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.

I final­ly got the grades from the first tech­ni­cal writ­ing assign­ment I turned in last week, and the peer reviews I did on two of my class­mates’ rough drafts. I got full points for all of them!

I was wor­ried about one of the peer reviews, because the per­son chose to do a set of instruc­tions for start­ing to cross-stitch. I know too much about that top­ic to eval­u­ate it well from a begin­ner’s point of view, and that was the intend­ed audi­ence. I actu­al­ly approached the pro­fes­sor with some ques­tions, and won­dered if I should swap reviews with some­one new to stitch­ing. Hap­pi­ly, the pro­fes­sor said I pro­vid­ed a bal­anced review that reflect­ed my expe­ri­ences as a for­mer begin­ner and cur­rent­ly expe­ri­enced stitch­er, and that I was respect­ful through­out. I was try­ing very, very hard to avoid any hint of con­de­scen­sion, and it appears that it worked!

My top­ic was “Cre­at­ing Your First Pod­cast,” and that received full points, too. It had to be done with a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Lev­el less than 8th grade, which was not easy. I got it down to 7th grade, and could­n’t go any low­er. The pro­fes­sor said that was due to the tech­ni­cal terms I had to use, and was per­fect­ly accept­able.

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.

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.

I am, in fact, still keep­ing up with Thing-a-Day! I need to go post over there, though. I do wish I could auto­mat­i­cal­ly cross-post, but if wish­es were fish­es and all that.

I stitched tonight while Sam and I gamed. I also wrote for a while, ear­li­er. Sam and I have recent­ly begun par­tic­i­pat­ing in a forum that does a great job of encour­ag­ing intro­spec­tion, and being a safe place in which to express one­self. It’s a pow­er­ful thing, and I’m in awe of the peo­ple who cre­at­ed and run it.

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.

Well, that’s what it felt like. Poor Sam had to take time off from work, because it was Pain Doc Day. The pain doc­tor is off in the wilds of Cobb Coun­ty, because that’s where we lived when I start­ed see­ing a pain doc­tor, and it’s darn near impos­si­ble to get a ref­er­ence to a new one (much less trust that a new one will, in fact, keep writ­ing pre­scrip­tions for the meds that actu­al­ly work). Then we head­ed to Big Ware­house Store to get the RXs filled, and also hit the bank and the post office because they’re just so much fun! And then it was time to go see the friend­ly ther­a­pist lady.

Hap­pi­ly, we were able to game off and on dur­ing the day, which made the whole busi­ness far more pleas­ant than it would have been oth­er­wise. And we picked up a great big bag of fat-lady clothes from a nice freecy­cler! Some of them are so cool the girl is eying them cov­etous­ly, so I need to be sure they go to my room and don’t wan­der off to hers.

While we were gone, though, a sweet fairy girl washed our quilt and com­forter! Sam put fresh sheets on the bed, so I’ll be crawl­ing into a nice, clean bed next to a fresh­ly-show­ered, cud­dly man soon. That part of the day, I’m look­ing for­ward to!

If there’s a way to auto-cross-post rel­e­vant entries from here to Thing-A-Day, I haven’t fig­ured it out. Doing it man­u­al­ly feels inel­e­gant.

I don’t have a pho­to to post, but I got out the draw­ing tablet for the first time in an embar­rass­ing­ly long time, and worked on a cross-stitch design. It split into two designs, some­how, but I’m hop­ing to post pics tomor­row. I dis­cov­ered that Pat­tern­Mak­er isn’t installed on this machine, so I’ve made graph­ics that have to be trans­lat­ed into graphed designs.

I feel that I’m real­ly in the “getting orga­nized” stage, which I should have done last week. But the tablet is attached now, and I know where my stitch­ing bag is. I’ll find out in the morn­ing just what my daugh­ter did with my col­ored pen­cils and such, and locate the Pat­tern­Mak­er install CD. And the cam­era, that would help. Yep.

It did feel great to have time on my sched­ule devot­ed to “being cre­ative” and noth­ing else!

The girl is gone this week­end. I’m start­ing to feel like the house is just a place where she keeps her stuff and does her laun­dry! I sup­pose that’s nor­mal for any par­ent of an old­er teen, and good prac­tice for when she goes off to col­lege. It does­n’t mean that i have to like it, though!

Sam has been Mr. Pod­casty tonight, record­ing a round­table dis­cus­sion for some­one else’s show, then record­ing a new Square One episode with Bill Wal­ton. I’m tempt­ed to do a Fibrant Liv­ing again. It’s cer­tain­ly been long enough!

I have hopes of rear­rang­ing the liv­ing room to some extent tomor­row, to make the house more invit­ing for guests and make it eas­i­er to play the piano. I’m real­ly tempt­ed to reclaim the back bed­room as “office space,” but Sam will kill me if I ask him to move the big sofa again. I just have this feel­ing that as long as our com­put­ers are out here in the pub­lic area, we aren’t going to be very suc­cess­ful at keep­ing the pub­lic areas unclut­tered. I’d need a desk to move my com­put­er in there, though, or we’d need anoth­er table.

We real­ly, real­ly need to improve the light­ing in the liv­ing room. One of the torchiere lamps has a bro­ken switch, and we don’t real­ly have any task light­ing at all. I’d much pre­fer the sort of lamps that have those adjustable heads, so some point up and anoth­er points down at what­ev­er you’re read­ing or stitch­ing.

Yep, I’m total­ly ran­dom tonight. This is Cyn on break­through meds. Whee!