Sorry I haven’t posted in several days. I was off having an awesome weekend in Vegas with friends. We had an a.maz.ing time and even all came away winners on the gambling front to boot! We all won at least $100 or more. I was up $222 at one point, but ended up gambling a bit more and came home “only” $180 to the good. Given I usually break even or lose a bit, I’ll take it. 
We all arrived in Vegas pretty late on Wednesday night, so we pretty much just crashed at the hotel. Thursday marked the day the fun stuff began! To kick things off, Terri surprised me while we were still in our hotel room with an early birthday present since we won’t see each other next month for my real birthday. It’s the Chocolate Sampler design by Jean Lea who owns the Attic Needlework shop in Mesa, AZ.
We then headed downstairs to meet up with Annette and her mom, Pat. We grabbed some breakfast at one of the hotel restaurants (remind me sometime to tell y’all about the vegan shrimp cocktail! 
) and then headed out to Stitcher’s Paradise for some stash shopping!
Since I’m on a stash diet, I limited myself to only what I needed for the Chocolate Sampler. Ok, ok, I know I shouldn’t have even bought that, but it doesn’t really count since it’s for something I got as a birthday present, right? Annette also added to the birthday stash list by gifting me with the couple of charts on the left as well!
While we were at the shop, I saw an adorable finishing idea for a piece I have stitched! It’s the Lizzie Kate 2007 Special Edition Christmas piece. I’ve had it stitched for around four years, but I’ve never finished into anything. Well, they had that same piece on display at Stitcher’s Paradise finished as a chimney stand-up made using brick fabric. So, now my quest is on for some brick fabric so I can duplicate this idea. I wish I could’ve gotten a better photo, but the piece was on a shelf almost at the ceiling. Anyway, isn’t it just awesome?!
After the stash shopping fun, it was back to the hotel for some stitching time. Unfortunately for me, I realized I made a HORRIBLE error on my Celtic Christmas piece and had to do some massive frogging. In fact, frogging was about the only stitching time I had while we were in Vegas. At least I’m ready to start making some forward progress again. By the time it was all said and done, I had to frog about 580 stitches to get myself back on the right track. 
Ok, that’s about it for part one of my Vegas trip recap. I’ll post part two about the trip in the new few days. I’ll leave you all with this photo which I’m also using as my entry for this week’s PhotoHunt theme which is circular. Given I was in Vegas, it seemed only appropriate. This is the Wheel of Fortune slot machine which was definitely a favorite of our group this weekend! I think we all played on a WoF slot at least once over the course of our stay.
I know I’m several days behind in my 30 Day Blog Challenge. I’ll try to get caught up on those over the next couple of days, too.
Until next time …
) Doing this will be for just getting our bodies used to getting up earlier. The following week will be step 4 which means the 5:15am 
Yeah, I may or may not be a little bit excited about this. 
