Weekend Progress Report #5

I am going to try to post my weekend progress reports on Sunday nights [or, at least, no later than Monday morning] for the remainder of the year. January was an unsettled month what with all I was trying to accomplish but even so ... posting a "weekend" progress report on a Wednesday is somewhat ludicrous.

The Current Rotation:

Focus Project: Teresa Wentzler's Autumn Faerie. I'd like to say I have been flying on this one but that would be one big fat lie. In fact, pressures of work and personal errands have kept me from working on this piece nearly all week. I keep it on my stitching stand and can work on it only at home. I just haven't had much leisure time at home this week. It seems like this week I came home only to sleep and eat. Well, at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, I carried my stitching stand down to the living room and settled in for a few hours in front of the tube watching some Stargate episodes from my DVD collection. Bill and I are up to season eight. The first photo [left - rather dark because my only light source was my Ott light] shows the whole piece and the second photo [right] is a detail shot showing what progress I have made in the borders: all the outermost backstitching is done as well as the backstitching in the corners between the round and square borders and yet another "blended" stitch has been added to the small leaves in the square border ... leaves which will only look like leaves after some more backstitching is done. Once the leaves and remaining backstitching are done, I'll have to get back to the main design since all that will be left in the border is the beading ... which, of course, will have to wait till the very end. I know it doesn't look like very much but it actually represents four or five hours of work ... I know two-handed stitching is supposed to go faster but I am still mastering the skill and am definitely not "up to speed".

Travel Project: Heartstring's Noah's Ark Santa. I got a fair amount done on this during the last few days ... mainly because I had to spend five hours in the auto dealer's waiting room while I had scheduled maintenance that was supposed to take only two hours ... but they kept telling me it would take just "another 1/2 hour" once the first three hours were up. Apparently, they have a relatively small service area and the person just ahead of me who'd come in for a state inspection had a whole list of things wrong that had to be fixed before he could pass inspection. I guess I am not the only one who tends to overestimate how much I can accomplish in an hour!

Sewing Finishes: still none, sadly.

Since the Heartstring's Santa is moving along nicely, I'll need to pick another travel project very soon. I think I'll kill two birds with one stone and choose the Peacock Biscornu which is both a conveniently sized project for travel and a project from the UFO Countdown list. That way I shall be tackling my February goals in a systematic fashion.