Weekend Progress Report: Sept 3, 2012

Since this was a long weekend, Friday through Labor Day Monday, I thought I'd extend my usual pattern to include Monday's stitching in the report.  While I stitched intermittently during the weekend, what stitching time I did spend was in long stretches entirely devoted to Teresa Wentzler.

Progress as of last Thursday

Teresa Wentzler's Woodland Angel Christmas Stocking: I finished section 6 just in time to add it to my August Goals report and began work on section 9 [the turning of the heel] on Saturday. Although a relatively small section, it had lots of confetti in the snow: between the shadows, the dead grass poking through the snow and all the different shades of white that make up your average TW snowscape in the first place!  But by Sunday evening I got a start on Section 8.  Remember I started on the top right corner and am working my way down and to the right until I come up with an outline of the project so that I can trim the material most economically, hoping to get all three stockings for my grandchildren out of this one piece of linen.   I make better progress on a TW piece when I spend several days in a row stitching on it.  And this past week, I concentrated on TW from Wednesday straight through the holiday weekend.  As with any other TW project I have done, I really need to develop a rhythm  in order to pick up any speed. 

Progress as of Tuesday morning

Stopping and starting just doesn't work.  At this point, I may as well expand Wentzler Wednesday into Wentzler Week by sticking to this project through to tomorrow.  Just as runners get a runner's high, an endorphin rush when they are well and truly into their runs, I tend to get a stitcher's rush when I find my rhythm and things just seem to go smoothly and I am well into a project.  I appear to be in the zone with The Woodland Angel and may as well take advantage of the situation as long as it lasts.  It also doesn't hurt that I am currently working on the bottom of the angel's robe.  Unlike the wings and the snow, the robe has sweeps of color, sometimes as much as four stitches wide and nine or ten stitches long.  Much easier and quicker to count than the pointilistic pixels of color in the wings and snow.  I figure that by the coming Wednesday, I'll be back in the snowdrifts at the bottom of the stocking and I am sure I'll be ready to move on to another project in my rotation by Thursday

I should also report on some off-goal stitching I did while spending some not-so-quality time at the local DMV.  I had assumed I'd have my entire birth month [September] in which to deal with renewing my driver's license until my husband reminded me that, under the new rules, it actually expired on my birthday [today].  Hence, Friday was the last day I could renew my license and remain a legally licensed driver, what with the Labor Day holiday.  So I hustled on down to the DMV after work and whiled away the first hour of my wait stitching on The Primitive Needle's Thy Needle.  In spite of the poor lighting and an awkward seating arrangement, I managed to make reasonably decent progress until my WDW Bark floss knotted.  I had to put it aside at that point to await some time beneath my magnifying lamp.  I spent my second hour watching the "now being served" board scroll ever so slowly up from F853 to F880, while all the C and D numbers seemed to get priority.  Oddly, there were no E numbers.  You'd think with 16 service windows they could  have moved a little more quickly.  But the end of the month and the Friday before a major holiday combined to create quite a backlog of last minute fools like myself, so I was doomed.  There was a two hour wait to approach the window to conduct two minutes of business, start to finish.