From Lee, this month’s Stitching Blogger’s Question.

Stitching is an activity that tends to be solitary. Sometimes I wonder if we choose stitching because we are more comfortable with pursuits that we do alone, or does our stitching cause us to be loners? So what do you think?

Personally? I started stitching because my aunt and The Last Supper as a WIP laying out when I was babysitting my niece one day, and I was working for a Joann Fabrics and could get kits for cheap with my employee discount.  I continue because I love the process. And sometimes I actually manage to finish and frame and display something, too!

Since we’re stitching alone most of the time, it seems to me that we get great joy from coming together with other stitchers.  It can be such a good feeling when we find a group of people who speak our language and understand our stitching excitement and passion.  But since not all stitchers are perfect, not all groups can be perfect either.  So…if you could create your own perfect stitching group, what characteristics would make it perfect?

I’m not perfect? LOL

Seriously, though. While I enjoy stitchy G2Gs, I find that I get very little accomplished on a project during those sessions. I don’t know whether to blame the projects or my brain, but it is generally difficult for me to actively work on a cross stitch piece and hold a conversation. I can do so in sequence, but not in parallel. Some crochet, especially the simple double-crochet cluster baby blankets I’ve been doing lately, is fairly easy for me to multi-task with, and I have taken to keeping a WIP in my church bag so I can knock out a couple rows during sacrament meeting and the passing period between Sunday School and Relief Society.

So I guess my perfect stitching get together would be one where we have lots of WIPs with us to show off – so long as we have sufficient progress to display since the last one, I guess – lots of clean snacks (because I love to nibble) and beverages, and an understanding that we’re going to spend a lot more time chatting and being silly than actually working on our respective pieces. My sister once lamented that when she comes over for a stitch-n-bitch, there’s way too much bitching and not enough stitching. Clearly, she has a very different mindset than I do here

Well, now that was not fun… somehow I managed to delete the admin panel from my sidebar. Took me a while to find out how to log in so I could post! LOL

Anyway….

I’m possibly getting ahead of myself a bit, but I decided it’s time to start putting out feelers.  I’m getting close to completing Mirabilia’s Christmas Elf Fairy and wondered if anyone out there is interested in her.  I’ll be honest, none of the other Mirabilias are catching my eye, and I’ve been on the Abstinence Wagon for so long that I have no idea what’s out there anymore. So this could be an adventure!

Work is going great. The boss has been letting me loose on new projects with little to no instruction, which honestly feels wonderful. The old boss never would have given me the kind of freedom I have here. Of course, Boss looks over everything after I’ve done it, but since it’s all going out over his name, that’s only natural and expected.

School is now done for the kids. Thank goodness, because I don’t know how much more of Buggie’s horribly terribly awful attitude I could have handled.  I do remember how bad Junior year was, and I didn’t even bother with ACT or SAT testing because I knew I was just going to end up at the local community college if anything. So I was sympathetic to the stress, but dang.

My calling at church is going very well. We’ve planned several good workshops and seminars for the next few months, and we’re starting to think about our big service project that we’ll do with the young women near the end of the year. Sadly, the charity I was really hoping for, Feed My Starving Children, is currently booked through about February of next year. So I’m keeping my eye open for cancellations, just in case.

The kids are doing well. Buggie ended up getting a 29 on the ACT without knowing any physics or finishing the written portion. Yeah, getting into college won’t be a problem for her. Paying for it, however, looks like it will be a big problem for me.

And I am stitching!  I’ve been working on the Christmas fairy during work and a crocheted baby blanket at church. Of course, I don’t have easy access to my camera for status pictures… LOL

The Stitching Blogger’s Questions have returned! Thank you, Lee!

Suppose we say that there are two types of stitchers.

There are those who enjoy the “process” of stitching.  They stitch for stitching’s sake and if something gets finished, so much the better, but it’s not necessarily the end goal.   Primarily, it’s the application of needle and thread to cloth that makes them happiest.

Then there are those who are “project” stitchers.  They move steadily through their projects, certainly enjoying their stitching time, but finding their greatest joy in the completed stitching.

If you had to pick one to describe yourself, which type of stitcher would you be?  I imagine that we could all say that we fall somewhere in between, but really think hard about this and try to pick just one.  And once you’ve decided whether you’re a Process or Project stitcher, tell us if your recognize that approach in other parts of your life.

I am absolutely a process stitcher.  I also has SADD – Stitcher’s Attention Deficit Disorder. Both of which might just explain my many UFOs.

Cross stitch (and lately crochet as well) is my therapy, my mental disconnect. It allows me to break away from whatever is stressing me and get back on an even keel.  When I was commuting to Chicago’s Loop for work, it was the best way I knew to get out of secretary mode and into mom mode.

Out of many hundreds of completed projects, I have less than two dozen completely finished at home. Possibly less than a dozen.  Oh, I’ve finish-finished more, but most of them get given away immediately once they’ve been mounted. I tend to not do the finishing until I know who is going to get that piece and why. I have a large file of fuffies waiting to be identified as gifts for someone.

My mommy got me goodies!

No, not the pictures, the cross stitch kit to make them!

See, when I was little, I absolutely adored the Holly Hobbie character. According to Wikipedia, the character was originally un-named and was “born” right about the same time as I was. I had several dolls, and my very first ever pair of glasses had small images of the blue girl on the temples.

A few years ago, someone came out with an updated version of Holly Hobbie. Probably the same jerks who decided to reboot Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite. Yuck yuck yuck. Stop frackin with my childhood. I did give the new Holly a try, honest. But the new Holly shared absolutely nothing in common with the girl in blue calico patchwork of the 70s, and the TV show that served as the foundation for the relaunch was – IMHO – more of the same little girl drivel that serves as the force behind most of the shows on Nickelodeon and Disney lately. Maybe I’m just too old, but eww.

So anyway, Mom was out shopping this last week, getting an embroidery hoop and needles so she could do some cross stitch pillows she got from someone somewhere. And she spotted this kit. She almost didn’t buy it because of the price, but she knew what my reaction would be when I saw it and decided that alone was worth it.

I literally SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEd when she handed it to me. I cannot remember the last time I saw a *real* Holly Hobbie picture. And when Mom told me it was mine, I squeeeeeeeeeeeed again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist stitching her for long LOL. I’m not as interested in blue boy, never was, but I know I’ll just *have* to stitch him as well to have the set up on the wall.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack!!

It’s been an insane couple weeks here, mostly because of figuring out new routines and then having them all immediately tossed out the window when Spring Break hit.  Just a few more days of that left, at least.

I have even been stitching! Not as much as I would like, but still more than I had been.  I’m mostly working on Chrissy the Christmas Fairy on my lunch breaks and occasionally working on Autumn Sunset at home. 

As for work, I’m in a nearby suburb.  My boss owns the building we’re in.  The office is on the second floor of a downtown building with lots of huge windows that face to the south, so lots of sunlight, and a Starbucks below me.  I love the smell of coffee but not the taste, so its proximity is only a small temptation because of their peppermint hot chocolate.  And a raw chocolate boutique is in negotiations to move into the currently empty first floor space next to Starbucks.  I don’t know if that will be dangerous, the sample they brought in yesterday didn’t interest me much, but I think I need to check out their website to see what else they might have.

I’m not sure if the RSS is actually updating afte rall. That last post never did show up on my reader.  So I may have gotten excited about that for nothing. If anyone out there using Wordpress has suggestions, I would appreciate it.  I would also love to get my dashboard to showme all tags and not just my “most used” ones.

And right now I am SOOOOOOOOOOooo loving this Akami spam filter system.  Yeesh, I wander away for a little bit and come back to 35 spam comments plus 5 new spam user sign-ups.

The RSS feed is actually updating now!! yay!

In other awesome news, I have a job at last!  Not the one I interviewed at last week (still haven’t heard back from them after leaving a follow up message on Wednesday) but an attorney who’s local to me and was a second-generation referral from church. I met with him yesterday and he put me to work immediately.  Woot!

Also, my dad just got confirmation that he’ll be working for the Census Bureau.  NOT as a census taker (the people that go door to door when you don’t send in your form) but as some sort of supervisor. And it’s a government job, so that opens up major doors for hi.

I managed to complete 4 hats and 1 scarf in time for the church auction for Girls’ Camp.  I also added in the baby blanket I made back in September, just because.  We’ll see how much actually sells and how much comes back home LOL.

Another interview this week. They’ll make a decision next week and plan to have someone start approximately 4/1. I’ll be following up with them and with the tax attorney from a month ago on Tuesday.

We’re having a fundraiser at church next weekend for girls’ camp, and I’ve been churning out crocheted hats and scarves to add to the auction. I’m hoping to get one more hat-and-scarf set and maybe another 2 hats done, and then maybe I’ll see about doing some little beaded pins as well.

Buggie’s been doing a ton of babysitting recently, which is great. At least someone is working, and she doesn’t have to keep asking me for money when she wants something. Which really isn’t often anyway, she’s definitely learned how to be self-controlled and frugal over the years.

I clearly have too many places to share certain types of information… I completely forgot to post here and now it’s a non-issue.

I had a series of interviews for a temp-to-perm job the last two weeks. I ended up not getting it, but I’m not upset about it. Over the course of the nearly 3 weeks since I was first contacted to determine my interest, we went from “occasional overtime” to “a couple days a month” to “I’m so backed up that you’re going to be putting in 2-3 hours a day every day for 4-6 weeks”. The interviews went really well and in the end it was down to me and one other candidate. They ended up going with the other person in the end, and I think it was because I have kids and they were concerned about my ability to work that much overtime. I had family lined up and ready to cover so I could take it, even though I was having doubts myself. In the end, I’m glad that she decided to pass me over. It would have been nice to have gotten all that overtime pay, but it would have been a major strain on the family situation. I do have other irons in the fire.

I’m back in the stitching groove as well, putting several hours into Autumn Sunset Sampler as well as working on a crocheted scarf during church. Half an hour a day, one day a week…. this is an awfully slow scarf. Then again, so are all of my other projects lately.

I’ve had a rash of new user registrations in the last week or so. No comments waiting for approval to go along with them, though. So far, only one of them came up with anything on a google search, and that “person” got deleted as the only hit was a spam post elsewhere. I find it interesting that they’re actually registering accounts and not just trying to enter comments (which I did test and is possible, but they sit in “awaiting moderation” or get stopped by the spam filter).

Anyway, another interview today! This is the one that I was waiting to have set up last week. This is another law firm, temp-to-perm assignment for one attorney in the Loop.