I didn't make much progress on anything the last couple of weeks. Although I did finish the first page of Peace. I've decided to work a page at a time from top to bottom. There is so much to this design and I'd like a sampling of all of it. Plus I get bored when working on bore-ders. I'm enjoying it again, though. It's going to be huge and I'll never be able to afford to frame it, but on the other hand I'll probably never get it finished so why worry about that now?

And then came Triple Town, which is a game for the Kindle. An extremely addictive game for the Kindle. For about a week I was playing it every chance I got and my stitching progress suffered accordingly. I think I'm over it now and have myself down to four or five games a day.

The project that really suffered from my game frenzy was Peacock Garden. I only managed to finish about half of one of those whatever you call those things. I think the next time around on this one I may work on the peacocks. Did I mention how quickly I lose interest when stitching the same thing over and over again? I probably shouldn't do the Chatelaines, but they are just so beautiful!

I also lost a Saturday to the Middle School Visitation Day at the University of Delaware. Neither my daughter nor I got much out of it. "They" can tell us all "they" want that middle school kids need to start thinking about college, but personally I think that's way too soon. The parent portion, though, was quite worthwhile (for someone who doesn't already have kids in college and happens to work in the Admissions Office at the local community college). Parents definitely need to be thinking about college while their kids are in middle school.

And speaking of school -- I'm proud to report my youngest daughter has been invited to participate in Academic Challenge for both math and English. Academic Challenge students come to the college campus once a week and take advanced classes.

Finally, I did some work on Pheonix 1. Again, not the kind of progress I'm used to. The Triple Town obsession was still in full force when I started it, so hopefully this drop in productivity is an aberration.

Here is the Jacob block from the Days of Advent Sampler. I'm still not sure of the pink tones I want to use and am waiting for an order from Hand Dyed Fibers for sample tags in the three color groups I'm considering. I simply love working on this piece -- the colors are so vibrant! I can't wait to get those pinks so I can see how they will look. This block completes the first row of five.

Next I worked on Dragon Skies. I didn't make much progress with her. Friday I was exhausted and went to bed early and then I decided to only work on her for three days since I wanted to try out the experimental scroll rods I got for Peace. People at the Lowe's probably thought I was nuts -- I went in there with a q-snap clamp, a scroll frame side bar, and a piece of fabric! A q-snap clamp fits perfectly on a 1" dowel so for $10 I got myself some 48" scroll bars. The experiment is only a partial success, though. The 1" dowel is too big for the indents in the side bar, which made it difficult to turn and one of the dowels has a splintery groove in it from the friction. The yard of fabric fits on it quite nicely, but it's not really tight. I haven't tried stitching on it yet, so we'll see if the tension is good enough. Anyway, here's a picture.

Another thing I did this weekend was rearrange my living room -- all for my floss. I think I've tried just about every floss storage system known to man and I think I've finally discovered the holy grail: Annie's Thread Keepers. They are so awesome! The one draw back was how to store the slides -- hanging file boxes are simply not deep enough and you either have to cut your thread short or allow it to tangle in the bottom. I wracked my brain and wracked my brain and then it hit me -- I could remove the bottom of the top drawer of one of my file cabinets, use a metal plate or something to join the two drawers together and wah-la one nice deep drawer. Then I took a look at my file cabinet and decided my floss deserved a nice, new home rather than my ratty old cabinet. I found one I really liked -- but it was quite large. So I decided to experiment with my existing file cabinet (which is actually smaller, but still quite large) and discovered that there was simply no way it was going to work without looking incredibly stupid. So I decided to see if there was any other way to arrange the furniture. All my friends had told me to try this arrangement but I just didn't think my gigantic chaise would fit, but it does and I like it sooooo much better. It still looks kind of funny, but not nearly as funny as it did before. And there will be plenty of room for the new file cabinet (experimental file cabinet is still in place for now). I just need to get used to having my stand on my left rather than my right. But so far, so good!

Finished on March 5, 2011! I worked on her for a total of 36 days... 30 of which were consecutive. She was such fun to stitch and I'll miss her!


And now I plan to run through my 7 "Priority" projects before starting a new round.