It's the most wonderful week of the year!

It's Stitchy Planning Week! Long-time readers are nodding their heads, new readers are wondering what all the fuss is about. If you need to catch up on this most wonderful tradition of mine, you can check out this post and this one. It's that time of year when I take a whole week to wallow in my stash and plan for the next year's stitching. It's so fun. It's only  the first day, so I haven't plunged headfirst into my stash yet, but I do have a few ideas for next year that I've been chewing on for a while.

I'm feeling the need to snuggle down and do some wintry stitches early in the year. Not Christmas, but winter. I love winter, but my stitching focus always seems to be Christmas, and I did Christmas ornaments all year this year. So winter it is. I've got a couple more small Christmas projects I'd like to finish up before the New Year first, though. I did manage to get my 2019 ornament stitched, and hope to get it finished this week. This is from the 2019 Just Cross Stitch Christmas Ornament issue. I stayed close to the original thread colors, but swapped them out for DMC Etoile so it would be really sparkly. The fabric is sparkly, too.

I also haven't stitched any Halloween in a very long time, and I've got a backlog of cute designs that need attention. Halloween here in our new neighborhood is a big deal and we had such a nice evening with oodles of little trick-or-treaters, it really made me want to do some new Halloween projects. So I hit upon a theme for my summer stitching: Summer of Halloween! Just Halloween, all summer. I think that'll be fun. I spend all summer looking forward to fall anyway! Mr. Wonderful knew I was planning this, and made sure there were a handful of beautiful fallish threads in my Christmas stocking!

I think I'll also finally tackle my dream project, Russian Hunt. If you've been here for a while, you'll remember this project that was supposed to be a New Year start a couple of years ago (here are a few posts about it). I ran into a couple of delays and never got going on it, but I'd like to take another run at it. 

So those are a few of my ideas for next year, and I'm sure I'll be adding to them as the week goes on. If you'd like to begin a Stitchy Planning Week tradition of your own but think there's no way you can manage to take a week during the holidays for it, don't think you can't do it at all. Keep in mind: 1) it doesn't have to be a whole week, and 2) it doesn't have to be during the holidays. Adapt it to whatever you need it to be. If January is much slower for you, do it in January. If summers are better, do it in the summer. Do it for your birthday. If a week is too long, make it a Stitchy Planning Weekend. It's so much fun to drag out all your stash and play with it and plan projects. Make it a tradition just for you. 

I'm off to spend the week in my sewing room! Stay tuned for SPW updates!