In a room upstairs where few dare to enter (because it is the storage room and there is a real danger of being knocked out by boxes of Jiffy bags or spring shackles tumbling down from their precariously balanced stacks) there is a chest of drawers. Like all chests of drawers, it has a bottom drawer. Unlike most chests of drawers, its bottom drawer is haunted. It houses the Ghosts of Projects Past.

I love designing, but not everything I design gets stitched. Well, not immediately. There are designs which have been waiting for years to be tried out in fabric and thread. There is only so much stitching time, after all. They do get some attention, though, as they tend to get tweaked every now and again while waiting to be stitched.

I love stitching, but not everything I stitch gets finished. I don’t mean I stop before the last stitch (although that happens too, occasionally), I mean it doesn’t get Finished. Those of you who have followed FoF for a while will know that I am not one of nature’s Finishers. When the last stitch is in, the project gets photographed for my records and then stored. In, you’ve got it, the Haunted Bottom Drawer. A few of them get framed, a few get made into ornaments, one or two are mounted on boxes, but most of them languish forgotten, poor ghosts wailing accusingly at me whenever I open the drawer to put in a new companion.

So it is with awe and admiration that I open my monthly email from Sheryl, one of the stitchers participating in the Round In Circles SAL. Not only does she stitch the monthly design, but she immediately makes it into something beautiful and useful. So far there have been two ornaments, a tape measure cover, a purse, a needlebook and a rosary bag. Others have sent in Finishes, and very pretty they are too, but none so consistently as Sheryl, whom I hereby crown Queen of SAL Finishers!

Now perhaps I should get one or two of those ghosts out…