Weekend Progress Report: October 2, 2011

The second three day weekend went as well as the first. It started on Friday with the discovery that the very noticeable and hard lump in my abdomen was merely a post-operative hernia and not a possibly cancerous tumor as I feared. A hernia may not be the best health issue to deal with but it is a lot less frightening than cancer. Since I will be working three 12 hour days in a row Monday through Wednesday, I did a lot more cooking and baking than stitching this weekend. I need to have plenty of leftovers for reheating throughout the early part of the week and I had some very ripe bananas that needed to be made up into a banana/walnut/chocolate chip cake. In baking the cake, I used a product called Stevia [a natural zero calorie sweetener made from a leafy green plant native to S. America] for the first time and I must say it performed well. A pot of red sauce using Italian sausages made with ground chicken was another experiment that turned out satisfactorily ... a healthier alternative to pork sausage and very nearly as tasty. And finally, a pot roast with a rich gravy made from low sodium beef stock, a white bordeaux and just barely carmelized onions.

And, since I am looking forward to a 4 day hiatus over the Columbus Day weekend, I expect I will catch up on all my stitching next weekend. Things do tend to even out. And, as to the stitching, I did manage to finish Aury's 2011 Quaker Heart and got a bit more done on the first block of Primitive Needle's Black'd Skie. I was a bit annoyed to note that I had failed to notice some irregularities in the chart for the top band: at three points the space between the diamond pattern was three stitches rather than two. I really do think designers should post a warning to unwary stitchers when they throw in the odd irregular repeat into a seemingly regular pattern. I am three stitches short on the width of the piece as a result but am not about to pull out all that stitching. I have carefully examined the rest of the chart and see no difficulty in carrying the shorter width down through the rest of the design. The blocks on the left will be one stitch less wide than charted and the blocks on the right will be two stitches less wide. It will not make an appreciable difference in the over-all mood or look of the piece. It just irks me that I didn't notice the irregular repeat in the first place. I will have to frog a bit of the stitching, the flower on the right of the first block, and move it one space to the right but that's better than frogging nearly the entire top band, the flower AND the right border of the first block.