It been a long time since I have posted here.  My last post was about one of two irises that my aunt had asked me to stitch for her.  Since then, I have been able to complete both irises.  They look like this:

These are Gay Parasol and Glad Rags, both designed by The Silver Lining.  Both are stitched on 32 count fabric.  I do not know what colors because my aunt bought the patterns and fabric and sent them to me.

Working on these taught me a couple of things.  I have been bouncing back and forth between several projects for quite some time.  Since I was stitching these for someone else, I didn’t feel like I had the luxury of working on anything else, otherwise I knew that I would have a hard time coming back to them.  Because of this I have learned that it is better to concentrate on one project at a time, rather than try to multitask.  I accomplish more that way.

One of my challenges in stitching has always been how to handle the more complicated parts of a piece.  I have to be able to “see” how things fit together in order for them to make sense.  When I hit an area with many colors spread out all over I have a hard time “seeing” and can get discouraged.  Once again, I couldn’t give up because of the commitment that I had made.  I found that if I just persisted and worked on the doing all of the stitches of the most prominent color, everything eventually fell into place.

It feels good to have these complete.  I didn’t like the pressure of making something for someone else.  I like irises, but they are not what I would normally choose to stitch.  So it feels good to be able to work on something that I want to work on.  I have returned to stitching my Santa’s and have made quite a bit of progress.  They really seem to move quickly compared to the irises.  This is what they look like right now: