WIP Wednesday – Best Laid Plans – December 7, 2016

“The best laid plans of mice and men, often go astray.” (Robert Burns, 1785). This is probably the most consistent theme in my life, or as my mom and I say often, “I had a plan, then God laughed!” Yesterday was no exception. Originally, I had they day off and had planned an end of year, all day stitch-a-thon to attempt to finish as many WIPs as I could before the New Year. Unfortunately, on Tuesday, two of my clients had to cancel and reschedule for Wednesday. Now you would think that wouldn’t mess up the whole day, but since that meant I needed the car, that meant I had to get up at 6am and drive my husband to work, then pick him up in afternoon. My husband and I have been sharing a car for the past year and for the most part it has been great. It opened up our budget and has given us some quality time together in the mornings and evenings. However, when you plan a full day of stitching, while lounging in your PJs and sipping coffee/tea all day, losing nearly 5 hours (2 for driving him to/from work and 3 for the client sessions)  can put a damper on your plans. Fortunately, I do have off tomorrow and I have informed my husband that I will be having an all day stitching retreat at home. Which means, beyond feeding and caring for the dogs & cat, I will not be doing any housework, I am taking the day off. No dishes, no laundry, no picking up of yard, and certainly no cleaning of bathroom.

So that’s tomorrow’s plan and I hope to take pictures all day of the WIPs and write a blog post over the weekend to share how the stitch-a-thon goes. In the mean time, during my down hours yesterday and today, I thought I would work on my floss organization. When I first started stitching, I use to wind my floss on the bobbins, however, I never liked the “kinks” that developed in the strands. So I quickly switched to the floss away bags, which I love and still use, however my system was initially to just throw the floss in a bag and toss it in a plastic bin or project bag. This lead to multiple bags all over and never really being able to find what I was looking for and resulted in the purchase of colors already in the stash. So a few years ago, I started labeling the bags with the DMC number and storing them in numerical order in plastic boxes designed for index cards. At that time, the majority of my stitching was from store bought kits and the floss inventory I had was just to replace any that I ran out of when working the kits. In recent years, I have started stitching from patterns, in books, magazines, purchased from Etsy, etc. and have needed to “kit up” my own supplies. This has increased my floss stash as well as the frequency with which I access it. That means I have a strong desire to have all my floss labeled, organized and accessible. While exploring organization ideas, I came across Its Daffy Cat’s blog post on how she organizes and pre-cuts her floss. It is a very similar method to the one I was already using with the floss away bags and since I also use the loop method, I loved the idea of having my floss ready to go, pre-cut, all at the same length, neatly labeled and organized.

 

Here is my DMC 435, labeled, precut to approximately 36 inch strands and ready for kitting:

 

Here is my current organized and prepped floss stash:

 

Here is the rest of the stash that still needs prepping:

 

Most likely I will not stay with the plastic bin, I am considering looking for and/or making decorative boxes for storing my floss. In addition to the actual floss storage, I also decided to create a DMC Inventory spreadsheet in Numbers on my Mac.

 

The nice thing about the spreadsheet in Numbers is, my inventory is stored in the cloud so I can access it from any of my devices. So if I am at Joann’s and they are having a big sale, I can check my inventory from my iPhone, to see what I need. The color blocks may not be necessary, but I like the idea that if I wanted to change a color scheme I can do a visual scan of my inventory to see what colors I like and/or have.

 

So that is pretty much what’s happening in Gallifrey Geek’s stitching world. Hopefully you will see a lovely post of all the progress I made on multiple WIPs, after tomorrow! Thanks for reading and happy stitching!

 

 

Post Thought: I cross stitch because it centers me.