Thursday, April 1, 2010

Ohhh, Those Pansy Petals!

NEW TRIVIA QUESTION IS BELOW!

I’ve been doing spring cleaning so I haven’t made much progress on the Pansy Candle mat.100_3658 I do have one pansy stitched on, only 7 more to go..

The actual stitching isn’t really all that difficult … easy actually.

The most time consuming task of the whole thing is creating the individual pansy petals.

100_3661 All of the petals have to be individually cut … and let me just say right here … I stole the pattern for my pansy from a real live pansy, so God gets the design credit for my pansies. I certainly want to give the proper credit to the original pattern designer.

I took a real pansy and pulled the petals apart, laid them out on a piece of paper and then traced around each petal.

Ok, so the time consuming part of all of this is the cutting and hand-dyeing of all those yellow petals. It’s a long, many stepped, process to get the special purple shading on each petal.

That’s why I limit myself to only a certain number of pansies that I make each year. I make them until I get sick of seeing those petals. Once I stop enjoying them, I must stop until the next year.

So, let me remind y’all that I’m making this pansy candle mat to giveaway in honor of my one year blog anniversary.

Every time I post, until the pansy candle mat is finished and ready to offer for the giveaway, I will ask a trivia question which relates to something that I’ve said in my blog over the past year. I will give the winner of each trivia question an extra chance entry for the actual giveaway.

Congratulations to Michelle, of Rocking Chair Stitches, for being the first one to answer the last trivia question correctly. She wins one extra entry for the giveaway which will be offered next week sometime.

The correct answer …. my daughter’s names are Jen and Rachel.

The NEXT trivia question will be much more difficult.

I’ve only mentioned this little bit of info one time (I think) in my blog so it’s unlikely that many people will remember this …

TRIVIA QUESTION: What does my daughter Jen do for a living?

(Casserole Carol, it’s cheating if you answer this and expect to get an extra entry so don’t even think about it)

The first one to answer correctly gets one extra entry into the next giveaway.

FED EX

I have never ever used Fed Ex for mailing, so when it was necessary to mail a package using a Fed Ex postage paid label, I had to go look on their website to find out where to take it for drop off. Oh good, there’s lots of Self-Service drop off boxes!

Ya know those cute Fed Ex mail boxes you see outside of businesses? Since I’ve never done this before I just assumed that I could affix the mailing label and drop my box into one of those Fed Ex mailboxes. So that’s what I did. Unfortunately, I didn’t do the right thing.

Apparently, those self-service mail boxes are only for Fed Ex Express packages. Since I was mailing a Fed Ex Ground package, the Fed Ex Express mail carrier, was confused. He didn’t know what to do when he saw my GROUND package mixed in with his EXPRESS packages.

I’m not sure what happened to my package after that but I do know that it sat lonesome and unwanted, somewhere, until almost 2 days later, I looked up the tracking number to see if the package was delivered yet.

My horror to discover that the tracking number revealed that it wasn’t picked up yet, resulted in me calling the Fed Ex phone number to find out what the heck had happened.

Eric, the Fed Ex phone answerer, informed me that it’s ok, lots of stupid people drop their ground packages in the express package mailboxes. He’ll put a trace on it and try to find the missing package. and then they’ll send it back to ME so that I can mail it back out the proper way.

Gosh, it’s not like I put a UPS package in there! I don’t know why the Express Package mail carrier couldn’t have given my Ground package to the Ground mail package mail carrier when he got back to his station. Apparently the ground and express carriers don’t mingle? I dunno.

But about 5 hours later, I got the phone call telling me that they did find the package. They graciously offered to mail it out by ground carrier for me instead of sending it back to me!

haha … ok, so lesson learned here.

DO NOT USE THOSE CONVIENENT SELF-SERVICE DROP OFF BOXES FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN EXPRESS PACKAGES because you will kill mail carrier brain cells when they see your ground package.

My brother used to be a Fed Ex mail carrier …. when he comes over on Sunday for Easter dinner, I will be sure to find out how many brain cells he’s lost over the years while working for FeD Ex.

I’m outta here … lots more spring cleaning to do!

Happy Day Everyone!

9 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't know that I've ever read what Jen does...other then she is mommy to Kaiden. I guess I haven't been reading long enough!

Anonymous said...

I know!!! Only I'm not allowed to tell, sicne my entry won't get me anything. Cathy, you know me too well. I really thought I could win this one.

Casserole Carol
see ya Sunday.

Anonymous said...

Hi Cathy,
I read your blogs everyday and you are so funny and talented all in one! I thought Jen was a school teacher. Love your work!
Lisa

Simone de Klerk said...

Just like Cara, I don't think I have been reading your blog long enough either. I love the flowers you are making. In Dutch they are called viooltjes (small violins) and in German Veilchen.

appleberrycottage said...

Jen is a ESL teacher. (I was able to find it in older listings)

I haven't tried shipping Fed Ex, but will remember not to put it in the box. Our post office is close, so it's easy to do USPS. For UPS, there is a storefront that's close by, too. If you ship USPS, you can order free Priority Mail boxes online and delivered for free to your house!
Laura

Anonymous said...

I always thought this was a good idea for a giveaway then you know that your loyal following are entering. :-)

Mary on Lake Pulaski said...

Tracing a real pansy petal and then hand dying each individual petal!! Wow Cathy - no wonder this mat is so amazing!

Brenda said...

HMMMM...belly dancer? LOL!

West Side of Straight said...

Oh, it's going to be so pretty.