A Work in Progress

We are not so patiently waiting for spring to arrive in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Four nor'easters in March is just cruel and I've had enough of this cold weather.  The upside is that it makes it easy to stay inside and stitch.  I'm making progress on a few things, but for reasons not clear to me, I've had a hard time settling down with one project.  I had the pleasure of taking two classes with Catherine Theron at the end of March.  You can see the projects she taught on the Salty Yarns website by clicking on the Events tab.  When I got home I was inspire to find the piece from the first class I took from Catherine at the Delaware Valley Historic Sampler Guild  many (maybe 10??) years ago.  This will become a Quaker sewing case. During class, I struggled putting in the black for the Florentine pattern which is why I put it away all these years.  After looking at it closely, I found and corrected several mistakes.  I fill...

Robin posted a WIP challenge awhile back and I entered. My sampler guild usually has a stitch-a-long, but this year, we are to choose a piece already in our stash (started or not) for completion. My piece for both of these is Moira Blackburn's Keep Me Sampler which was the one I was stitching at the first guild meeting I attended back in 2006. I've done a little more on it since this photo was taken. My mini-goal for the week is to finish the top right (fence, vine, border) with a bonus goal of finishing one of the trees on the right. And maybe figure out if/where I went wrong on the border on the left. The plan is to stitch on this pretty much exclusively until it's done.

I've tried many times to do a rotation. I've tried stitching 10 hours on a project. I've tried having a focus piece to stitch on every other slot in the rotation. I've tried rotating projects weekly. Nothing seemed to be right for me and I just went back to being a one-at-time stitcher. That was great until I started the SAL for Petit Sampling Etui with my sampler guild. I found that I was stitching on it all the time, trying to keep up with the SAL. And I really wanted to be working on some of my other projects, too. As I was stitching one night, I thought about the method I use to keep myself motivated during difficult parts of stitching or on boring borders. I stitch three needles full of one color, two of the next and one of a third. Then back to the first color. Why couldn't I do that with my projects? And thus, a rotation was born. I chose four projects and rotate them, stitching four days on one, three on the next, two on the next and one on the last. When I...