Time Flies

Time got away from me again.  DH got sick, the house flooded and needed repairs, and the car engine died as we were driving to the doctor’s office.  Needless to say, the last half of 2014 has been busy.

Somehow, in the middle of all this activity, I got back to stitching.  My last post was about stitching on the Tour de France poster while watching the race on TV.  I didn’t watch the race every day as planned, but I did make progress on the poster.  It was fun to stitch on something related to the race.  After this year’s race ended, I put that project away until next July.

In August, I finished my Torah Stitch by Stitch panel and mailed it in a couple of weeks past the deadline.   I decided not to embellish it with a border or additional designs, partly because I took too long to stitch it, and partly because I really liked the simplicity of the black letters on the white fabric.  I’d like to design an aleph-bet sampler someday, or maybe stitch something in Hebrew for myself.

The past few weeks have seen me working on two projects, both in blackwork and both related to my EGA chapter.  One is a sampler for our chapter’s 40^th Anniversary Challenge, and the other is a Group Correspondence Course that I took through the chapter.  The 40AC piece really is a challenge because I’m selecting the colors myself as I go along.  Deciding on where to place each color isn’t easy because I won’t know how they work together until I see them stitched.  It feels intimidating at times, but when I got stuck, I pulled out the other blackwork piece, Roses, and have worked on that.  Roses is almost done.  I’ve made a lot of changes on that as well, mostly with the patterns used in each section, but also with the leaf colors.  The instructions called for grey and gold for the leaves, but I didn’t like how either color looked, so I changed it to green (DMC 3345).  Then I made it difficult for myself by trying to be clever and add a lighter green to the design.  Most of my lighter greens were too light, so I started one of the leaves with Splendor.  I’m not sure if it’ll work, but I’m not ready to frog it yet either.

As for reading, well, there hasn’t been much of that this year.  For the first time that I can remember, I couldn’t find anything to read.  I finished The Last Plantagenets in June (an entertaining if biased account of the end of that dynasty) but had no idea what to read next.  Nothing appealed to me.  I’d start books but would get bored after a few pages.  This has never happened to me before, and I considered just not reading anything anymore.  But for October, I decided to reread The Woman in White, a spooky gothic thriller whose plot I had completely forgotten.  It was a good choice for Halloween and I’m actually enjoying it.  I even have the next book picked out, Master & Commander by Patrick O’Brian.  

(Edited slightly - font changed, pictures of Roses and Challenge moved, and picture of Torah Stitch by Stitch panel added.)