Yes, I did get in some decent stitching time this weekend, despite the warm weather enticing Terry and I to go out and work in the yard, totally overdoing it so that we paid for it today. Which is a bummer because I wanted to go to the driving range today. I just hope that next weekend is nice, too. The weather here is unseasonably warm, with temps in the high 60’s for most of the day, into the evenings. I actually prefer temperatures in the 50’s for outside work so you can wear long pants and sleeves without sweating too much, but hey… it’s November and I can’t usually work outside, so I’ll take what I can get!
The warm weather is really throwing off my holiday instincts, though. By now, I’m usually well into my Christmas shopping. I try to get all of my shopping finished by Thanksgiving every year to take the pressure off of me during the months of December. I’m not sure it’s going to happen this year, though. I have very few ideas for Terry (he’s difficult to buy for); one good one for my mother, but it’s currently out of stock; and no ideas for my dad. I’ll have to talk to mom about that and see if she has any (not likely!). I’m going to be stingy with the stitched gifts this year. I had so much obligation stitching going on that I just didn’t want to make myself crazy with Christmas stitching, as well. I’ll start early next year so it won’t be a problem. I already have kits in stash, some even started…
Anyway, back to the reason I’m blogging – today’s stitching update. I’ve been moving along on the Christmas Hearts bellpull this weekend. I just finished band 8, I think, and I just started it Thursday night, so that’s pretty good for me. I’d really like to complete the stitching next weekend, if at all possible. I’m really driven to finish things right now, so I’ll keep going as long as I can with it. 🙂 Of course, I have another model coming in sometime this week or next, so I’ll want to put everything down and get through it as quickly as possible. I know… I’m crazy. What can I say?
I also worked for a couple of hours on the Pooh baby afghan. Unfortunately, the frogs ate up half of that time, as I figured out I had started Pooh bear in the wrong square on the afghan fabric. *sigh* That was a good hour of stitching wasted, just to rip it all out and try again. And with the warm weather, stitching on the afghan has made me quite warm. I think I may fold that one up and put it in my stitching bag until the weather cools down and I can actually enjoy the extra warmth of the afghan on my lap!
No progress pics, sorry. I just hate dragging out Terry’s camera to take them, popping the card out and dragging it upstairs to download, crop, resize and then upload the pictures. I think I’ll go back to using our first digital camera, the easy one. It would be much quicker for me to take WIP pics with it. Detailed, finished pictures will still require Terry’s digital SLR camera to get the best quality, but for WIPs, quick and dirty should do. In fact, if I really get my act together, I could add some progress info to my sidebar. I want to use progress bars, but I want to actually script it so that all I have to put in is the number and it will automatically build the correct progress bar graphic. I know how to do it, I just haven’t been really motivated to doing any sort of coding at home with everything I’ve been doing at work. But I will get try to get to it before the end of the year.
Speaking of working at home, I have some graphics work to do that I was putting off this week because I’m dreading it. I need to either bite the bullet on that right now or go write up some bills. Hmmm… wonder which will win? 😉
Yuk, bills — I vote for graphics!