Weekend Progress Report: 8/26/12

During the past week, I spent a portion of  my lunch break [on those few days that I took a lunch break on the job] stitching on the Mystic Smalls Stitcher's Pocket.  But I didn't get any more work done on it over the weekend.  So, there's simply been no progress since the last photo. I must appear to be very distracted and inconsistent with all this switching about from one project to another but the Woodland Angel and the English Band Sampler are not particularly portable projects what with  14" scroll frames, large cuts of fabric and clunky plastic floss boxes.  The TW project calls for a fairly modest [for her] 78 colors of DMC and the sampler calls for 23 and each project has its own floss box.  So these projects are definitely of the stitch-at-home variety, which leaves me casting about for something else to carry along in my stitching bag.  Things are likely to remain this way for quite a while since I don't anticipate finishing up either of these very large projects anytime soon which means my change of pace stitching will be done, for the most part, in small half hour increments at lunch time on workdays.  That is, until I feel a screaming need for variety and abandon my BAPs for a quick succession of small instant gratification projects that can be stitched up in a day or two.  I know my limitations and I suspect the Labor Day weekend will see the start of a Christmas ornament just so I can feel like I've gotten something "done".

And here are photos of the late week progress on The English Band Sampler.  This latest band is rather intricate with lots of quarter stitches and lots of back stitching.  And there is even some satin stitching on this string of pearls motif, to tie it visually to the previous band.  Like the previous band, it is dominated by stylized floral motifs.  The colors are beautiful: I have always liked the DMC run of corals from 349-353.  Once this band is done it will be one of the most densely stitched bands thus far.  But Part III is even more densely stitched, making this particular sampler a little bottom-heavy.

And, as I noted on Thursday's post, I had planned to alternate between the Woodland Angel and the band sampler during the later part of the week.  But that plan went up in smoke when I realized I had misread the chart for the satin stitched vertical  string of pearls motif at the far left, leaving two full stitches out of every repeat.  Since this threw off the placement of the line of single cross-stitches as well, the result was a lot of frogging.  And I am only just caught up to where I had been before I realized my mistake.  But at least I caught the error before I had stitched the satin stitched motifs on the far right and in the center of this band.  I don't know why Part II is giving me so much trouble and aggravation.  Objectively speaking, it's no more difficult than Part I or the previous band of Part II.  So, why all the errors?  In any case, here is a photo of the TUSAL jar that's been fed with lots of fluffy bits of pale coral floss being eyed greedily by my recent amphibian visitors.