A win-win situation

Back in 2008, my ANG chapter kicked off an outreach project. For this project, each member was invited to stitch one or more hearts to be given to cancer patients at a local hospital. I decided to use purple, since this is the ribbon color for pancreatic cancer (much as pink is the ribbon color for breast cancer). Since two of my grandparents died of this horrible disease, purple it was! The picture on the right shows the heart I stitched then.

Our chapter's initial donation of 25 hearts (give or take a few) were a great success. The cancer center gave them to patients having an especially tough day, and the recipients were touched that complete strangers would make something like this for them.

Now, the cancer center has reported that they've run out of the hearts, and the chapter has decided to continue the project for as long as members are willing to make hearts.

If you'll recall, one of my goals for this year is to decrease my WIP count. I'd pretty much settled on the finish-two-start-one plan, but sometimes that means a LONG wait to start the next project. So, I've changed my plan. Now, after every finish, I'm stitching a heart for the cancer outreach project. In other words, the plan is now

• finish one WIP
• start and finish a heart
• finish another WIP
• start and finish another heart
• start something NEW!

Talk about a win-win situation. This lets me continue the WIP reduction, while scratching the itch to start something new and get another quick finish, all while contributing to our outreach project.

In addition, I've decided to use stash threads (primarily Caron's Watercolours for now) while trying out some new-to-me stitches. Since I finished a project earlier this week, I started one of the hearts. Stay tuned for a report on my thread and stitch choices!