Monogamy

 I must believe in monogamy. After all, I've been married to Dearly Beloved to almost 45 years. When I retire June 1 (but who's counting?) I will have taken pay checks from the same company for almost 21 years. I've lived in the same place for 30 years.

But I have never been monogamous in my needlework. I zip from one project to another like a hyperactive bumblebee. This may account for the huge number of UFO's and all the projects waiting to be finish-finished.

Until recently. The last three projects I've worked on, I've stuck to.

I think it's all Baby Girl's fault. When she invited me to stitch Emie's Etui with her, I was in. Then we worked on the Needle Woman's Work Tray at the same time. And now I'm working on another Betsy Morgan project because she's working on a Betsy Morgan project that I have already done.

This is what I've done on the Etui since I wrote last:

One side:

Another side:

And the top:

I have seriously thought about doing spiral trellis inside the berries around the top of the lid. I'm trying to take deep breaths and get over that thought.

Now I do have to admit that I was slightly distracted from stitching this week. I was in the middle of the latest John Sandford Prey book and things were starting to happen fast. I could either trade my stitching time for reading time, or I would be up until 3 a.m. on a school night--er, work night--finishing the book. So I read instead of stitching.

And I originally planned to do some finish-finishing today, to the point I pulled out the project I was planning to do and read over the assembly directions.

But apparently monogamy is winning, I'm going to work on another side for the Etui.

invisible?

 I'm almost through with the bottom of the Christmas Etui.

If you look very, very closely, you can see white cross stitches that represent the berries on the mistletoe. Under artificial light, they almost disappear.

I thought about that as I was stitching them. I started thinking about working with double strands, which would likely distort the linen a bit. Then I thought about Smyrna crosses. Not only would that give more thread that would intensify the color, it would also provide texture and slightly raise the stitches about the surface.

Luckily, I had a head-slap moment before I did that. This is the bottom of the etui. I don't necessarily want it raised. In fact, I want it to sit flat.

So no Smyrna crosses.

And I kept myself from having to rip out! Win-win!

And it's done!

 Well, after doing it wrong, I did it right.

I think it turned out pretty well, despite having to rip and re-do because I can't read directions at times.

Tonight I had planned to work on Betsy Morgan's Christmas Spirit Etui. There's not much to see so far, so I'm not dragging out the camera again until there is something interesting to look at.

The only problem is that I have the CS Harris St Cyr mystery and the new John Sandford Prey thriller and I'm in the midst of re-reading James Herriot's All Creatures Great & Small series. With that stack of books competing with stitching, I'm not sure what I'll end up doing tonight.

Nice problem to have . . . 

not making any plans, nope, not me

 I had some plans for this year.

For one thing, I wanted to blog more. When I'm blogging, I tend to stitch more than I do when I'm not writing about it. 

So February was Embroidery Month--and I didn't blog more.

And March was Craft Month--and I didn't blog more.

And April doesn't have a relationship to embroidery or craft, but it is the month when things really seem to start budding and blooming, so it would be a good time to get my blog going more than once a week.

But I need to stitch to blog.

Monday, I started stitching and made a major counting error, so there was nothing to see.

Tuesday, I decided to start on the insides of the piece I was stitching and work the outline from that point outward. Then I decided I would need to have three needles threaded so I could easily move from one area to the next. And that's when I decided, after the day I'd had at work, trying to keep three needles untangled was more than my little pointy head or fumbling fingers could handle.

Wednesday, I just sat in my corner and brooded.

So on Thursday, I decided I wanted to work on something different and entirely new since I have not started a new, pristine project in 2021. This meant my evening was spent stash diving, and I came up with Betsy Morgan's Christmas Etui. 

So on Friday, I found a scroll frame and spent the evening sewing the linen to the bars. (When I win the lottery, I am going to hire people to sew linen to scroll bars and attach linen to slate frames and tack canvases to stretcher bars.) There is no stitching to see, just linen on scroll bars.

And that brings me to the week-end. I had already decided it was going to be a finishing week-end, and I wanted to put Jackie's Needle Woman's Work Tray together.

Yesterday, I managed to sew the needle packet together:

And then I started on the tray itself, and misread the directions, so much of what I did last evening, I will need to remove today.

I am not making plans for stitching or blogging this week.

Happy Easter!

 It is a beautiful day, despite the usual Easter cold snap, and there are things starting to bud and bloom.

I didn't have anything that was exactly Easter-ish to show, but then I looked at the current project. It definitely has spring-like colors.

I'm still working on the Needlewoman's Work Tray, and I may just get the stitching done today. You would think, with a three-day week-end, I'd have more to show, but I had company coming.

Baby Girl was our honored guest yesterday, so there was cooking and feasting to plan. Plus, she was bringing me my new phone (she is my tech expert, and we're on the same phone plan, so the phones were delivered to her and she got to figure them out so she could explain the differences between my old phone and the new one to me).

And the kit I had ordered for her from Inspirations came so she wanted to pick it up. It's the Virgin Queen etui that Betsy Morgan designed. I took the class from Betsy awhile back, and mine is stitched and assembled.

Speaking of Betsy Morgan, her new book is available for pre-order from Inspirations. Baby Girl and I viewed the contents on the Inspirations site, and she has four projects she wants to do, and I have three. This will give us even more projects for our Stitch-Alongs.

We have been having fun stitching projects together. Egging each other on really helps to get things done. We are going to digress for a bit, though. She wants to work on the Virgin Queen and I want to do the projects for Gardenesque, another Jackie class I took pre-Covid. And I want to get back to my finishing week-ends. As much as I don't love finishing, I do love having projects finished.

And then I have plans for the stitching I want to do when I retire--in two more months--I am not counting the days quite yet, but I'm getting close to that. All day to stitch in daylight, seven days a week, at the brightest time of the year. I can't wait!