Week Four - January 28, 2016

The fourth in what looks like a long series of short and boring, repetitive weekly updates on my stitchery. 

I spent one stitchery night preparing the mess made two weeks ago when I had to forge a whole lot of stitches due to a count count miscount. The repair required the removal of a whole skein’s worth of additional stitches but now the back if fine and the outline is back on track.

So, to date, four of 6 pages of outline complete and more than half of a fifth:

WIPocalypse 2016 - January 24

This will be my fifth year participating in WIPocalypse; I find it useful in keeping me on point, as it were. There are a lot of activities, ranging from the mundane (household chores, for example) to the creative (I’ve taken a major interest in paper crafting add mixed media in the last year), often interrupted by the odd road trip (I don’t stitch well without magnification and decent light, none of which seem to be available where we spend out “holiday” times, and my Ott floor light is a little large to take along to compensate, so stitchery suffers in this times).

My projects this year are cross-stitch, with some crazy-quilt/bead journal projects from the past few years to “finish-finish”. There is a traveling needlepoint piece and a LOT of UFOs dating back to the 1990s!, some of which MIGHT (probably not) make my to-do list this year. My 2016 goal, however, s to get back on track in embroidery and FINISH something (last year was one of my worst completion records ever!)!

I have two BAPS “in progress” for 2016. The first is Elizabeth Almond’s “Save the Stitches’; blackwork sampler, which I haven’t touched since April of 2015. It has all the outlines done and a little more than half the filling stitches (13 blocks) done (except for beads — that will be last).

The second is Tracey Horner’s “Roll Your Own” series of nine mandalas.  seven of which were completed by the end of 2015:

Since January 1, I have made some progress on the outline for the eighth mandala (“Rematch”):

Here’s hoping I can actually motivate and finish at LEAST one of these pieces in time for entry in the county fair (deadline would be July) but given my rate of stitching on any one mandala (roughly four months average), I have my doubts. So… unless I really get on a roll and don’t meet up with the frog again, it looks like my goals are more realistic for 2017 goals, rather than 2016 goals. Still, I shall try!

Week Three, January 21. 2016

After all that progress last week, I backslid this week. There was quilt guild on Thursday night and another computer glitch (and long telephone conference with Apple Care: upgrades to the operating system aren’t agreeing with my laptop, for some reason) on Monday and just general mailaise the rest of the week… In all, I stitched only one day and made little progress: just a thin strip of outlines along the tops of page four of the pattern…

It's been snowing but, luckily, we seem to be either far to the north or far to the south of the major storm tracks. Just darned cold and slippery enough to make driving tenuous. And for some reason, no matter how warm the thermostat says the house is, I feel cold, too cold to take out the stitchery. All I want to do is sleep! Winter and dull skies do that to me...

I suppose I should pledge to do better in the coming week. I know that if I take it out of it's project bag, I WILL stitch on it, at least for a couple of hours. We shall see…

Week Two, January 14, 2015

Got a little sidetracked this week, and ended up spending an entire stitching session ripping out a massive mistake in the lower right corner (I really have issues with multiple pages sometimes, matching up pages with each other, and in this case, I was a whole ten stitches off! AAACL!). Anyway, I did manage to complete the top half of the outline, all of page 6 and a part of page five (until the ripping started…) in “Rematch” of the “Roll Your Own Mandala” series:

Quilt guild meets tonight so I won’t be able to clean up the back of this and get back to stitching until tomorrow…

But I am making progress!

Week One, January 7, 2016

I pushed myself but I did it --- got back into the groove and stitched every night on the outline for "Rematch", the eights in the series of mandalas in the "Roll Your Own" series by Tracy Horner. And I have finished on page (of six) in the pattern and nearly finished two more!

Since I am opting out of doing Crazy Quilt Journal Project and Bead Journal Project for this year, there we no other stitchery pieces competing for my time so I'm feeling pretty good about the completion time for "Rematch". I can't say the same for paper-crafting/mixed media but this is rarely an every-day thing and I never do that at night, and I always stitch at night - and try to make that every night - so theoretically, there is no overlap as far as the clock is concerned. Housework, on the other hand, does suffer) 

Let's see if I can keep it up!

2015 Round-up/Wrap-up and 2016 Goal-setting

I pretty much wrapped up the year in my WIPocalypse report for December , but I have made a little progress since. 

I feel like I am a broken record because, in December 2014  I said "Like in 2012, I'm not that happy with my completion rate for 2013". There was a list of fifteen completed projects and/or classes for 2013; and a list of eleven in 2014! Well, If I wasn't happy then,  I am miserable now because completed even less in 2015. I blame it on road trips, a protracted sinus infection which has caused headaches which coincide with ever weather front, a a rekindled interest in papercrafting , and (not so much) reading... All I managed to complete this year were 5 projects and no classes:

• 12 merged Crazy Quilt Journal/Bead Journal project blocks
• 3 small charity pieces for a friend’s EGA
• 1 quilt block for a sympathy quilt for the family of a a friend who passed away in
• one plastic canvas ornament for a swap
• three placemats for a quilt guild charity project
  

i am still a member of the local quilt guild and still their webmaster (and Yahoo Group administrator).

For accountabillity, I participated in WIPocalypse 2015 and International Hermit and Stitch Weekend 2015 as well as this blog.

Now for the negatives:

I hadn’t signed up for any new classes and the ones I signed up for and never finished in 2014 (finishing with Funk & Weber, a Seed Bead Botany class,  two Janet Perry classes - (one a stitch guide practicum and the other a background stitch notebook, and several Craftsy online classes for quilting) were barely touched.

I didn’t start TAST 2015 since it was basically a rerun of TAST 2011-12-13.

Long-standing UFOs from precious years weren't even taken out, let alone stitched on:

•     "Angel of Love" - started before we moved to England in 1992!
•     "Celestial Angel"  - started before we moved to England in 1992!
•     "Map of England and Wales" - started in Saudi, sometime around 2001
•     "Nature's Song" (excerpted from a larger chart) - started in Saudi sometime around 2001

to say nothing of an ancient crewel-work pillow (I'm sure the moths have done in the wool by now), all the top work on six or seven needlepoint pieces that all predate 1992, and 19 or so of piece-worked tops from quilting classes in Saudi...  And then there is my Round Robin piece from 2006 --- I still need to finish that off. (If the preceding words look familiar, they are almost verbatim my reports from 2013 AND 2014!)

There are still all the years of Janet Perry needlepoint exercises that require finish-finishing; and a Chinese coins quilt top still awaits its sandwiching, quilting and binding. In addition there are two crazy quilt wall hangings assembled but not sandwiched, quilted or bound and a third not yet assembled… and the three years of TAST samplers are still unbound…

Also stitched on, but unfinished in 2015 are two "true" WIPs and two travel pieces:

•     nine "Roll Your Own" mandalas from InkCircles (seven are complete, two have partial outlines and that leaves two to go!)
•     An Elizabeth Almond blackwork sampler SAL called "Save the Stitches" (issued in 24 installments, fill is completed in13 and outlines completed for 24 more...)
•     A small souvenir piece from a summer road trip called "Historic Biltmore" (which has become a travel piece)
• the border has most of a second color done on “Palm Tree Elegance” (a needlepoint which is my go-to travel piece
  

As for 2016…

Like in 2015, I hope to make 2016 a year of catching up and maybe even re-organizing my crafting space (which is currently a hot mess! - that’s right — no progress made there either). So my stitching goals are to finish what I call the "makeable WIPs": the "Roll Your Own" mandalas and the blackwork sampler; If I feel motivated,  Crazy Quilt Journal Project and Bead Journal Project will also take it's place in this list. I will limit my goals to these, and if anything else inserts itself into my schedule, I should have the time to work on it...

Week Fifty-Two, December 31, 2015 (and a day late)

A completion to celebrate the end of 2015! Well, part of one, anyway! I finished "Revenge":

and here is how the "Roll Your Own" Mandalas look today:

Other than that, Christmas day at brother-in-law's and then again on Sunday (for the other two in-law families who were in town for the day), lunch with the widow of one of husband's dear friends, and an eye-appointment on New Year's Eve (which is why I'm late with this check-in) took up my week. 

Not a great year for stitching (see next post) and I didn't come close to filling my goals for 2015. Still, it was an OK year as years go (not counting US presidential politics and world-wide terrorism, that is)...

As for 2016, I'm hoping for better, in stitching and in the world and wish you all a Happy, Healthy, Peaceful and Profitable New Year!