This was my mantra Friday night. I had a bunch of finished projects that were ready to go to the finisher. I wanted to get my Christmas ornaments in early so I decided that I would make a trip to The Stitching Post on Saturday. On Thursday, I decided to try and get one more ornament done before my trip.

The ornament projects tend to go quickly, but I knew this one would be pushing it. I started the candy canes Thursday night and brought the project to work so I could finish the candy canes at lunch on Friday. Then the plan was to stitch, stitch, stitch Friday night until complete. Bill was out with friends and I had the tivo to myself. He rolled in around 11 and I threw him a kiss with a “can’t stop, gotta stitch.” Finally, at 2 am I had to stop. I had found 2 missed stitches due to my rushing. I put it away knowing I had about two hours worth of work to finish up before being able to head out to the store. As it turned out, I had an hour of stitching work, and then spent an hour scrutizing all my finished projects for missed stitches. I found one missed stitch on four of six projects. Does anyone else have this problem? It makes me nervous that I’m going to get it back from the finisher and find another missed stitch. I think I have a way to correct it, but it’s not easy and really shouldn’t happen. I do think that I was rushing on most of these projects though. In the end, I sent four projects to be finished into ornaments and six projects to be framed:

and this one, this one, this one and this one.

I am now working on my Christmas Elf Fairy and my goal is to finish her so that I can take her to be framed when I pick up my finished framed pieces. I’m hoping to get to two other things before then too. But I have to let myself relax and breathe because finishing that ornament was more stressful than fun and this is supposed to relax me! In the end it will be worth it because I will enjoy seeing them hang in my house this December!