I had to go to town last week to take my son to the doctor. I knew there would be some waiting time, so I decided to take Honeybee Happenings with me. It's not a small kit, more like medium and I wondered how the logistics of that would work for working on it out and about. I had it in my 8 inch Qsnaps and all my threads and needed items in a large tote style hand bag. I have to say, it really wasn't awkward at all. I've taken small projects like hand towels out with me before but never a larger piece. It worked out just fine.
I first worked on it in the examination room while we waited for the doctor to come in. We has a bit of a long wait, so I was very glad I had brought it with me. When the doctor came in and saw me with my cross stitch and all the accouterments, she smiled brightly and exclaimed, "Well look at you making good use of your time!" Then she came and looked at the piece and said it was pretty. I thought it was sweet for her to take a bit of her time to notice it like that. I guess she's probably used to coming in the rooms and seeing everyone on their phones, lol. After we left the doctor we went to Walmart so my son could get a hair cut at the place there. There wasn't anywhere in that area for me to sit, so I just went outside the salon area and sat on the bench at the front entrance where everyone was coming and going. I wonder how many odd looks I got as sat in that most unlikely of spots and cross stitched for almost half an hour, lol. I know I did look up at one point and a man walked by and when he saw what I was doing he did get a shocked expression on his face. Oh well, lol. Between the doctor's office and Walmart, I actually made a good bit of progress that afternoon.
Now, a bit about my progress on my WIP. I have to eat my words a bit from something I said in my last post. I said that I don't use the floor stand much. And that's true. It's always felt a bit awkward to me and I've had trouble figuring out how to easily start and stop my threads because my stand doesn't pivot such that I can easily flip it to get the back of my work.
However, the more I worked on Honeybee Happenings, the more it became obvious that it just wasn't going to work on my Qsnaps. There was too much fabric hanging around for me to deal with and it was just uncomfortable. Which is odd, because I've had no issue with working with other pieces much larger in Qsnaps. But for whatever reason, it just wasn't working. So, I moved the work from Qsnaps to a scroll frame. That did help somewhat but it didn't take long before I started having pain in my shoulders from holding the large scrolls. At that point, the only thing left I could do was get out the floor stand. And it's been so much more comfortable since doing that! I'm still on a learning curve on using it, but I asked some questions in a cross stitching group and they gave me some hints and tips and it seems that using waste knots is my best course of action. So that's what I started doing last night. I'm not a big fan of waste knots, but this project will be an exercise in getting over that, lol.
So here's my current progress ~ parked threads, waste knots and all.
Happy Stitching and keep those needles flying!
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