A Tale of Two Months

Sometimes life keeps you so busy, you can catch yourself coming and going!  I am sorry that I have not been keeping up with the blog as I intended, but allow me to explain.  January is always a busy month.  I try to plan most of the classes I intend to offer for the year.  However, this January I became distracted.  A stray female Labrador retriever mixed dog wanders onto our place and decides to stay.  We already own a golden retriever, and were not interested in another dog. So we contacted the appropriate authorities.  They put advertisements in the local papers, and called people in the area to see if they were missing a dog.

Meanwhile, she is growing on us.  Our dog, Brady, adopted her.  She was great at playing catch, none of the other dogs we owned ever wanted to play that game.  We found ourselves falling in love with her.  

After she has been with us for about three weeks, one day she isn’t around as much.  My husband notices that she has been staying in the dog house.  We coax her out and discover that her right front leg has been injured.  Assuming that she has been hit by a car, we contact the vet. 

Once there we decide to go through with the x-rays to diagnose the problem.  Much to our dismay, she had been shot!  The bullet destroyed her leg joint, and it would have to be amputated.  We didn’t know what to do since she was a stray, and it was going to cost a lot to have the surgery.  So the clinic posted the story on their face book account, and the donations came pouring in to perform the surgery.

The next question was, would we be interested in adopting her if they performed the surgery. Placement of an adult dog is hard, and it is harder if they have special needs.  It didn’t take long for us to decide she is part of the family. So the next two weeks, I was nursing her back to health.  Giving her medicines and keeping an active dog quiet is not easy.

She healed very well and everything was going fine.  After much debate, our son named her Peggy.

Brady

Then our golden retriever, Brady, started going downhill.  My husband took him to the vet.  We found out he had diabetes and wouldn’t live long.  In fact he lasted only two more days.  It was a sad loss since he had been a member of our family since 2002.  

Peggy playing in the snow.

The month of February ended with a couple of big snow storms.  The last one leaving us without power for two days, so even though I had the time to write a post I couldn’t.  However, I wanted to share with you the thank you card I created for the donors to Peggy’s surgery. 

I used my digitizing software to import a photo.  Then I created some echo quilting lines, and the word, “Thanks”.  Finally, I traced around the photo so I could create a postcard in the embroidery hoop.  I transferred Peggy’s photo to fabric, this then became the face of the postcard.  I stitched them out with my embroidery machine.

Peggy's Thank You Postcards

Here is the results!