Happy Samhain! It is Samhain and so it is time for another pair of embroideries in the Wheel of The Year stitchalong. I am really happy with how these turned out. And I hadn’t actually planned for the smaller one to have a matching purple fabric! :-) If you want to stitch these patterns, join the stitchalong here. The small pattern is not available outside the stitchalong but you can buy the Thistles pattern on its own here. Those thistle flowers are just so fluffy! I love stitching them. :-) Here are all the embroideries in the stitchalong so far. When I started it I had a rough plan of what was going to be included and I am very happy with how it is progressing. I love stitching flowers. :-) https://www.carinascraftblog.com/2026/10/30/happy-samhain-4.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=happy-samhain-4 #samhain #happy #wheel #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Introducing: Marley Yesterday was two weeks shy of a full year since we said goodbye to Blake. It has been a tough year. I have missed Blake a lot (I still do.) Tony has too but it seems like it really hit me very hard. It took a long time before I could think about him without feeling like crying. And often I did cry. He was my buddy, a part of our family. The house felt empty for a long while. My darling Blake… Eventually I got used to it. Although whispers of Blake hung around for many months. In the last year of his life, and especially the last six months, his eyesight was very poor. So we would push the dining chairs to one side so it was easier for him to navigate his way under the table, through to the garden door. We kept doing that for months after he was no longer here. And speaking of the garden door; the bottom 30 centimetres is still covered in his nose marks. When Tony has cleaned the door, I have forbidden him to clean it off… But it was kind of nice to not have to worry about Blake. It was difficult to do anything away from home because the period where he could be left home alone became shorter and shorter. And you better believe that I felt guilty for being relieved of the mental load of worrying about him. Grief is complicated. We knew we wanted to get another dog at some point. Occasionally, we would check the Dogs Trust website. It kept feeling like it was too soon.. We thought we would adopt an older dog because they often take longer to find a new home. But then we saw Marley (or Mark as he was called then*.) I have mended those toys a couple of times already! We first saw him before we went to Denmark at the end of August but they wouldn’t start the process with us until we were back. I guess that’s understandable. We agreed that we wouldn’t check the website, to see if he had been reserved, until a couple of days before we were returning home. Reader, of course I checked multiple times a day! :-D And he wasn’t reserved so a couple of days after we came back from Denmark, we went to see if we could meet him. I think the reason he wasn’t reserved is that in the description it mentioned biting issues in the family that had previously adopted him. A failed adoption might put some people off. It has been a long process. Because of those biting incidents with the previous family, Dogs Trust wanted to make sure that we would be ok with him, and he with us. In a way that was good. We got to know him, and he got to know us, before he came to live with us. As I remember the process with Blake, it only took a couple of weeks and less than a handful of visits. That was quite the shock to the system! Wait, we just adopted a dog?! This is Marley’s chair now! The process with Marley was longer and more gradual. First a bunch of supervised visits at Dogs Trust, then more unsupervised visits. Then he came to visit us a couple of times. Finally, he came for an unsupervised visit here for a few hours, which turned into an overnight stay, which became a weekend stay, and then he never left. The first 2-3 days we were starting to doubt if he would be a good fit because he was very energetic and wanted to play all the time. Probably because he wasn’t used to having the undivided attention of humans for long periods of time. I had serious doubts about the whole project. But then one evening he wanted to snooze on my lap and, well, I couldn’t let him go after that! And he did calm down and we got into a routine. Just look at that face!! The biting issues with the other family was the humans’ fault, we suspect. Because we have seen nothing like that. He can be a bit ‘mouthy’ when he is feeling overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to process his feelings (he is still young, about 2.5 years old), but we just tell him to find a toy, which he does, and after a couple of minutes all is fine. We also think that maybe the children in the other family teased him, or at least didn’t respect his space, but of course we don’t know for sure. What we do know for sure is that he is a lovely boy. We were told that he needed a hands off approach and that he wasn’t a lap dog. So we were cautious about handling him to start with but it turns out that once he was away from the stressful environment at the kennels, he loves a fuss, he doesn’t mind being picked up, in fact sometimes he even asks to be picked up. Which is really, really lovely. It shows that he trusts us and he feels safe in his new forever home. Last visit at Dogs Trust. Yesterday we went to Dogs Trust with him one last time, for a final vet check, and for us to sign the adoption papers. I felt quite emotional as we left. Marley is not replacing Blake but he is filling the dog shaped hole in our lives. We are looking forward to adventures with Marley because, unlike Blake, he doesn’t hate being in the car. At first we will explore various parks nearby but we hope to do a longer road trip with him at some point. He would really like to get to Tony! *We changed his name because our neighbour is called Mark and we could foresee some confusion if we were in the garden calling out for Mark and human Mark thought we were talking to him. And Marley is cuter than Mark, IMHO. :-D https://www.carinascraftblog.com/2026/10/16/introducing-marley.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing-marley #blake #marley #dogstrust #because #denmark #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit