A finish and some rambling

Over the weekend, I finished stitching on Cheryl's RR which is now winging its way off to New York and Janice. Cheryl has asked for a house theme in her RR, and as we're using LHN designs, I stitched the top of Nature's Beauty for her.

I'm really pleased with it - I love the way the colours look on Cheryl's linen.

Next, I'll be starting on Donna's RR which is ready and waiting for me. Given that I got a bit behind with Cheryl's my main goal for Donna's is to get back on schedule!

In between times, I'm adding odd blocks to Nova and I've also dug Starflake out of my WIP box, but not much progress to show at present. I also have plans to stitch some small items, but I'm waiting for the postman on that one!


Edited a bit later to add:

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been wandering around people's blogs a bit more than recently. In doing so, I came across an SBQ which got me thinking. It also links in part to a Deb's post on Old and New Ideas.

The SBQ was - What for you means to achieve mastery as a stitcher?

One of my first thoughts on reading the question was - why would/should I want to achieve 'mastery' as a stitcher? What is 'mastery' anyway? Perfection? Ternezia/Renée who suggested the question has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

I don't know that I ever want to be able to say that I've achieved 'mastery' as that would mean that there were no new challenges in my stitching, nothing new to learn. For me, stitching, as with life, is a learning process where I started with nothing on the day I was born and will continue to learn about myself and the world around me until I die.

To a certain extent, too, I certainly wouldn't want perfection in my stitching. I'm all in favour of a bit of imperfection as it personalises the stitching and adds to the expression of the stitcher him/herself. Because of this, my stitching of any particular design will never be the same as anyone else's and therefore each stitcher's work is unique. Why would we all want to produce work that was completely identical?

There's also a question over whether achieving 'mastery' would allow a stitcher to customise a designer's work. Does mastery mean you can customise somebody else's design to make it 'better'? While if mastery is 'perfection' then would the customisation of a designer's work be allowed?

So in my quest not to achieve mastery - I'll use any stitching method I feel like, I'll use a looped start, I'll lick my floss, I'll stick needles between my lips for safekeeping (and then loose them down the front of my shirt when I forget they're there), I'll leave small items in a hoop for days on end and larger items in a scroll frame for months, even years! I won't wash my hands before stitching and I'll always keep a cup of coffee precariously perched nearby.

Can't think of any more bad habbits right now, but I'm sure there are plenty of them!

Anyway, enough rambling! I should be working!