Biting off more than I can chew

I am still plugging along on my exchanges. I appreciate Leena and Nancy who are being very patient while I finish up their pieces and take care of everything else in my life. It's been quite a ride these last few months. I feel very bad that I got behind and I am worried about my stitching *reputation*. So to those stitchers, please accept my apologies and please realize that this has been one of the worst times of my life. I miss my Dad very much and there are days when I just go through the motions.

I've been thinking of my stitching goals for next year. Around this time of the year, I take a peek at my goals and accomplishments. I have to say, I am not really good at planning my stitching, I tend to go with the flow of things. I do a great deal of planning at work so I have a tendency not to *plan* things outside of work. It's not to say that I don't make lists or try to set goals but stitching is supposed to be relaxing and not work, right? So now, with all the obligation stitching, I am up to my neck in lists and goals and plans. It's a necessity for me to do that to stay on top of it all but I am not enjoying stitching right now. I am feeling a lot of pressure and that is sapping my the joy of stitching *lovelies* for my stitching pals.

So here is a listing of my stitching musings....tell me what you think.

1. I listed all my WIPS, I have 28! YIKES!!!!! I didn't think that I had THAT many! So one of my new goals will be to finish 2 of them that are closest to being finished. That would be Drawn Thread's Welcome Spot and Real Roses. Both of them only have about 8 hours of stitching to complete. I got hung up with the roof on the house on Welcome Spot and I wanted to make the boy into a man on Real Roses to represent our family.
2. Then I will pick out one that's not as far along and work on it. I would like to work on either Carriagehouse Samplings, Wild Roses, or Moira Blackburn's Time and Seasons.
3. I want to start Sarah Tatum on December 31st, I always start a new piece on New Year's Eve.
4. I want to also do a couple of small pieces.
5. I also need to limit my obligation stitching. I love the exchanges but I also have a ton of stash (and I recently acquired MORE!!!) so I need to concentrate on stitching it.
6. I have plans for *sampler walls*. I would like to have a Quaker wall, a wall of reproduction samplers with houses, a wall of samplers with biblical verses, a wall of the Chester County samplers and a wall of french alphabet samplers in red or black.

I didn't do well with accomplishments this year, I finished a few things but not as much as I would have liked to finish. I framed Drawn Thread's Happy Halloween and Bent Creek's Blackbird Sampler. But I've also decided that stitching is not a *goal oriented* activity so I'm not going to obsess over not completing as much as I would have liked to complete.