Tuesday Sundries - Confetti

If you have any hobbies, non-work activities, those sort of things, often they come with their own set of special words. 

There is WIP - work in progress - which covers most of my addictions.  

Frogging is another, which means 'rip it-rip it' and also covers everything from sewing and quilting to knitting, crochet and cross stitch. 

But I recently learned a new to me word in conjunction with cross stitch - CONFETTI!

It's not the annoying bits of paper people mistakenly put in cards and letters thinking it's cute to open them and get the shit stuff everywhere so that you have to pull out the vacuum cleaner and actually (finally) run it over the carpet.

With cross stitching, it's the areas of single stitches of color all sprinkled together.

My two 'gateposts' above are an example of confetti. Pretty solid confetti, but still it's a ton of different colors. 

While switching out colors makes for an interesting design, it's also very tedious as you have to stitch a few and then swap out thread. It can make for a very long day of stitching.

Of course, it's better than huge areas of only one color that can become equally boring.

But it points out something really exciting to me - 

you never stop learning!  

I took my first quilting class in the early 1980's. There were no rotary cutters, acrylic rulers and probably the biggest debate was hand stitching or machine stitching a quilt. There were some pretty hard-core, hand stitching purists back then.

You made your own templates out or cardstock and traced around them with pencil or chalk. 

Over the decades came much simpler, quicker and accurate ways of cutting out pattern pieces and most people machine stitch now (unless you are doing EPP - English Paper Piecing).

So while I may be returning to my first love - needlework - there are still things to learn, even with an interest which is centuries old. 

That's a beautiful thing about life - you should never stop learning!