The cur­rent Stitch­ing Blog­ger’s Ques­tion is:
What do you do to your thread clip­pings? Do you just scrap them or do
you use them in some­thing else?

I throw them away, as I don’t know what else I would do with them. The only pos­si­ble use I know of is a vague mem­o­ry of some­one on RCTN using them to fill witch balls (glass fish­ing floats?). I’m curi­ous as to what oth­er peo­ple do with them, though.

The Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion of the Week:
Do you cur­rent­ly sub­scribe to any stitch­ing pub­li­ca­tions or have you in the past? (Either in print or online) If so, which ones?

I don’t sub­scribe to any at the moment, and I rarely buy them off the rack. I have hun­dreds of them in my stash, and I keep mean­ing to go through and just keep the designs I’m still plan­ning to stitch, but I nev­er get around to doing it! I stopped buy­ing them because I real­ized that I haven’t ever stitched one sin­gle pat­tern in any of those hun­dreds of mag­a­zines.

The Stitch­ing Blog­ger’s Ques­tion of the Week is:
Do you ever get to a point work­ing on a project that you’ve had for so
long, you start to won­der what pos­sessed you to start it in the first
place?

Of course! It has always hap­pened with pat­terns I chose to do for some­one else, though, rather than those I chose because I was inter­est­ed in them. There are a few WIPs that have out­lived the rela­tion­ships that inspired them, and they may nev­er be fin­ished. That’s a bit embar­rass­ing, but in at least one case I would­n’t have ever start­ed the piece if I’d real­ly known what an unsta­ble, vicious being the intend­ed recip­i­ent was.

This week’s Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion of the Week:

For sea­soned stitch­ers: Define a stitch­ing term or acronym for new
stitch­ers.

Gah. I don’t play in the needle­work news­group any more, so I don’t think in acronyms. Rail­road­ing is the only term that I can think of that was­n’t obvi­ous or explained in a pat­tern’s instruc­tions. There’s a decent expla­na­tion here, and an arti­cle with good pho­tos here.

And anoth­er Stitch­ing Blog­ger Ques­tion of the week, which should leave me all caught up:

Do you have any pieces that you would liked passed on to future
gen­er­a­tions as fam­i­ly heir­looms?

At one time, I thought so. My moth­er has a Tigerlily piece I did for her, and my father has a big Marine Corps Emblem that hangs in his office. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the first piece I ever framed and gave to them suf­fered smoke dam­age, and I haven’t been able to get it com­plete­ly clean yet. They haven’t expressed any inter­est in hav­ing it back, either. Mom stuck anoth­er piece I did and gave to her in a draw­er, and for­got that I’d done it at all.

Some of the pieces I did for my first hus­band’s fam­i­ly, like a baby sam­pler and a nice serv­ing tray, may get passed on. Maybe. They may have got­ten rid of them because of the asso­ci­a­tion with an ex-spouse. Who knows?

And anoth­er Stitch­ing Blog­ger Ques­tion:

How do you han­dle blend­ed threads? Do you kit the blends up before you
start a piece, or do you grab what col­ors you need and blend when the
need aris­es? If you kit up the blends before­hand, how do you store
them? Do you have anoth­er option for blends to share?

I can’t remem­ber the last time I did a piece that used blend­ed threads. Obvi­ous­ly, I haven’t got­ten around to stitch­ing any­thing by Tere­sa Went­zler 😉

When I’ve had to use them, I just blend them as the need aris­es. I keep most of my threads (DMC, def­i­nite­ly) on plas­tic bob­bins, so when I start a project I gath­er all the col­ors required and put them on a met­al ring. As I cut a length, I wind what­ev­er I did­n’t use back on the bob­bin for lat­er use, to avoid waste.

I’m behind on the Stitch­ing Blo­qqer Ques­tions, so I’ll do them for the next few days.

What is the most com­pli­cat­ed piece you’ve ever com­plet­ed?

I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to judge how com­pli­cat­ed some­one else would judge a piece to be. Size? Dif­fer­ent types of stitch­es? Embell­ish­ments?

For sheer cussed­ness, though it was worth it, I’d have to say that the Ele­men­tal Cos­mos piece designed by Witch­es Stitch­es prob­a­bly takes the cake. It did­n’t use blend­ed nee­dles or spe­cial fibers or stitch­es, but there were lots of lit­tle sec­tions of “three stitch­es this col­or, four of that col­or, one stitch of anoth­er” and so on. I had to do a lot of frog­ging, too, before I fig­ured out some of the tricks of work­ing on black fab­ric. It’s beau­ti­ful, though!

Mélange from Cal­i­co Cross­roads was the first piece I did that real­ly used a lot of dif­fer­ent stitch­es. I enjoyed it great­ly.

Yay! Anoth­er Stitch­ing Blog­gers’ Ques­tion:

What items do you con­sid­er essen­tial to your needle­work that you keep
in your stitch­ing bag

The pat­tern, fab­ric and ring of floss cards for my cur­rent project, the scroll bars or QSnaps or hoop or what­ev­er I’m using (I sel­dom stitch in hand), and a long sil­ver chain on which I wear my scis­sors and nee­dle case. If I’m work­ing with metallics, I also keep—whoops, what’s the name of it? That tiny blue cube of stuff that makes metallics so much more man­age­able? I’m not using metallics at the moment, so there’s none in my bag, but I guess I should go look up the name of it.

I did keep a seam rip­per in the bag, but I don’t have a safe case for my cur­rent rip­per, so I’m afraid to do that.

Late­ly, I also keep a small magnifier/light that hangs around my neck in the bag. It does­n’t work so well, though, so I should prob­a­bly just take it out.

I real­ly need to replace my bag. It’s falling apart, and the zip­per is stub­born. It’s been incred­i­bly good for a free­bie bag, though! It last­ed about ten years.

I’ve lust­ed after a nice stand­ing or lap frame for years—one of the good, stur­dy ones, with attach­ments for a lamp and a mag­ni­fi­er and chart hold­er and a place to put your fibers and such. Some even come with cup hold­ers! The nice ones are trés expen­sive, though. I don’t want to both­er with the flim­sy ones, as I think they’d be more frus­trat­ing than help­ful.

This week’s Stitch­ing Blog­gers’ Ques­tion is:

When you stitch a pat­tern that you have down­loaded do you print out
the pat­tern or do you stitch direct­ly from your com­put­er screen?

I don’t remem­ber actu­al­ly stitch­ing any of the many pat­terns I’ve down­loaded. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, though, I’m sure I’d print them out, and prob­a­bly put the print­out in a clear page pro­tec­tor. I like to keep my cur­rent pat­tern in my stitch­ing bag, and the mon­i­tor just isn’t a good fit 🙂

I lost most of the pat­terns I’d col­lect­ed online over the years when my lap­top died, unfor­tu­nate­ly. I think maybe I should print them out after down­load­ing them, and put them in a note­book kept with the rest of my pat­terns. That way I’d be more like­ly to remem­ber them when I’m look­ing for an idea, too.

(I’m glad to see the SBQ back. I did­n’t get a mes­sage from the list last week, and maybe not the week before.)

This week’s ques­tion is the first of some recy­cled ques­tions. It was first asked back in 2005, and I don’t think I even knew about SBQ then, so I doubt that I’ve answered it before.

After you stitch a pat­tern or kit, what do you do with it?

I’ve done so few kits that they hard­ly count. I think I have just about every pat­tern I’ve ever stitch, though. I wish I had pho­tos of all the items I’ve stitched from those pat­terns! I guess hang­ing on to the pat­tern is a mem­oir, of sorts, as I’m very unlike­ly to stitch most things more than once.