Crawling out from under my rock. . .

Wow, where have I been?  Not here, sharing my thoughts on my blog. . .  Work and personal life has been kinda bumpy.  So I haven't been doing the things I love very often.  Like knitting.  (I'll wait right here while you pick yourself back up off the floor)  So, no.  No knitting in the past four months or so.  I also haven't bought any yarn or patterns or needles.  Creatively speaking, I haven't purchased craft supplies in a very long time.  At least it feels like a long time.  So what have I been doing?  Well, last summer my Grandmother moved into a small apartment.  Which meant that a lot of her belongings had to go.  Along with some very pretty glass knickknacks, I inherited her cross stitch DMC floss.  My mother-in-law gave me most of her collection a few years back and I already had a lot of my own.  So I started sorting though them this past February, mixing Grandma's into my collection.  It got me thinking about how I don't really cross stitch very often, so why was I going through the trouble of keeping it?  Why spend so much time when I may never ever use it?  At this point I had already set aside my knitting.  So I went through my cross stitch stuff and found a project I'd started but hadn't come close to finishing.  So that's what I've been working on:

When I pulled this project out, it was just the pointe shoes.  So, from February until early May, I did the roses and leaves and some back stitching.  It's only about 45% done.  Here is what it should look like when it's all done, sorry for the blurry picture:

I originally started this because I wanted to decorate my bathroom with a ballet theme.  Light pinks, black, grey, and chrome.   Since my husband and I still rent, it's not really in my best interest to go out and spend money decorating our house the way I want my dream home to look.  But that doesn't mean that I can prepare for it now.  So ballet inspired cross stitch it is.