I’m quite late with the cur­rent Stitch­ing Blog­ger’s Ques­tion, which is:
If you had to choose, would you rather spend mon­ey on overdyed floss
or hand-dyed fab­ric?

Overdyed floss, cer­tain­ly. I’ve only pur­chased one piece of hand-dyed fab­ric, and nobody is like­ly to go, “Oh, wow!” about the effect in the fin­ished piece (although I’m hap­py, because I could­n’t find any oth­er fab­ric that was exact­ly right). I seri­ous­ly doubt that any­one but anoth­er devot­ed stitch­er would ever know that the fab­ric is hand-dyed.

The overdyed floss­es I’ve used, though, fre­quent­ly lead to incred­i­ble effects that are appar­ent to any­one who views the pieces. They’re usu­al­ly a joy to work with, as well.

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 (real­ly last week) is:

How do you bal­ance your stitch­ing time with your oth­er oblig­a­tions
such as work, house­hold chores, etc.?

That isn’t real­ly an issue for me, as I haven’t been stitch­ing late­ly. I real­ly need to go buy some floss so I can get past a stum­bling block on my most active cur­rent project.

Oth­er than that, the only times I’ve ever real­ly stitched have been when I did­n’t “need” to do some­thing else, and usu­al­ly when I’ve been mul­ti­task­ing. It’s rare that I’m not gam­ing or oth­er­wise engaged while stitch­ing.

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.

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.

What is your cross stitch weak­ness? (i.e., What do you have to have when you see it, even if you are sup­posed to be on the Wag­on?)

I’m sup­posed to go telling my weak­ness­es, in pub­lic?

Well, I guess I’ve already exposed them, con­sid­er­ing the lists on my site. I adore “dif­fer­ent” pat­terns. If it jumps out from all the cutesy crap, I want it. Celtic knot­work is anoth­er one. I haven’t seen too many good pagan designs, so when I do, I pay atten­tion.

The Stitch­ing Blog­gers’ Ques­tion of the Week is:

Do you have any projects that you have scrapped and start­ed over? What made you start over from scratch?


I can only remem­ber one, and I restart­ed it at least twice, maybe three times. It was the Celtic Cross designed by Deb Davis for Y‑Knot Designs. I think I tried start­ing with one of the cor­ners, but kept find­ing myself off a bit, so I frogged every­thing and start­ed from the mid­dle, as I usu­al­ly do. I still kept get­ting off by just a thread here or there, so I do think I frogged all that again, then start­ed from the cen­ter again but work­ing in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, but I think it was the last piece I did on linen instead of even­weave.

This week­end’s Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion:

Are there oth­er crafts that you have tried and aban­doned? Why do you like stitch­ing bet­ter?

Short ver­sion: Because it’s one of the few visu­al­ly-beau­ti­ful things I’ve ever been good at.