Personally, I don’t enjoy stitching two similar embroidery projects simultaneously. Sometimes I do this, so that I can troubleshoot or so I can try different materials with the same design.

There are, in fact, two versions of my current Jacobean piece underway.

On the very delightful-for-me side, I’m not embroidering the second one. Anna (my niece) is.

I suspect Anna will show me up. She has a doggéd determination to work through problems and to get things “just right,” and I’ve admittedly lost that kind of obsessive tenacity for meticulous detail with my embroidery over the years.

Part of it has to do with the fact that she’s a newbie and she hasn’t developed the confidence that normally goes with years of experience in any kind of craft.

This is her first embroidery project of this type. She’s done a lot of what I’d call “casual” embroidery. Flour sack towels. Some of my snowflake Christmas ornaments. She’s also done a bit of cross stitch and she sews clothes and such. So she’s familiar with a needle, but she’s never done a more complex surface embroidery piece for display, from start to finish, making her own decisions as she goes along.