The Best-laid Plans...

After finally taking the plunge and starting my blog, I promptly left for two weeks of family obligations and vacation. I brought along Small House Sampler, but haven't gotten much farther ahead with it. I'm finding that having the right light makes a huge difference, especially when one's eyes aren't what they used to be. I use both reading glasses and a magnifier hung around my neck to stitch, and I also use a desk lamp that's made for treating seasonal affective disorder, because the light is so much like daylight. While I've been traveling I haven't had a good enough light to stitch without making even more mistakes than I usually do. That's my excuse for my poor output, anyway. I'm looking forward to getting back to my lamp, and to my stitching.

Although I enjoyed working on Study Hard as I learned to stitch on linen, I was longing to get to the project I'd really wanted to do - Little House Needleworks' Pine Tree Hill. LHN charts are perfect for new stitchers. They are simple but not simplistic designs which don't have a lot of difficult color changes. Although I like other designers (I'll post a list at a later time) it is the LHN ones that most appeal to me. I joined a Yahoo group that the designer participates in, and it's so great to learn about her creative process. It's also a good reminder that there are real people behind those wonderful charts.

So here is what my Pine Tree Hill ended up looking like:



It's still in its "just completed" stage, because as of yet I am frightened of finishing (that sounds like a title of a mystery novel). I've yet to try to finish a thing I've done; it's very intimidating and I don't want to wreck my hard-won work. There are some great blogs that I know will help me eventually though, like Focus on Finishing, where many very generous stitchers post pictures and instructions of how they finished their pieces. Right now I am so focused on stitching that I am leaving learning to finish alone, but I know it's something I have to tackle eventually.

One thing I'd like to do for this blog is add links to my favorite stitching bloggers to my sidebar. I don't know whether any of them will mind; I hope doing so is okay and that they will take it as a compliment, as it is meant to be. Now if I can just figure out how to add the links! Learning how to use blogger almost deserves a post of its own. So far I haven't been able to remove the numbers next to the archive - I don't see the point of noting how many posts per month I've done - it's just clutter. But that mystery remains to be solved.

Okay, off to tackle that sidebar...