It's not as bad as I thought...

I took a few minutes on my ride home from work to pop by our storage space. I grabbed all of the cross stitch stuff I could find and brought it home so I could sort through it. I made a few discoveries--

1) My stitching on The Castle isn't in as bad of shape as I thought. I have probably about 30-35% of the pattern done, and the fabric's in okay shape. It's a bit stained, but I think I'll be able to get it out by hand when I finish. So rather than start over, I'll keep working on this one for now.

2) I have a lot of different threads

3) Most of my leaflets of different patterns are nowhere to be seen. I assume they're probably at my mom's. If not, they're in a book bin somewhere in storage. I'll look again for them come Spring.

4) I also came across the binder that had all of the stuff from when I was VMP of the sorority. Yay! So at some point, I'll sort through my scribbling to see if there is stuff for the website, laugh over it, show it to John (given that he's a history buff for the chapter), and then hand it over to Kellie so she can take a look through to see if anything's missing from current chapter education.


Back to stitching... I put together a preliminary Works-In-Progress page at my domain. The initial page is here. It'll grow as time goes on. I've talked to a few different stitchers, and they seem to find a rotation method to work the best-- basically, you gather your projects together and line them all up in an order. You choose a number of hours and work on a piece for that amount of time (say, ten hours). When you've reached ten hours, you stop working on that piece and pick up the next piece and do ten hours on that. When you've gone through all of the pieces you currently have in progress, you can allow yourself to add another one to the rotation if you want before going back through the same rotation again.

This allows you to get some work done on each piece, but not get bored with working on some pieces-- like The Castle or the Egyptian Sampler (which literally are hundreds of stitch hours to complete) -- for years and get so sick of them that you never finish ANY of them. Throw some little easy ones in there, and you can get a ton more done and feel accomplished.

It sounds like it could work, and keep me on the hobby a lot more. Just one hour a night before bed during weeknights. That's a guaranteed 20 hours or so each month (assuming some nights I'm out doing whatever or just crash out). Plenty of stitching time.

It might just work...