All posts for the month January, 2018

Squirrel Weekend?

I’ve spent my life chasing multitasking squirrels. In school my oldest and youngest children were referred for ADHD testing. I looked at the teachers and explained, the kids had tested negative, it is Mom who has issues. This means I have a tendency to jump from idea to idea and project to project with no rhyme or reason. Oh, hey, look it’s shiny….

In the last year, I completed coaching certification. I completed my Competent Communicator award from Toastmasters International (and competed in a speech competition). I took my dream vacation and rode the Carson County Carousel. And I got the offer to move to Georgia or find a new job. In April, my employment ends (with a possible extension to July). Squirrel?

This weekend I attended my very first writing conference. I learned a lot about the business of writing, didn’t ask “tell me more” from other attendees as often as I should have, dug out the 3 files of stories that I have stored in the cloud and realized there is only 1 page on each of them. I loved being at the conference even though I spent the weekend wondering what I was doing there and how it applied to me. The high point was meeting Richard Paul Evans and hearing about his writing process and his marketing process before Christmas Box became a best seller. I also got a great idea for a short, twisted, speculative fiction story from Stephanie Mabey (okay not from her but from one of her songs). But for some reason, I feel this entire weekend was chasing a shiny squirrel.

If I catch the squirrel, will it all make sense and come to a sensible conclusion? Even if it doesn’t, it has started some great conversations with my middle son (who loaned me a copy of his Neil Gaiman short story book) and I have an appointment with my oldest to attend the League of Utah Writers in February. I wonder if I will catch the squirrel there.

Working from a Backlog for Rotation.

Instead of setting up an hourly rotation this year, I set up my rotation slots based on accomplishing sections of the WIPs I’m working on completing.

We’re two weeks into the year and I’ve completed three stories and I’m working on the fourth. I’ve completed Cary Grant and Vivian Leigh in Stars for a new Millennium

Vivian Leigh

Cary Grant

January Fabulous Women

and I should finish the Into the Jungle January square this weekend so this month is really moving well and I like using the story method for determining when it’s time to rotate.

WIPocalypse Kickoff 2018

Introduce yourself, your projects, and any goals you have for the year!

Introduce Yourself

I’m Stasha and I am beyond SABLE (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy) I seem to be doing a lot of that lately. It’s the first question in a job interview. I have been a product manager for a software company for 4.5 years. They are closing my office and I chose not to relocate. That means I need a new job. But what you care about is who am I not what I do. I am a fiber artist: cross-stitch, needlepoint, beadwork, quilting, crochet, but I do not knit. I am the mother to three children who are adults and to round out the pack, we have 2 beagles. The snake, birds and lizard moved with my daughter. I’m very data driven and a firm believer in continual improvement.

Show us your WIPs

My WIP parade video

What are your plans for 2018

For years I’ve done my planning on an Excel spreadsheet. This year I moved to Sheets on Google because I’ve been having issues with Microsoft wanting me to subscribe to an office account in order to access my documents. I find this somewhat ridiculous because I bought the software, it wasn’t free, and I have plenty of storage space on devices with cloud backup. Therefore the move to Sheets. I lost some of the auto-formatting and color options because I haven’t learned how Sheets does them. You can see my plans for the year, HERE.

I’ve tried to include capacity planning this year but I still may have over committed. Last year I completed around 123,000 stitches and this year I’m looking at 236,366 stitches if I complete all three SALs (Class Schedule, Into the Jungle, and Fabulous Women), Stars for a New Millennium, 12 Rows on Anniversary Roses, Ecology, Dragon Ride, Summer Carousel Horse and Tempest.

If I get tired of TW since I have 3 of them in the latter part of my rotation, I will bring in Noah’s Sub or Tiger Lily and work on those. The plan is that the only new starts I will have will be the 2 new SALs from Armada Designs and Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. We’ll see how well that works since I have 40 kitted projects that call to me from time to time. The ultimate goal for this year is to have fewer WIPs at the end of the year than I had at the beginning.

The only plan I really had for how to rotate was to break the segments needed to finish each projects into smaller segments (called stories) and organize them by priority. It’s the 2nd page of my Sheets book titled- Backlog. Right now it’s looking like I work on SAL’s or cross-stitch during the week and then Stars on the weekend but it’s only the 2nd weekend of 2018 so we’ll see how that lasts.

Just So you Know