HAED Plans

 Currently I am working on "Winter Wings ' by Nene Thomas - an old retired chart so it's an "old school " wip with a paper chart and self gridded fabric 

Those colors! That owl! I love working on this one and it has the most progress of all my full coverage wips. And with the new magnifying light I'm really enjoying it again. 

Which led to an overall sorting of the other HAEDs and plans for some future starts thereof.

Plan #1. Getting pre gridded fabric. I have several "bucket list" patterns that I want to start, and several of these are by Josephine Wall- so that's a riot of color and confetti stitching. I think using the pre gridded fabric for those types is a must. So I ordered a yard and it should be here after Xmas. 

Plan #2. I now have all my HAED pdfs loaded into Pattern Keeper and ready to go. As for the retired paper charts it's impossible to get them as a PDF so I'm not going to worry about it, nor am I going to replace all my paper charts with digital and buy the same patterns twice. 

Though I admit that I have done so for several Josephine Wall and a couple Laurie Prindle- I figure that they'll be easier using Pattern Keeper. 

Plan #3. "Old school " HAED projects. They need some attention! And waited long enough really. It would be nice to get some of these old beauties started.

Plan #4. I ve long been searching/ collecting charts that actually look like my horses. It'd be awesome to get these going and have a sort of "stable" of horse projects 

Plan #5. Managing "Max Color" projects. Several of my patterns are this, and I hear the detail and shading is incredible. But managing 250 colors, (average) is going to take some thinking.  Right now my HAEDs floss just lives in a big zip lock bag for each project. I really don't wanna bobbin. But at the same time would like there to be some sort of easy access instead of searching through a pile of thread. I dunno- I'll have to see how other people wrangle such an amount of thread colors.

The other thing too, is since several of the Max Colors are Jo Wall projects- couldn't they just share and replace skeins as needed. I don't think any would have giant blocks of color where dyelots would be a big issue.  So I might just try that for them. It would be nice to have them all be sort of thier own special collection and stored together. We'll see, some of the patterns/ colors are very obviously seasonal, but here is where it'd be helpful to see what others have done. 

Plan #6. Actually this involves all my stitching, and that is finding a fun and motivated way to prompt more progress. I have the old LOTR "Stitch to Mordor" plan printed out, and theres a bunch of Facebook groups themed around fun stitching prompts. The trouble is that my stitching is sporadic throughout the year depending on what farming schedules are. The other factor is the Facebook groups tend to have alot of complicated steps to participate. I loved the Harry Potter themed one from a few years back, wish I had printed out the prompts for it to just do my own thing; but drama crept in the group and that got all scrambled, and in the end I couldn't keep up or do "points" and keep up with the team I was assigned to. I've since found a Disney themed prompt group and it looks fun but in January they switch to a different theme that I'm not into and would not be familiar with the prompts they'd have. So there's that. I wish there would be a Harry Potter, Jane Austen, or fairy tales type of prompt group, and perhaps there is and I just don't know about it. Which honestly wouldn't surprise me cuz so often I'm out of the loop anymore.  But if I can't find one, I'll just do the LOTR one on my own. Though naturally it's more fun and motivation in a group.