I mentioned last week that I like to rotate the types of embroidery projects I work on, to give myself a little variety, moving from more intense to less intense projects and visa-versa.

This is all part of my time-and-enthusiasm-levels Management Program, and it works!

Right now, I’m in a less-intense project phase. After finishing a very quick little weedy thing, I set up a new project that I’ve been eager to get going on for a while.

I think of it as a leafy sampler of sorts.

Right off the bat, I changed my mind on some key decisions that come along with any embroidery project, and although I made decent progress over the weekend, I’m going to stop where I am and start this project over. I’ll tell you why.

This week, I finished an embroidery project.

Once upon a time, I disliked coming to the end of a project. As I approached the end, I’d start to feel a little sad. I called it the End-of-Project Blues. It’s that time when you realize that the enjoyment you’ve had in stitching a project and seeing it come to life is about to end.

And it’s that time when you realize that you’ve got to go through the whole process of deciding and setting up another project before you can settle into the bliss of having something fun to stitch.

These days, though, I have so many projects in the wings planned out for Needle ‘n Thread, that I don’t have a chance to feel blue at all! There’s that brief elation of finishing a project, pleased that it came out at least somewhat similar to what I envisioned, rapidly followed by The Next Thing.

There’s always a method in my project line-up when I’m stitching things in relatively quick succession, though. It’s not just a random grab-whatever-and-get-going approach. I put a little bit of thought behind the order of choosing projects, for very specific reasons.

Come along, and I’ll tell you my thought processes…

Embroidery thread organization is a question that every stitcher faces, eventually.

How should I organize my threads for this project or that project? You’ve probably pondered this point at least once already in your stitching life, right?

And especially if you travel with a project, thread organization becomes more of a quandary. You want your threads handy, easy to access, neat & tidy, but you also want them compact, easy to slip in a bag, a briefcase, a backpack.

Well, Julie over at The Floss Inn has come up with a rather ingenious solution to compact embroidery floss storage for stitching projects. I think you’ll think it’s pretty neat and clever! There are so many things to like about it!

So let’s take a look at The Floss Inn and chat about pros and cons.

On weekends, I always imagine I’ll get more embroidery done than I actually do get done.

I imagine, on weekends, that I’ll have longer chunks of quiet time to stitch; that I won’t have as much computer work to do; that there won’t be many drop-ins since the rest of the people in my world use the weekend to get stuff done at home or run errands and whatnot.

But it never works out that way.

This weekend, I played a game with myself. I timed my stitching.

Before we kick off the weekend, here’s a little Stitch Fun! tutorial to get your creative juices flowing!

Now, before I go any further, there’s a caveat. I used a really awful piece of linen in this. So my apologies ahead of time. Sometimes, you just don’t realize how lousy a piece of fabric is, until you see the results when you’re editing photos. I should have known, I should have known!

Lately, I’ve received a lot of requests for information on this particular approach to creating a rose with stem stitch. Usually, the request comes in the form of a photo emailed in. “What stitch is this? Do you have a tutorial?”

So I figured I’d work one up, for the next inquiry.

Here on Needle ‘n Thread, we’ve chatted quite a bit about hand embroidery needles. If you’re new to the website or the newsletter and you’ve missed those articles and you want to know more about needles used for hand embroidery, I’ll provide some links at the end of this article.

But today, I want to talk about needle sizes and stitching, about changing needle sizes for two different stitching scenarios.

I’m going to ask the wider Needle ‘n Thread community to pitch in their suggestions, too, at the end of the article, so make sure you revisit this article in the next day or so on Needle ‘n Thread to see what other stitchers have added to the topic!

Have you ever completed an embroidery project and looked at it a year later – or maybe even just months or weeks later – and wondered, “What color number is that?” or “Gosh, how many strands of floss did I actually use?” or “Did I stitch that first or this first?”

This morning’s embroidery bit isn’t so much a how-to tip as far as stitching goes. Rather, it’s a kind of organizational tip.

If you’re a prolific embroiderer, especially if you plan to do something in the long run with your embroidery – maybe you want to be a designer, maybe you want to teach classes, maybe you want to start a blog to document your needlework journey, maybe you’ll want to reproduce the same project again down the road, or maybe you just want to be able to remember what you did when – this tip is for you!