Incoherent Scribblings

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Outi and is:

What is your favorite past time while stitching? Do you just enjoy silence, listen to music/audiobooks or do you “watch” TV/movies? Do you have specific favorites you listen to/watch while stitching?

Honestly speaking, I like to do all of the above while stitching. Depending on my mood, sometimes I enjoy the silence, other times I listen to my last.fm station or my music collection, and sometimes I “watch” television shows or movies. Since I don’t own a television, I only watch a few select programs like House or Heroes on my laptop so obviously they are some of my favorites to “watch” while stitching.

However, I recently discovered the joy of listening to audiobooks while stitching.

I quite enjoyed listening to Harry Potter 1 and 2 during my drive over Christmas break a few weeks ago, which made me wonder if I would like to listen to them while stitching.

After all, if one can entertain his or her brain by listening to an audiobook while performing a mechanical task like driving, wouldn’t another mechanical task (like stitching* ) work just as well? So I set up a somewhat odd corner in my living room consisting of my stitching, my chair, and what I have dubbed my “all-purpose entertainment center” (aka my laptop) and started to listening to Harry Potter 3…

… And 4.
… And 5.

* Before anyone gets up in arms, as a stitcher I know that cross stitching is a creative outlet, but the fact is inserting a needle and thread into a piece of fabric over and over again is a pretty mechanical task… I think we all know what I mean.

The cats and I successfully arrived in Arkansas last night about 9:30pm. The trip turned out to be 13½ hours and was made bearable by listening to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

One of my “101 Things” is to listen to the Harry Potter books on “tape,” so I took the opportunity to check them out of the library over break. I had never listened to an audio book during my travels and I must say that I really enjoyed the experience.

This weekend was also stitch-a-thon weekend. My goal was to finish Outi’s birthday exchange and/or work on “Fairy Flora.” I finished the birthday exchange before the weekend, so I worked on Flo. Since I knew I would be traveling part of the weekend, I didn’t have any specific goals but I managed to work on her for about 4 hours and get some more flowers done. I hope to be able to start working on her wings soon.