The Year of Stitching Freebily . . .

officially began this morning.I started one of Pam Kellogg's Millenium Cats on a tea towel. I started the January cat, Midnight. This was a series she did that I printed off in 1999, September 16th to be exact. I don't know if there are photos of them out there, but I did one or two on a RR one time, and I had the charts, and I wanted to do them. I think they'll be cute in our kitchen, as purely decorative objects. And, at $5.99 for the tea towels, plus the cost of floss, it was hard to resist them.

I know I've said this before, but my major focus in 2010 will be to stop collecting all these freebies and stitch them. I have several binders full of free charts, plus stacks of paper and those stored on my computer. Such fabulous charts being given away for free! I keep telling myself to sit and stitch them, but there is always a reason I don't do it. So, this year, I'm breaking out of my comfort zone, and focusing my new starts as charts that were not offered for sale. I've toyed a lot with the idea of how to define a "freebie", since some of the charts I have were originally offered as free charts, but were then sold, and I bought them once sold. Was that how I wanted to go? Could I stitch those and still call them freebies? I've decided for me, the answer is no. The charts I will work on will be ones that were "free", meaning I didn't pay out of pocket for the chart when I got them. This leaves me with all those binders of freebies, plus the freebies my LNS kitted up that I just never stitched, plus the free kits that come with British magazines (I could spend a year on just those.)

I am allowing myself a few exceptions:

Circle of Life, by Pollyanna Pickering, because that's a fair entry.

Kingdom of the Ice Dragon, by Dragon Dreams, my January 1st start.

Any UFO or WIP. I have so many of those. Summer Ball and Sleepy Hollow are major projects and deserve to be finished.

Anything for the wedding. It's not that I don't think that there are good enough free charts available for our wedding sampler or the ring pillow, but I found what I want, I haven't found a better free alternative, and I can't wait to find one. I don't want to get in a situation where it's our wedding day and I don't have the things done because I procrastinated.

Charts for the SALs I'm in. That's kinda obvious. I signed up for these SALs and I need to keep going.

I think this gives me good variety for the year.


I worked on Summer Ball for a couple hours last night. It's a tedious stitch, especially on their faces. Someone on 123 finished it in a hundred days; she is my hero. For some weird reason, the girl in the center of the picture reminds me of the actress who played Becky Sharp in the version of Vanity Fair they used to show on A&E. Maybe because the other girls look vaguely annoyed with her? That should probably not be a good thing, but I really loved that miniseries, and I have always liked Becky. It probably means I have spent too much time on this project that I think things like that, but, oh well. HTB asked me how long I had been working on it. I told him since 2006. I think he thinks I'll never get it finished . . . He may be right, but I'll give it the old college try.