A Year of Stitches

Not that I need another project, but an invitation from a Facebook friend in Nottingham (a wonderful dancer and consummate craftswoman, as well as having gorgeous cats!) was too attractive to resist. I haven't done any embroidery for years. Time to regenerate my rusty embroidery skills!

The idea  is to create some embroidery - sampler, free-form, whatever you like - using a different stitch every day for a year. I'd seen a post on Craftsy last year about it, and it's an idea which has evidently caught the imagination of many embroidery enthusiasts.

I managed to find my frame, my stash of embroidery floss and some calico. I managed the first fortnight or so, working in a doodle-like fashion, trying not to be too judgemental or a perfectionist about the result. I did rip out one row of stitches, because they were just too untidy.

But it's evidently not the year for this, because I found that I quickly became bored and dissatisfied with my doodle and didn't have the energy to restart it as a sampler. I usually have no problem with Art For Art's Sake, but started thinking I should be creating something functional, and felt a vague sense of guilt.

Then I received a very large book (well, 5 books plus prologue and epilogue) to edit and the embroidery project has already slipped. It's sitting in the living room, and should be tempting, but after a few hours correcting appalling typography and wading through paragraph-length sentences, I find I don't have the concentration to do any embroidery.

I even feel torn that I've decided to give the project up, but it was clearly not meant to be, at least for this year. It's not as if I don't have other WIPs!