Dithering

I read a lot of blogs and it seems that many of the bloggers I read know exactly what they're going to stitch as soon as they complete a project.

There are those who work only on one project at a time, many of them huge designs that require a great deal of diligence to complete. And they complete them in an amazingly short amount of time and have planned what the next beautiful piece will be. It looks as though they have the linen ironed and on the scroll bars and the threads pulled and the chart at hand so the minute the last stitch is finished off on that project, they can pick up the new piece and start.

Then there are the people with rotation systems, who are so incredibly organized that they know which project will be stitched and in what order. It's simply a matter of setting down one project and picking up the next. And they, too, seem to know which project will be introduced into the rotation as soon as one is completed.

I don't do either of those things.

I dither.

Case in point:  I finished the Betsy Morgan casket pieces on Sunday afternoon. I had been focused because I really need to get it done. Basically I plopped my amply padded posterior in the wing chair on Friday evening and planted it there for the week-end, where it stayed until Sunday, aside from obvious biological imperatives. Dearly Beloved periodically brought food and drink, probably because he was hungry and thirsty and that was the only way he was going to be fed.

Once the piece was finished, the dithering started. There are at least umpty-leven projects within arm's reach of the wing chair. I have several Shining Needle projects to do, a couple of them not even started. I have two correspondence courses from EGA to stitch.  I have been longing to dive headlong back into the seventeenth century. I have a basket full of things that need to be finish-finished.

I must have picked up and put down four different projects before I decided to read a book.

Last night, the dithering continued. I worked a strand into the Remember Me piece.  I pulled Martha Edlin out of her pillowcase and did half a dozen stitches which I then unstitched since I did them in the wrong place.

Then I poked my head into the finishing basket. There is a piece that I abandoned awhile back because either I totally misunderstood the directions (quite likely) or because there was a step missing.  I had decided to set it aside until I could figure out how to fix the problem.  Apparently my subconscious has been working on it because I had figured out what to do, so I started to take apart what I had put together.

Unfortunately, I had done such a good job of putting it together wrong that taking it apart was going to result in a bigger mess than what I started out with.

So . . .I decided that I was going to put it back together as it was, even though it's probably wrong. It will still be usable. It just won't be perfect.

The perfectionistic first-born girl child part of me has been hogtied with heavy rope and shoved into the corner.  There is duct tape across her mouth so she can't fuss at me about this.

After that, I thought perhaps I could do the beading on an ornament so it could be put together. I finally managed to get the beading needle threaded. This took fifteen minutes of steady swearing. With the first bead, I managed to pull the beading needle off the thread.

I decided to read instead.

Am I working on anything tonight?

This book is REALLY good. I think I'll stick with it for awhile.