Gifted Georgesness Report for September.

It's been a mixed stitching month for me - some happiness, and a lot of despair!  First the good news.

I have stitched two more ornaments , and started a third.  I still have some beads to add, as well as the finishing into ornaments.  They will be Christmas gifts for three delightful Irish-Aussie sisters, children of one of my sister's friends.

And the bad news.  The moral here is 'pride goeth before a fall'.  I am talking of my progress on HAED Christmas Dreams (chart, fabric, and most of the floss bought with birthday money). I was steaming ahead on Christmas Dreams, till disaster struck.  Here is the story:

This is where I was last month. Row 2 finished (12 pages complete).

I had met my stitching target for the year, but decided to keep stitching.  By the  first week of this month I had almost 15 pages completed, and was feeling very pleased with myself. 

And then I noticed that the top of page 3 wasn't matching the bottom of page 2.  Major panic, and an hour of counting stitches, and checking charts, and some questionable language and hair pulling.  Then the penny dropped - I had repeated the last three stitches on each page in the third row of pages - so I was now 6 stitches out - and it did matter! In my defense, I will point out that because I am stitching sideways, the shaded area on each page, indicating the repeated stitches, didn't coincide with the actual stitches repeated.  But I got it right when stitching the first 2 rows of charts - so why would I then forget when stitching row 3!  (Hint:  advancing age and receding memory.) So, for the past 2 weeks, I have been unpicking my work,  Very chastened.  I still have about 1/6 of a page to go.

Today it looks like this:

You can see the unpicked area (it looks dirty).  When it is all unpicked, I will have just the first 30 rows on page 3 stitched (the first page being a partial page).  So, in the end some progress - but not reflective of my stitching (+ unpicking) time, or the angst it caused me!  I am afraid this is the final appearance of Christmas Dreams for this year.  He is going upstairs for a rest until 2017 - just as soon as I have gone through all the chart pages, and cut off the 'repeated' rows - to make sure that I can't make the same mistake next year.

I hope everyone else had a less stressful stitching time in the past month!  And if you have any hints for cleaning up the unpicked area, please pass them on to me.