Time for a creative change?

I seem to have been writing and diving into nothing but wordage for months now. But lately I’ve started to notice that a stitch is creeping into my mind. Not the sort of stitch that causes pain, but the threading of a needle with soft, lustred thread and then pulling it through crisp silk fabric.

Over the last two nights I’ve finished beading two tiny little bags and today pulled out the ‘Projects to be Finished’ box. There are two stumpwork pieces awaiting completion. Both are botanical panels created by Jane Nicholas; one is the beautiful snowdrop piece and the other is the Bittersweet piece. To finish the snowdrop piece, I need to go back to Stitch in Time on a Saturday to find out how to complete the detached stems and pedicels. I appear to have forgotten! And with the Bittersweet, it’s merely a question of dedication and discipline.

The trouble is that for months now, after seeing the Mirror project from Jane’s Master Class in Hobart last year, I’ve a desperate need to embroider that piece myself.

But I’ve got a guilt complex too… about moving on to new works before others are finished. It’s why I get so crabby with my writing life sometimes. At any one time, I have Paperweights/Glass Flowers in submission in the UK, The Last Stitch being edited/re-written as a second edition for Kindle and Gisborne being blog-published. And in the shadowed and dark recesses of my writing file on the computer, gathering cyber-dust and despairing that it shall ever move it’s narrative further than the 70,000 mark… sits The Shifu Cloth.

Being an anal sort of person, I need to complete tasks, to drop them in the Done basket. My mind’s essentially a simple and undeveloped sort of thing. I can only concentrate on one thing at a time if the end result is going to be anything approaching the standard I crave. So tonight is thinking about the Austen Twitter Project, tomorrow night is doing the Twitter Project. Wednesday daytime is Gisborne, Wednesday and Thursday nights are embroidery times. The way I look at it, it’s a kind of meditation… it can only help.