Not fair!

It’s really not fair! At work today, while thinking of things other than work (as one does), I thought it would be a cool idea to take photos of all my current embroidery works-in-progress and post them on my diary, so I could check back in a year from now and see if I’d actually got any further on any of them. I got home and dug out as many of them as I could find (there’s one that mysteriously seems to have disappeared over the last year or so – I’m sure it will turn up somewhere, but it’s not in any of the places I would expect it to be.), laid them out and took photos of them, came to DD to start uploading the pictures so I could write my diary entry, and &%^$ Hamipiks is playing up and won’t let me upload anything!

Oh well, you’ll just have to use your imagination until Hamipiks starts co-operating again.

The first picture was going to be of the knight and lady that have appeared in the last couple of diary entries, and which I’m currently actively working on. The knight now has his helmet totally filled in, plus some of his body, and the lady’s outline is complete. The pillar on the left has been mostly filled in, and there’s now most of the outline of a matching pillar on the right.

Then was going to come a parade of the projects I’ve put aside for one reason or another. I definitely will finish them all, but they’re just waiting for the right moment of inspiration to strike me:

First, a woman in a garden. She’s almost complete, apart from her hair, part of the bodice of her dress, and a large chunk of the garden behind her. She’s a very impressive design – huge, with lots of metallic threads and beads. I gave up working on her because I was getting confused following the hundreds (well, it seems like it, anyway) of different shades of green and brown in the garden, each of which seemed to only be used for one or two stitches.

Next, an advent calendar, featuring Santa in his workshop. At the moment, Santa is headless (though part of his beard is there), and about a third of his workshop is missing, as is most of the calendar part (so far, it goes up to 5). After the picture itself is complete, there’s a whole load of little toys to embroider on plastic canvas, which I’ll cut out and attach loops to so they can be hung from the days of the calendar. This is the project I was working on before I started on the knight and lady. It’s a present for my nephews, so I’ll probably work on it pretty reliably once I’ve got them (the knight and lady, not my nephews!) out the way.

Then there’s four very cute Christmas ornaments embroidered on plastic canvas, featuring kittens doing Christmassy type things. There should be six of them, but for some reason I never got the last two done (there is a small brown and red blob on the remaining plastic canvas that’s the beginnings of number 5, but you wouldn’t recognise it as a kitten yet). I can’t remember why I stopped doing them – probably because plastic canvas can be a pain to sew on.

Last is the biggest (and most incomplete) project – a massive wall-hanging (it will end up about 1m long by 50cm wide, from memory), featuring the entire alphabet done in illuminated letters. The letters are gorgeous, based mostly on letters from The Book of Kells, and are in really bright and interesting colours. Well, they will be, anyway… so far, there’s an M, and half an L. And that’s it. I know why I put that one aside: one, the piece of fabric I’m sewing on is so big it’s a pain to keep the unwanted bits out of the way (especially with cats around, shedding their hair all over everything!), plus the designs are really intricate, featuring way too many fractional stitches (and I’m not normally one to complain about fractionals – in fact, I’ll often add a few in if I think they’ll improve the design – I’m doing that with the Santa). So I put it aside for a while in favour of something simpler, and haven’t bothered yet to pick it up again…

There should be another picture, but that’s the one I can’t find. It’s a dragon, not particularly big, but seriously impressive, with loads of sparkly blending filament and beads. From memory, it was almost finished, just the part of the border to do, plus maybe a bit of background. It was put aside because the blending filament, while fabulous looking, is incredibly annoying to use, so the dragon is yet another project that gets picked up and put down again in fits and starts. I wish I knew where it was…

And of course, then there’s all the projects I’ve got sitting waiting to be started. Some of them are very tempting, but I’ve promised myself I’ll finish the current ones before I start yet another new one. (Yes, I know the knight and lady is a new project, but I’ve got an excuse with that one, because it’s for a gift 🙂 )

You know, reading back through my excuses for not finishing these projects, it sounds like cross-stitching is just a series of annoyances! It’s not, really, I actually really enjoy doing it, but it’s just that the big projects which I favour can take months to complete (years, in some cases), so I tend to get bored with them, and put them aside while I do something else. But then I’ll get bored with the new project, and go back to one of the old ones again. And surprisingly enough, I *do* occasionally finish projects 🙂

Well, let’s hope that Hamipiks gets fixed soon, so I can upload the photos and you can compare them with my inadequate descriptions…

(What? Another entry not mentioning Bookcrossing? I must be getting slack!)

Currently reading: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka