Slow Stitching Sunday 1/25/15

You know how they say a new resolution may take a couple of attempts before it becomes a "habit"?  It looks like Slow Sunday Stitching will be that way for me.  I thought I was all set up to stitch two weeks ago with plans to do it during the "Downton Abbey" hour.   However, I sat down that night and found that I wasn't getting much light from the little neck light I like to wear when hand stitching.

Darn it, it needed batteries!  It takes those flat batteries and of course they are not something I keep a stock of in the house and not something I wanted to run out and get at nine o'clock at night!  I thought I'd push on any way but trying to do the work in regular incandescent light brought me back to a problem I had talked about the first week:  the tracings I had made with a pink quilt marking pencil were just too light to follow in anything but bright day light and even then it's a challenge given the amount of detail of the design I'm stitching.  So I had to give up trying and just watch the show!

So for last week's SSS, I got new batteries for the neck light and worked on re-tracing the design with a darker pen.  As mentioned in my previous SSS post, I had seen a tip on using a red Pigma Micron pen to trace designs.  I already had a very fine point Sharpie marker so tested that out and found it worked pretty good. 

Unfortunately now the problem is that the glass side table I usually use as a "light box" is at the moment piled high with my mother's old photo albums that I need to go through and organize/empty.  It was pretty cloudy throughout most of that week so my alternate "light box" (aka my terrace door) was only somewhat useful.  I was able to trace a small part of the design but would need some sunnier days to get the whole thing re-traced and it being winter, that didn't happen.  So last week, although a little more got done, it didn't actually happen until Monday:

Are you starting to see the theme of this piece?  This week, despite some snow yesterday, today was the first really sunny day so I was able to retrace all the rest of the the design and THIS TIME, I actually got to sit down on Sunday to do it (but NOT during the Downton hour!) and even post about it the same day!

Hopefully from here on in I can keep plugging away since I know that eventually, steady work will make it to the finish.  Head on over to Kathy's to see what others accomplished with their Slow Stitching Sunday.  Hopefully, I'll see you there next week!