OOPS!

I had planned to go to a meeting of the Piedmont Heritage Sampler Guild today.

I'm about 90 miles from the meeting place, but it's such a great group of people, several of whom are also involved in the Casket Class, that it's well worth the drive.   Baby Girl and I had decided that we'd have a girls' week-end the months the guild meets. I'd drive to her house (which is closer to the meeting place) on Friday night, we'd go to the meeting on Saturday, find something to entertain ourselves with on Saturday evenings, and I'd head home on Sunday morning.

Except this week-end, her best friend was going to be in town. So I had decided to go on my own from home.

I set the clock and went to bed at a fairly reasonable hour for a Friday night.  This morning, I woke up about fifteen minutes before the clock was supposed to go off.  I decided to go ahead and turn the clock off so it wouldn't wake Dearly Beloved up. Then I made the critical mistake. I decided to lie there for a few minutes before I sprang from bed.

The next time I looked at the clock, it was three hours later.

I do not believe that I could get up, get dressed, get fed, and drive 90 miles in twelve minutes so that I could arrive on time.

So I stayed home and stitched.

And finally, finally, the insides of the vines are all filled in.  The centers of each is worked in white silk so it may not look like there's something there, but there is. Now I get to do the fun stuff.

Slow and steady wins the race

Or gets the filling on Remember Me finally finished:

Of course, this reflects the limit of my ability to concentrate this week.

A little over a week ago, the Big Kid was involved in a traffic accident with a drunk driver, who not only hit him hard enough to spin him around but also had her ten-year-old child in the car with her. He is OK--or as he put it, both eyes are looking in the same direction and all his insides are still inside and in the correct places. He does start PT this week for his back and knees, and his car is totaled. However, he was alone in the car so Wife and The Flash were not injured.

I have to admit, I am still vibrating a little.

Thus proving that motherhood is indeed a terminal condition. You recover when you die.

Still pitiful

There will be no picture on this blog because there has been no significant progress made on any needlework since the last posting.

Instead of needlework, I spent a good chunk of the week-end digging in one corner of our junk . . . uh . . . storage room. It was originally going to be my sewing room but then it turned into a room where everything we didn't know what else to do with was put. My dead sewing machine is still on the other side of the room and getting to it has turned into a full-on obstacle course. As I am large and lovely and no longer capable of hippity-hopping over impediments, something had to be done. So I started at the corner closest to the door and I am happy to say that the back of my car is currently full of items that will be donated this week.

I have barely made a dent.

We have lived here for 20 years and, from the looks of things, we have never disposed of anything in all those 20 years.  As we have been talking about downsizing--or at least moving to something on one floor since neither of us has knees that need to go up and down stairs--it is time to spend some time determining if these treasures we've held onto are really treasures.

I just hope it doesn't take me 20 years to do it.

Pitiful, just pitiful

This is the only needlework I have to show for the last week and a half.  Pathetic . . .

First I was under the weather, then we had a minor family emergency which required an overnight trip, then I couldn't lay my hands on the instructions for the project I wanted to do--talk about a panic attack!--then by the time I found the directions, I had lost interest in working on the piece, and finally, work has been crazy since it's fast approaching the end of the quarter and I have quarterly reports to do.

So there has been little to no needlework going on.

Hopefully I'll be able to hurdle the majority of the work-related pile o' stuff tomorrow and can take a deep breath. Once I can take a deep breath, I can actually sit down and stitch instead of thinking about how much I would like to sit down and stitch.

Flurry of Finishes

After I finished Lady Jane's Garden and blogged about it, I still had finishing supplies strewn about and several more hours before bedtime. So I rooted around in the finishing basket and found several things that did not require a sewing machine to complete.

Just a couple more pinkeeps and a pin box . . .I think I have more pinkeeps than pins at this point. Like I said before, I do love my toys.

And it was a good thing I at least have this much to show, since I was struck by the Galloping Crud at 3 a.m. on Monday morning.  The terminally perky triage nurse at my doctor's said I probably had the infamous "Something Going Around," that as long as my temp didn't go above 102, I didn't need to come in, and my resistance was probably low because I had just fought off an infection a few weeks ago.

So I asked how to rebuild my resistance and she said to avoid small germy children and big germy groups of people.

Anyway I have spent the last three days grumpily sipping ginger ale (when I could) and nibbling saltine crackers (when I could) and listlessly staring at the TV when I wasn't asleep under a pile of blankets. Dearly Beloved was most concerned because I didn't pick up a needle.

And this would have been a good week to pick up a needle!  The Christmas Ornament edition arrived from Just Cross Stitch.  The latest edition of Needlepoint Now appeared in the mail box.  The kits for Mary and Bess, the companions for Elizabeth, came from Gay Ann Rogers.  The latest Nibble kit came from Thistle Threads.  The first lessons for both Barbara Jackson's Tea Time Basket from Shining Needle and the bird thimble holder from The Essamplaire were posted.

I have finally returned to the land of the living--actually went to work today and managed to stay the whole day--with any luck I'll be able to stitch a bit before I go to bed.  Which won't be very long from now.

Lady Jane's Garden

Since this three-day cycle included a whole week-end, I thought perhaps I should do some finishing.  This project was taught by Jackie du Plessis through Shining Needle. The parts have been stitched for months.  Many months. Sooooooooo many months.

And everything fits into the Shaker basket.

As usual, I learned something while doing this:

• I love toys, especially stitching toys.
• I hate finishing.
• If I'm going to have toys, I have to put them together.
• I better get over my dislike of finishing.
• If I think I'm doing something wrong, stop.
• If I don't stop, at least don't do anything permanent.
• If I do something permanent, don't try to take it apart since it will make things worse.
• Accept the fact that it isn't going to be perfect and move on.
• My sewing machine is definitely dying.
• The more finishing I do, the better I'm getting at it, although I have a long way to go.
• I still hate finishing.

So that was the week-end. The one time I was out of the house was when I took four pairs of pants to the local dressmaker to hem. Ironic, huh.

the attention span of a gnat

I have the attention span of a gnat.  A hyperactive gnat, at that.

I started filling in one of the vines (?) on Martha Edlin.

It's not horrible to do, just a lot of reversible cross stitch. And I got restless. And I started thinking about how much I need to do on this sampler to finish it by the end of the year. And I got stressed about it--to the point I called Baby Girl and asked her to remind me that needlework is supposed to be fun.

Dearly Beloved asked me why I had to finish by the end of the year.

Well, actually, I don't.

Actually I never have to finish it if I don't want to.

This flies in the face of all that makes up a first born girl child who is responsible for the turning of the world on its axis.  That thought, though, was quite liberating.  I am not obligated to work on this!

(I do want to finish it. I don't want to make myself miserable doing it.)

Since I didn't really feel like stitching, I caught up on my blog reading, mainly because reading all these wonderful blogs on stitching usually inspires me to stitch.  On Anna's blog (Stitch Bitch), she was talking about working a sort of rotation, in which she works on one project for the first three days of the month, another one for the second three days, a third for the third three days, and so on and so on and so on.  That's a bit too much like a rotation for me. I have tried that and failed at it.

But there was something about the idea of three days.  And it occurred to me that any time I take a four-day class or workshop, the time goes something like this:

On the first day, I am rarin' to go, excited and interested.

On the second day, I'm settled in and really focused.

On the third day, my momentum is starting to slow.

On the fourth day, I'm done, through, finished, over it all and ready to go to something else.

So why not apply that to my own projects at home?

So here is what I'm going to try for the next few weeks.

I can work on anything I want to, but I have to commit three days to it. At the end of those three days, I go to something else for three days. After that, I can go back to the first project, I can go to something else, I can work on finishing, I can do anything.  If I complete a project, yay!  If I don't, I will eventually.

You have no idea how ridiculously happy this has made me.  In the grand scheme of things, this is of little import. I fully understand this. But my outlook on getting things done and setting goals and worrying about finishing something by an arbitrary date that I set for myself (what a nimrod thing to do!) has changed entirely.

And since needlework is supposed to be fun--Baby Girl has reminded me--this is making it fun again.

This is the current three-day project, a Merry Cox class from Christmas in Williamsburg last year. She's been calling for quite some time and I'm happy to start working on her again.