Further Progress

I was just paging back through the blog to see when was the last time I stitched on any thing other than the stocking.  It was August 18th, on Stitch Bitch's challenge piece featuring the Plum Street Sampler free chart, Be True.  Considering my usual affliction of stitcher's ADD, working on one piece and only one piece for  a little over a month is truly astounding.

The result is evident in the progress I have made.  I have only a bit left to do and I shall have finished Section 5.  With my usual three day weekend starting up, I anticipate getting a nice jump toward completing the pictorial part of Section 2.  I plan on leaving the Celtic knot work and the over-one lettering of the name in both Sections 1 and 2 till I have finished the angel and the background.  I didn't manage any stitching on Wednesday or Thursday not even during lunch hour minute.

This being the first week of classes, with the usual Parent Orientation and Meet the Catechist sessions, means the days have been pretty high energy.  I simply crash when I get home.  There are all the usual glitches: catechists who have had a change in work schedules and can no longer serve, replacements to be recruited, the usual few parents suddenly waking up to the fact that, "Gee, I really should register the children for religion class", even a catechist with a dreadful medical emergency in her family that will keep her in south Jersey for the foreseeable future and for whom I had to recruit a long term substitute.  But for the most part things are running smoothly.  Ninety percent of the volunteer staff showed up as expected, all the textbooks and resource materials were delivered on time, 96% of the expected enrollment is actually registered, we had no criers or clingers among our new first graders.  It's been a good week.  And the weeks that follow will all be so much easier.  So, to celebrate, I spent a good part of this morning on the stocking, filling in a bit more of the chest and sleeve of the angel's robes.  Again, the first photo is a when last seen photo and the second is current.

Apropos of the recent post of Autumn finishes: I hadn't realized just how very much I gravitate towards Autumn and Halloween and Thanksgiving projects.  For the heck of it, I went back and counted the photos on those three gallery posts and it came to a total of 67 projects.  And that's only as many projects as I  have bothered to photograph.  There are probably a dozen or more similarly themed pieces gifted to my daughter and a few more gifted to my grandchildren that were never recorded in my digital photo albums.  I am almost afraid to browse through my stash to see just how many Fall, Halloween and Thanksgiving charts are yet to be stitched.  I could very well end up in three digits.  Perhaps it is a good thing that I have embarked on the project of making a stocking for each of my three grandchildren.  It will give me a bit of variety in my stitchery.  Though it is true that when my own children were younger I stitched an awful lot of Christmas stuff.  I guess I do tend to get hung up on themes.  A quick mental inventory of my stash shows me I still have many dragon charts, Quaker charts and sampler charts awaiting stitching.  So, I see many a dragon, an acorn, an alphabet and a Quake motif in my future interspersed with witches and cauldrons and such like stuff.