My decision making skills are notoriously weak. I vacillate and dither over every little part of my design work. I SEE so many possibilities and each definite decision cuts off one path and sends you down another. The beginning stitching on this piece was pretty easy for me…a bit of stitching to check things out, followed by heavy filling in on the colored part.



And then I got to the solid burgundy part and had some decisions to make. Here is a little trick I have used more than once to force myself to a yes or no point rather than a so-many-directions standstill.
Drawing is another skill where I am impossibly weak. I don’t come to it naturally and I have never devoted time to learning how to draw, so I do the best I can. So….I sketch or trace the design I want and figure out how to get it to the project. Sewing through a paper drawing is the easiest process for me. I have used thin paper, tracing paper and regular copy paper and they all work, though copy paper is the hardest to sew through.
Today I made a sketch from a picture of a sycamore tree that I love. Not perfect, but good enough. I put it on top of my piece and tried to decide what color I wanted to stitch it out with. (It’s much more visible in person than in the picture!)

White, variegated that I used on the other part, burgundy on burgundy for more subtlety, silver or gold or copper metallic…….dither, dither, dither……….even asked for opinions on social media.
Then I realized that I could go ahead and stitch the outline in white and remove that paper. If I changed my color decision, it would be pretty easy to overstitch the white or even remove it. Having the paper gone meant that I would be able to see the actual tree better on the background.

At first I thought my tension must be way off, but I figured out that the burgundy was showing through the holes in the paper, not pulling up from the bobbin!
And here’s where I’m at……….


A couple of things I noticed right away. I don’t like the white going below the yellow line and I don’t like the stitched intersections where I have branches crossing, but I like the white.
I’m not going to fill it in with stitch, but I am going to sketch over it again with the white for a heavier line. When I force myself to make a decision like this, though, I always let things marinate for a while and then come back to them. I realize that it’s a part of my vacillation, but by waiting and re-assessing, I feel confident in my final decisions and can proceed with certainty to finish it up.
Have I done this and totally changed my mind? Yes, I have and un-sewing is a bitch! But making that outline and KNOWING what something is going to look like is much better than proceeding on a bad path and hating what you end up with….because un-sewing a huge amount of stitching is more than a bitch!
Grandson hockey will give me a good break from the studio and time to consider the next step. I’ll be ready to hit it hard when I get back to it.
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