Sigh...

I am so good at making stitching plans.  I spend hours searching for just the right combination of projects, making lists, reworking lists, figuring times and supplies, and I finally have the perfect plan. The problem is my carry-through sucks.  For example, take a gander at the WIPocalypse Project List and 2017 Stitching Plan tab at the top of my postings.  That plan took me ages to work up, but it has the right balance to get a lot done.  I was keeping up with it pretty well, until July.  All my planning since the beginning of July has been for naught - how come that's pronounced "nawt" and draught is pronounced "draft"? (at least in my  mish-mashed American version of English).  I am pretty close to calling a free-for-all through the end of the year and see where I end up.

Since my last post, I've been to New Orleans - yes we got rain from Hurricane Harvey, but no wind and no flooding (other than the room of one of our trainees - a pipe burst in the room next to his and flooded his room), been home for a couple weeks and am getting ready to head to Michigan the end of the month for a week of training.  I should be done traveling for a while - probably this time next year when we get our travel and training funds - so maybe I can settle down a bit.  Who am I kidding?  DNiece is getting married the 20th of October and I need to make a card and get things around for that trip.  Rather than just a few days of either side of the wedding, I decided to take the week on each side, so two weeks off work.  Other than the travel for the wedding, I have stitching planned.

Speaking of stitching (which is what I am supposed to be doing on this blog) it is time for September's  check-in.  Gifted Gorgeousness is hosted by Jo at Serendipitous Stitching.  Pop on over there and say "Hi".  She's having a birthday tomorrow, so wish her a Happy Birthday while your there.  Anyway, Gifted Gorgeousness is a way to thank the generous people that have gifted us stitching things or to show things that we are stitching that will be gifted or anything we can shoehorn into the stitch-along theme.

I only have one project that fits into any of these categories (heck, I've only stitched on one thing for the last few months).  It actually fits two as it is a gift for DNiece2 and the fabric was a gift from The Hubs last Christmas.  Here is A Glimpse of Santa from The Stoney Creek Collection.

It is stitched on 28-count Antique White Monaco with DMC threads.  After a bit of a translation problem, I am moving right along.  The translation problem was  - I couldn't figure out what these symbols meant:

It's a horrible picture, but see those double symboled stitches?   My first thought was printing error, so I started stitching those areas in regular cross stitch.  Then I decided there was too much of it to be an error so tweeding was my next thought.  There were no colors represented by that symbol.  Read and re-read the directions, double checked that I had downloaded all the pages, swore a bit and then figured out that they were half stitches slanting in the direction of the slash. Nothing in the directions mentioned this little tidbit of information.  Maybe it's a peculiarity of this company's patterns, I haven't stitched enough of them to know, and they assume you know it, but I sure didn't and I wasted several hours stitching, figuring it out, and removing the stitches I had already done.

Need to throw a load of laundry into the washer and then hopefully settle into some decent stitching time this afternoon and evening.