Weekend Progress Report: January 22, 2012

As Hermit and Stitching Weekend continued, I worked diligently on my current monthly goals.

Crazy Class Project Challenge: The Sweetheart Tree's Holly and Hearts Sampler. Aside from finishing up the brick stitch row, I have stalled on this piece. I need to get the motivation to really examine that last row of tracery below the heart to see where I made my mistake and then frog and re-stitch. While my cold was at its worst, I didn't have the concentration to do so. And, now that I am back to stitching on Tracery Dragons after a three month hiatus, that's all I want to stitch. Maybe this week, after the novelty of the dragon wears off, I'll finish the sampler. I am so close to a finish and it would be fantastic to have two finishes this month!

2010-2011 WIPs List: Finished The Workbasket's Quaker Sampler on Saturday 1/21. I turned it into an anniversary sampler by putting Bill's and my initials in the medallions flanking the heart, in which I stitched the year of our marriage. No sooner did I put that down, then I promptly resumed work on Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons. I appear to have recovered my enthusiasm for the piece and have made a fair amount of progress. But then I have been working on areas that are comprised mostly of the trellis and the leaves, each of which only have 5-6 color changes and work up pretty quickly. Unlike the roses and the dragon, which have many more color changes, lots of confetti placement and a nightmare of fractional stitching. The stems and branches are also slow going because they are so irregular and require such careful counting even though most only have 3-4 color changes. When last seen, the dragon looked like this, with pages two and three of the chart stitched and backstitched. And now that I have gotten a fair start on the stitching of page one, it looks like this.

And, I'd also like to announce the winner of the two fried egg buttons: Mary Ann, #10 in the CAY SAL. Only 7 members of the SAL had signed on for the contest at the time I printed out the entries on Friday morning [one day later than planned]. And I chose the winner by writing the seven numbers on a sheet of paper, closing my eyes, and jabbing the paper with my finger. Not particularly scientific but I am sure Mary Ann doesn't mind.