The light at the end of the tunnel

I think I am finally getting better. After a lecture from my doctor, a doctor's note excusing me from work, and a mandate from my boss to not come back til I feel better, I've spent the better part of the last two days in bed, and I think this cough/cold/primordial gack is finally loosening its hold on me.

I did manage to finish You Lucky Dog this weekend, and completed "Yuletide," Plum Street Samplers' JCS ornament for 2011. I will post pictures tonight. I think it's a pretty little thing, but my advice if you are stitching this one, DO NOT USE CINDERS. It's a funky little black/red combo from Gentle Art that probably works really well in another context, but I was not pleased with it. Apparently my skein has more red in it than the designer's skein, and by red, I mean red, not wine, so I now have red and black reindeer. Not quite the effect I was hoping hoping for. The DMC conversion shows a brown/black for this color, so, if I were stitching it again, I'd go for something like Dark Chocolate instead. Or make sure that your Cinders has little to no red and then don't use that part--I know these skeins exist, because a friend of mine said all she could find had no red, probably because all my LNS got was lots of red.

I've sort of figured out how I'll incorporate new projects into my stash this year, especially since the UFOs either bred in captivity or were hiding--I found 5 last night in a box that I KNOW was only supposed to be for charts I "intend to stitch soon", and I'm starting to find ones I really don't remember starting, but I must have, because why would I have them? I've decided that, if I finish 5 UFOs, I can add a new project into the mix. Likewise, if I finish 5 ornaments, I can add something new. I think this is the only way I'm going to keep from being bogged down by having too much of one thing.

And I am still laughing at myself because, out of the UFOs I found, all but one of them had been abandoned with less than 100 completed stitches. The one I picked up to work on and finish before I lost the teensy beads had so few stitches in it that I couldn't figure out which way it was supposed to go, so I picked the whole thing out and started over. And it's almost finished already. Probably less than 2 hours work and then I can make it into something. I didn't kick myself for doing it, after all, this year is a chance to break old habits, and start something new. I can not change how things used to be done, I can only improve starting now, and I'm doing that.