Peppermint Bark Progress

Cross stitching is not a race . . I get that but, I have so many things I want to finish and it just isn’t happening. I’m not a terribly slow stitcher, though the thumb has slowed things down a bit. There are several things, mostly self inflected, that slow me down. I do cook a lot but we have to eat. I do hang out all the clothes. I knew it was going to rain this week so I did four loads of laundry this weekend. I can hang two loads out at a time and with the shorter days, that means two loads in the morning and they’ll be dry by 3 p.m. or so. I do usually end up with four loads at a time because I wash dish towels separately. I toss them in the washer as they get dirty so when the rest of the laundry starts piling up, I wash the dish towels because I want to wash them by themselves. Then, whatever load is the largest gets washed next because one super big load and one smaller load of dish towels will fill up the clothes line. The super big load is usually Vince’s jeans, shorts, t-shirts. Because he works and gets dirty, he has a bigger pile than I do. If there’s room in his load, I’ll throw in a pair or two of my jeans. The third load is usually bath towels, wash clothes and whatever of my jeans that didn’t fit in with Vince’s jeans. The final load is underwear and my night clothes. Anyway . . you didn’t need to know all that, did you? But, I was thinking . . tossing this stuff in the dryer would be a lost faster than hanging out all these clothes, then going out and getting them and bringing them in, but I actually like to hang the clothes out. It does take time and that’s time away from stitching.

So . . I started Peppermint Bark on October 7. The stitch count is 84 x 84. I thought . . I’ll have this finished in two days. Right!

Here’s where I am:

I’ll be doing good to have it finished by Friday!

Do y’all think I’m going to need to outline the dog? I don’t mind doing it but it takes a good bit of time. If I do outline, I’m going to outline part of him in metallic gold thread and part of him in maybe dark brown DMC and then show it again and have y’all weigh in on what color I should use for the outline.

I have a hard time with diagonal stitching and I ripped out those first three or four colors at least twice. I think I have it down now but . . I’ll be happy to finish and I need to think twice before stitching something else that has diagonal stitching.