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.

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.

Because I would really like to get “Above the Clouds” and “Poet’s Heart” finished by the end of the year, I chose to work on “Above the Clouds” this month. As you can see, not only am I nearly done with the clouds now, I also tackled some backstitching. I tell you, a happy dance is so close that I can nearly smell it!

I must confess that I didn’t stitch as much as I could have this weekend though: I spent half of the day today finishing one of the books I started back in August while I was jet-setting around going to job interviews.

I was about half-way finished with The Virgin’s Lover by Philippa Gregory when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows fell into my hands. As a result, the story of the first two years of Elizabeth I’s reign and her affair with Sir Robert Dudley had to wait until Lord Voldemort was thoroughly defeated.

All in all, it was a perfect weekend: Drinks with friends, stitching, and reading. What more could a single girl wish for?

For Terri, I stitched a Quaker-esque design in redwork from one of the stitching magazines that I got at that yard sale a couple of months ago and finished it into a diamond-shaped ornament. (I forgot to photograph the back of the ornie, but Terri has a pretty good picture of both sides on her blog.) I also included some floss for Terri and a postcard. I hope you enjoy your exchange Terri. I sure enjoyed stitching it for you.

I haven’t been doing much stitching over the past few days because I have been focused on reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I could have probably finished the book in on sitting, but I decided to try and take my time and enjoy the book… which I almost managed. I only read a few chapters at a time for a few days, but then last night I only had about 350 pages left and since it was getting good, I just couldn’t put it down anymore.

And WOW! what a ride!

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, but realized that I really need to go back and read books five and six. Though I have read the first four books three or four times a piece, I have only read five and six once and though I remembered the main plot points, there are so many details that I had obviously forgotten.

Overall, I would have to say that I am pretty pleased with the way everything came together and wrapped up at the end. There were definitely a few twists, but at the same time, I was pleased to find that some of the suspicions I had concerning a few of the characters were true.

Yep, two thumbs up for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!