Weekend Progress Report: August 14, 2011

I have been enjoying a visit from my son and his young family this past week and have been doing a bit of de-clutterring work on the someday craft room space as well. Eight of those very large black trash bags, filled mostly with VHS and audiocassette tapes, are out front awaiting curbside pick-up. So there hasn't been all that much stitching going on. Just completing the floral border on the Heartstrings Earth Day Make Do Sampler. In addition, I finished the stitching on my Pyn Keepe for the September HOE and just need to assemble it. I do have some plans to make some marbelized pearl headed pins with which to decorate it. I'll wait to show the piece once it has been fully assembled, sent and received.

And then startitis struck again. I have been carrying Sue Donnelly's Hear The Sea Call sampler around in my stitching bag since the recent Stitcher's Hideaway I attended [Sturbridge, July 2011]. Sue always includes a design of her own in the swag bags of her retreats, usually a small ornament or pin keep. But this time she really outdid herself. This original Donnelly piece is a lovely little sampler kit, complete with embellishments of small mother of pearl fish and tiny shells and bits of faux sea glass. She included a square of Babbling Brook Linen, a luscious Threadworx floss called Dreamscape [gotta buy a full skein of that little lovely!] and a sweet little nautical floss ring. The sampler is stitched primarily in satin stitch and shell eyelets with the poem stitched in longstitch and backstitch. So it is working up very quickly. I guess all these weeks of painstakingly slow work on Tracery Dragons is taking its toll. Hear The Sea Call is the second unplanned and undisciplined start in just a few days. I'll never make a one-project-at-a-time sort of stitcher: it seems I crave variety. And I'll never be a just-BAPs stitcher, either since I am addicted to the heady gratification of freqent finishes. So expect to see a few more small starts sneaking into the rotation over the next few weeks. I do have Aury's Quaker Heart 2011 and a PS promo card Summer House in reserve for when I need a bit more novelty again, no doubt sooner than later .