Incoherent Scribblings

Here is my slow but sure progress on the Autumn Chair for Chris’s round robin. I am all caught up with my homework so I will be working on it some more tonight after I finish this post.

Sorry that I don’t have any other stitching to show, but the looming deadline of this round (October 15) combined with my limited stitching time these days has managed to make me a one-at-a-time stitcher again. All I can say is thank goodness I haven’t committed myself to any exchanges or additional round robins, because I would never get them done on time!

I do so love to rotate, but I can’t say that I am unhappy about being a OAATer again. With my current schedule if I work on only one project at a time I actually see some progress and eventually a finish… and we all know how important that finish is! Hopefully once this round of the robin is finished I can start rotating again though.

And in other news… I think I can finally say that the SBQ is on an indefinite hiatus. I no longer have any new questions to ask and I really don’t have any desire to recycle old ones. If you have an SBQ that you would like asked, please feel free to send it to me and I will ask them as I get them. However, as long as I have no questions I will not be posting the SBQ. Thanks for understanding.

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Dawn and is:

If you had to choose, would you rather spend money on overdyed floss or hand-dyed fabric?

Eegads! What a question! What a choice! The short answer to this question is that I can’t choose. However, in keeping with the spirit of the SBQ I will try.

Let’s start with hand-dyed fabric. I love hand-dyed fabric. I have dyed my own and since January of this year I have belonged to Silkweaver’s FOM club. However, as much as I love those pretty pieces of fabric, I have to admit that when I start a new project I seldom choose one of them.

As for overdyed floss… Well, it seems to have grown on me over the past couple of years. The first time I tried overdyed floss I wasn’t that impressed, but I gave it another chance and after that I was hooked. I don’t have a complete set of any of the overdyed flosses so one problem I have right now is when a pattern calls for WDW, GAST, etc., I don’t necessarily have all the required floss at my fingertips. I love that my lack of overdyes give me a reason to order stash, but I hate that when I want to start something that calls for them I have to order the floss and then wait for it to arrive.

That said, at this moment in time if I had to choose I think I would probably spend money on overdyed floss rather than hand-dyed fabric… that way I could at least complete my collections of WDW and GAST.

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Outi and is:

What do you do to your thread clippings? Do you just scrap them or do you use them in something else?

I used to keep a little trash can beside my stitching chair that I tossed my thread clippings in when I snipped them off. However, I got tired of the cats constantly turning over the can and scattering things everywhere so I retired it. Nowadays I just put all my clippings in a little pile next to my scissors as I am stitching and when I am finished for the evening I gather up all the clippings and throw them away.

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Thanks to Jennifer at Sweet Pea Stitches and Shelleen at Shelleen’s Musings for naming me for the Brilliant and Kreativ blog awards respectively. I think I am about the last person to be named for these awards, but I would like to mention six blogs that I would name as Brilliant and Kreativ because in one way or another, these ladies’ blogs and their stitching inspires me. (I chose six because it is a happy medium between the seven you are supposed to name for Brilliant Blogs and the five for Kreativ).

1. Dawn
2. Cathy
3. Christine
4. Outi
5. Anne
6. Hev

P.S. For anyone who wonders who the designers I stitch are, I tag all my posts with the designer name and usually the name of the pattern as well. Although the tags don’t show up in Google reader (I don’t know about other readers) you can always visit my blog and check out the tags. Dawn’s Round Robin is from a Stoney Creek leaflet called “Snow Happens.”

Today’s SBQ is:

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

This SBQ has been asked a couple of different times and every time I have had a different answer. The first time it was asked I was soliciting advice. The second time I was flip. This time around though, I only have one word: priorities

You have to know what your priorities in life are. I love to stitch, but unfortunately sometimes there are things that happen in life that just take precedence.

I think when I first asked/answered this question I was afraid if I wasn’t stitching every day that I was in danger of abandoning stitching all together. I now know that is not true. Therefore I have a more relaxed attitude about the time I spend stitching. I may not always be able to stitch when I want, but I can always find time to stitch if I need to!

Today’s SBQ is:

Do you currently subscribe to any stitching publications or have you in the past? (Either in print or online) If so, which ones?

Yes I do and I have.

I recently subscribed to Just Cross Stitch on a whim. I was flipping though one of my Ornie issues one night when a subscription card fell into my lap so I filled it out and dropped it in the mailbox the next morning. I have only received two issues so I can’t really give a solid opinion on whether or not my subscription is worth it yet, but I will say that so far I have seen things in both issues that I might think about stitching.

In 2006, when I was living in Germany, I subscribed to The World of Cross Stitching and I think that it is a nice British magazine. In my opinion, most of the charts were barely above intermediate-level so I didn’t find as many “must stitch” designs in it as I had hoped I would. However, I did get some nice samples of those “cutsie” designs such as Newton, Tatty Teddy, and Country Companions that, at the time, I thought I wanted to stitch. (FYI: To date I have yet to stitch any of those designs!)