Incoherent Scribblings

April Goals and May Rotation

It’s that time again…

For April, I planned to:

1. Continue my Sunday “Harvest Witch” SAL with Dawn. - Yep!
2. Participate in the April SAT. - Yep!
3. Work on “Fairy Flora.” - Yep!
4. Work on “Poet’s Heart.” - Yep! Finished it too!
5. Stitch (and finish) a Christmas Ornament for my 10 Ornies Challenge - Yep!
6. Order the Kreiniks and charms for “Harvest Witch” and the beads for “Spring Queen” and “In Cupid’s Garden.” - Yep!

All in all a very successful month if I do say so myself!

I think I will stick with “Fairy Flora” as my focus piece in May and go from there. So, for May I plan to:

1. Continue my Sunday SAL with Dawn. (While we wait for her Kreiniks to arrive we may go ahead and start our new SAL piece “Summer’s Magic” by Dragon Dreams.)
2. Participate in the May SAT.
3. Work for at least 10 hours on “Fairy Flora.”
4. Work on (and finish?) “The Bookshelf.”
5. Work on “Spring Queen.”
6. Stitch (and finish) one of my PIF gifts.

April Rotation and Goals

I was getting ready to sit down and stitch when I realized that I was ready for a new round in my rotation but hadn’t yet decided what to work on because I am at a bit of an impasse concerning it right now.

While the ten-hour rotation has been successful by and large, I am kind of tired of it. I enjoy giving each project a focused amount of time, but have been slightly frustrated at how long it takes me to get through my rotation. This was particularly apparent to me when I was working on “Fairy Flora” a couple of weeks ago because I realized that I hadn’t seen her since December. Unfortunately, at the rate of working on her for 10 hours every three months I will never get her finished by the end of the year.

This led me to consider changing my rotation to one with a focus piece and I got a lot of great advice on how to implement such a rotation, but I am not exactly sure if that is what I want to do either.

However, as I glance through my goals over the past few months I see that on average I tend to work on two of my WIPs a month (not including my “Harvest Witch” SAL), so what I have decided to do for now is work on one other WIP a month in addition to “Fairy Flora.” Although I keep track of my hours I am not going to confine myself to working on these projects for X hours. Instead, I will work on each project throughout the month as I see fit.

So, without further ado, here are my March/April goals:

For March:

1. Finish “Bearly a Wizard.” – Yep!
2. Continue my Sunday “Harvest Witch” SAL with Dawn. - Yep!
3. Stitch for 10 hours on “In Cupid’s Garden.” - Nope.
4. Stitch for 10 hours on “Fairy Flora.” - Yep!
5. Order the Kreiniks and charms for “Harvest Witch” and the beads for “Spring Queen” and “In Cupid’s Garden.” - Nope.
6. Have a blast with my sister and niece who are coming to visit me over Spring Break! - Yep!!!

For April:

1. Continue my Sunday “Harvest Witch” SAL with Dawn.
2. Participate in the April SAT.
3. Work on “Fairy Flora.”
4. Work on “Poet’s Heart.”
5. Stitch (and finish) a Christmas Ornament for my 10 Ornies Challenge
6. Order the Kreiniks and charms for “Harvest Witch” and the beads for “Spring Queen” and “In Cupid’s Garden.”

February at Last Already

I have had a strange sense of time this month. In some ways I feel like January 1st was a long time ago and in other ways I can’t believe February starts tomorrow. I suppose this is directly related to the fact that the first half of the month was relatively slow since it was the interim at West Texas Town University but when classes started the second half of the month practically flew by.

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is tomorrow is February 1st and that means it is goal day!

January’s goals (which I believe I wrote while Dawn and I were sipping strawberry daiquiris on New Year’s Eve) were as follows:

1. Mail Outi’s belated birthday exchange. - Yep! She got it last week.
2. Work on “Fairy Flora.” - Yep! I finally started her wings and though I still have quite a way to go, I might actually finish her this year.
3. Work on and maybe finish “Cool Cats.” - Nope! I was going to but I decided I needed to get back to some sort of rotation so I was a good girl and put it away when I was done with my ten hours.
4. Participate in the January SAT - Yep!
5. Start “Harvest Witch” (Sunday SAL with Dawn, start on SAT weekend) -Yep!
6. Start and finish a “small.” - Yep!

Actually, January’s goals really don’t do the stitching I did this month justice. I worked on four of my WIPs, started three new projects as part of Guilt-Free January, and finished a small. In fact, I would wager that January 2008 was one of the most productive stitching months I have had in quite some time.

So, what goals shall I set for February? Well, since I have added some WIPs to my list I suppose one thing I should do is reorder my rotation and then continue to work through it in an orderly fashion. So, with that in mind, here is what I propose for February:

1. Finish my 10 hour rotation on “Spring Queen.”
2. Work on “Above the Clouds” and/or “Cool Cats.”
3. Continue my Sunday “Harvest Witch” SAL with Dawn.
4. Participate in the February SAT.
5. Stitch and finish Christmas ornament #1 for my “10 Ornies in 500 Days” Challenge.

Rotation Gripes

Today over on The Wagon I joined in a discussion concerning current stitching gripes. Though I griped a little bit about the fact that I still have not finished “Above the Clouds,” my main stitching gripe right now is that I somehow seem to have forgotten how to rotate my projects.

I don’t know why I do this to myself. I love it when I have a rotation and it is going places. I get so much accomplished and never get bored.

However, as I mentioned in my reply, the biggest problem I have with rotating is that when I perceive that I am close to finishing something I lose perspective and this stubborn little stitcher emerges and proclaims that she is not going to work on anything else until said project is complete. This attitude works great if I am within 10 hours of finishing the project but unfortunately I sometimes underestimate how many hours I have left and overestimate my enthusiasm for it.

In addition to this tunnel vision that I seem to acquire when I am almost finished with something, it seems to me that when I say a screaming rotation works for me I am just fooling myself. I won’t say I get nothing accomplished when I am using a screaming rotation, but (and I have admitted this before) I feel terribly unfocused.

Honestly I wish I had the luxury of going back to my daily rotation, but I have come to accept the fact that when working full-time I don’t always have a chance to stitch every day. Therefore I believe my best bet is to return to the ten-hour rotation that I implemented this summer. After all, before I got off track with the whole job/moving/working thing it was working rather well, so I can’t see any reason not to pick it back up again.

Sadly, I still have the exact same five projects in my rotation as I had six months ago when I started. But, as you will see below, at least I have made some progress on them.

On May 31, 2007, I posted my ten-hour rotation as follows:

Above the Clouds (~50%)

Spring Queen (0%)

Fairy Flora (~65%)

Four Seasons Cats, Summer (0%, 25%)

Poet’s Heart (~20%)

As of today, my ten-hour rotation will have the following order:

Fairy Flora (~75%)

It has been quite a while since I worked on Flo (August maybe?) and I have really missed her.

Poet’s Heart (~60%)

Spring Queen (~5%)

Four Seasons Cats (~30%)

Last time I worked on this I abandoned the one cat at a time method and decided to work on them all.

Above the Clouds (~90%)

A pox on Confetti! I WILL finish him though! We have been through way too much for him to become a UFO!

I will probably revamp this in a month or so to include some things that I hope to stitch in 2008, but for now this is where I begin (again!).

New Month, New Goals

Egads! Is it goal day already!?

My goals for October were to:

1. Get my rotation back on track. Sort of. I have apparently gone back to my screaming rotation, but that is OK I think.
2. Participate in the October SAT. Yep! I got quite a bit done on Confetti too. Unfortunately, I haven’t worked on him much since then though…
3. Stitch (and finish) something for Halloween. Yep! I stitched a little fob and sent it to Dawn.
4. Resume posting the SBQ. Yep!

For November, I hope to:

1. Finish “Above the Clouds.”
2. Stitch, finish, and mail Outi’s replacement Birthday Exchange piece.
3. Participate in the November SAT.
4. Work on “Poet’s Heart.”
5. Start “Kitty Cat Row.” (My fabric has been shipped and should arrive any day now.)