I said my posting would be erratic this month. And I really meant just that. But First Communion and Confirmation have been celebrated. The Grade 1-6 program concluded last Thursday, the 8th grade program concluded with Confirmation on Saturday and the 7th grade program will conclude on Wednesday, May 28th. So things should settle down soon into my summer routine of inventory, re-ordering and planning the 2014-15 program. I start working the normal 9-5 schedule on May 29. It will be a real pleasure not working crazy evening hours every other day. Indeed, working a normal 9-5 schedule is very nearly a vacation in and of itself. I get to take the last week of July and the first three weeks of August as a bona fide vacation. Something to anticipate with delight.
During my free evenings and my time off, I have plans for renovating the small hall bedroom as a computer room/office for my husband as a birthday gift. Now that he is retired, he has been volunteering as an archivist at the local historical society and an office would be an asset. So far he has written an article for the society's journal on a local Civil War officer's service, served as part of a panel on our county's Civil War participation in an interview on a local radio station, and served as a moderator when the society hosted the Civil War Round Table's visit to the current exhibit on Lincoln and the region's Civil War regiments. Currently, he is hard at work transcribing the diary of a county society matron in the years immediately preceding the Great Depression. The lady is quite a character, the county's own version of Auntie Mame, and he brings home stories of her antics each week I am very proud of his accomplishments and think he deserves a home office. Besides, it will get the computer out of the master bedroom.
About stitching:
While I may not have been posting; I have been stitching. I have made some pretty good progress on Dragon Dreams'
A Dragon Tea Party, which I started on May 12. I realize this is a little cartoonish and not in my usual style ... but it does combine two of my favorite themes, dragons and tea. I have stitched a few of Jennifer Aiken-Smith's more realistic dragons, if I may use that term for a fantastical creature ... most recently,
Stormbringer. And I have her
Dragon of the Winter Moon and
Dragon of the Summer Sky in my stash. These are a bit more to my taste and I look forward to working them into my rotation soon. However, for the present, I am having fun with the tea party and it is certainly an easy stitch. This is another piece that I am stitching on Silkweaver's 28ct Golden Promise linen. Again, a change from my preferred 36 and 40 ct linens but oh so relaxing and easy on the eyes. No magnifier lamp needed! I have a fairly sizable stash of 28 ct linens remaining from the early days of my Silkweaver Fabric-of-the-month subscription back when I was still stitching quite a bit on 28ct. I do have some charts that call for 28ct and will be moving them into the rotation until I deplete my supply of that size linen.
And a little about gardening:
I have been experimenting with the square foot garden techniques of super rich soil [plenty of compost] combined with patio gardening. In one of my large waist high planters I have planted eggplant, peppers, cucumbers and basil.
In two very large pots I have planted two different strains of tomato plants. Here is one of the pots.
My chives have come back strong from last year. You can see them here beside my one surviving mini Christmas tree and the second variety of tomato plants.
I have added nutmeg scented thyme and Italian parsley pots to my collection of herbs. I will probably add a few more herbs, perhaps tosemary and a lemon scented basil
And last, but not least, is a shot of my Van Houten Spirea in full bloom. The pity is that the blooms only last a week or so but they are lovely while they last. I plan on using my second waist high planter to start a salad garden of lettuce, radishes and carrots from seed but I need to pick up another few bags of organic soil to bring the soil level up to where I want it. I really need to work on my front planter boxas well. I want to plant a cutting flower garden there so that I can have vases filled with flowers all summer long.
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Not counting the tiny bit of stitching in January that qualified Tracery Dragons as a 2011 Crazy Challenge piece, serious stitching on the piece began on June 3, 2011. There were times when I thought this project would go on for all eternity. There was the time I put it aside for three full months because I just couldn't face one more blended needle or one more string of quarter stitches. There was the time I threatened to make a Teresa Wentzler voodoo doll and stick it with all those blended needles! There was the day I admitted that including this chart in the Crazy Challenge was clearly a tortured stitcher's exercise in self-sabotage. There was the day I decided that Baudelaire's Fleur du Mal was actually the correct description of a TW rose. But that is the past. Today, I post a photo of my Tracery Dragons finish. Today, I dance. In solemn and stately measure, somewhat stiffly, rather like one of Martha Graham's final performances. No manic happy dance is this but rather serious, slow, serpentine steps in celebration of an eight month's journey with the Dragons.
As I said in a previous post, I tend to overestimate what I can accomplish in any given time frame. Hubris led me to believe I'd be posting a finish photo today. I even wrote a draft post to that effect, which I have since post-dated to week's end. The truth is I haven't even finished the cross-stitching [two leaves are left to stitch], let alone the back-stitching and specialty stitching. So, here is a WIP photo rather than a finish photo. Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow will produce a finish photo!
I spent most of the weekend [and, indeed, most of the week] virtuously working on Tracery Dragons in keeping with my stated annual and monthly goals to work on old class projects and WIPs from the last two years. After last week's deviation into the immediate gratification of a scissor fob and two bookmarks, I thought it best to get back on track before I completely lost my shreds of self-discipline and reverted to the old habits that left me with over a dozen half-finished class projects and six or seven WIPs, in the first place. I refuse to call my WIPs UFOs since I know exactly what they are and I have been working on them continuously, really I have! As you can see from this photo of my dragon, I am closing in on a finish ... with less than a quarter of a page of cross-stitching and back-stitching to go. And then the specialty stitching of the dragon's mane and the rose stems will complete the project. That will make two finishes from the WIP list so far this year but none as yet from the Class Project Challenge List. I will have to get back to working on the Holly and Hearts Sampler very soon. What I am finding quite confusing about all this is how much easier and more quickly stitching on the dragon is going this time around. It took me June, July, August, September, October and the better part of November to accomplish roughly the same amount of stitching I have managed so far this year: six months as compared to six weeks. And, the motifs that were sheer torture in 2011 [the roses] were a breeze to stitch in 2012. Go figure!
I have been moving along on Tracery Dragons this week, to the total exclusion of all other stitching, with this result. As I have said many times, I am normally a rotation stitcher ... which is really a polite way of saying my limited attention span requires a selection of five to ten projects from which to choose at any given moment. In fact, if you looked in my current stitching tote you would find seven projects in various stages of completion and there are two more nearly finished projects sitting near my stitching chair awaiting some quality time. My self-imposed challenges to complete class projects and one & two year old WIPs have taken me out of that comfort zone of rotation stitching. In fact, this year, I am becoming more than a bit compulsive, craving finishes and working single-mindedly toward that goal. That sounds grim but it isn't really! I can honestly say that in nearly 40 years of stitching, I have committed to only three or four duty stitches, and none in the past several years. Everything else has been chosen because I am genuinely attracted by the the concept or the process or the finished design. All good reasons to stitch. Furthermore, I am a list-maker and I just love, love, love crossing completed tasks off a to-do list ... at home, at work, and apparently, at play. So, I am looking forward to crossing Tracery Dragons off the list of 2010-2011 WIPs awaiting completion. Maybe by month's end!
after photos to demonstrate just how much progress has been made. [Note to those unfamiliar with Teresa Wentzler's designs: if you try to stitch her designs in a rational order, working steadily in a consistent direction, you change needles every 2 or 3 minutes. For TW, a large color block tends to be a dozen or so stitches and though her designs are pretty solidly stitched leaving little bare linen, that solid stitching is made up of multitudes of confetti stitches and quarter stitches. The end result is spectacular but the process is complicated.] So here is how things looked on Wednesday evening 
and the second shot shows how things looked Saturday evening. I even managed to complete one of the dreaded roses without too much trouble. I am trying to decide if I want to pause when I have completed the left side of page one and switch to doing all the back-stitching and the specialty stitching. It always give me a great deal of satisfaction to see the design come alive as I go. It keeps me motivated. And without the defining back stitches, a TW piece tends to look like an impressionist painting viewed out of focus.
I picked Tracery Dragons up again for the first time in approximately three months and have made some fairly good progress. At least, I am impressed with my progress. Back in October of 2011, I found this very slow going. But that has changed completely! I am moving through page 1 much more rapidly than I did through pages 2 or 3. Perhaps it is because I understand the flow of the design better, having stitched and backstitched more than half the piece. Or perhaps I just needed to take a break from it. Or perhaps it is because the only rose I have had to stitch so far is viewed in profile rather than full on. I hope I can maintain this pace and finish the dragons by the end of February. There was one small setback when I had to frog and restitch two of the leaves that were two threads further to the left than they should've have been ... the result of stitching in a poorly lit waiting room. But that was easily fixed. However, I have been working on the dragons for five days in a row. It is time for me to switch back to The Holly & Hearts Sampler, the other piece in my current rotation. I don't want to burn out on the TW piece again, like I did last Fall.
