely. I'm going to put some iridescent sequins with silver lined iridescent seed beads in their centers along the bottom of the flowers (between the spoke looking things). I've got some iridescent clear glass teardrops that are the perfect size to put in each of the teardrop shapes at the top of the trim. I'm going to order some more of the pressed glass flowers I used on my wedding gown embroidery, but in clear AB for the center of each flower (kind of a flower within a flower) and put a silver lined iridescent seed bead in the center of each of those. I think that's all I'm going to do. I know I had more planned, but I don't want to overload it or overload myself with too much work. I'll take another picture of it when I finish all of the silver embroidery on this section (hopefully by the end of the day). Not sure I'll get to work on it over the weekend. My friend Steffany and her daughter are coming up from Huntsville for a visit this weekend and she's going to watch Jonah while we work on putting up about 70 feet of privacy fencing and a couple of gates.

I did get the office (my sewing room) cleaned up enough that I can get in there and work again. But since it's also our guest bedroom, again, I won't be working in there this weekend since Steff and Lilly will be sleeping in there.