Festina lente

Or how not to tackle your homework, in 20 easy stages.

1. Try coral stitch on the hillside.
2. Decide coral stitch doesn’t work and unpick it.
3. Decide the hand-dyed habotai silk [HDHS – or HADES as Livewriter’s spell check would have it] you used for the hillside is now a mess because of all the unpicking.
4. Remove viaduct and hillside.
5. Look for more HDHS and find the turquoise dupion silk you had originally intended to use for the hillside but couldn’t find at the time.
6. Swither about which to use.
7. Decide on dupion.
8. Replace habotai with dupion. 
9. Find some turquoise embroidery floss in your stash, and add the blue-violet you bought specially for the HDHS to the stash that you are trying to reduce.
10. Try horizontal bands of running stitch in a sort of Morse code pattern [dot-dash–dot-dot-dot dash etc.] and decide you like it.
11. Try it on the hillside but on the diagonal and decide you don’t like it.
12. Put it all on one side and go off to finish your sari silk bowl [SSB] – which is not homework.
13. Decide that because you decided to restrict the colour scheme on the SSB you will need more SS and make emergency trip to the Hillier Gardens.
14. Find it difficult to find another hank in the colours you need but buy the closest – and another hank because it’s pretty – at considerable expense.
15. Have tea and cake at Hillier Gardens – at rather less expense.
16. Come home, work on bowl and decide that you would have had enough from the original hank.
17. Finish bowl, with the addition of a junk CD
18. Go on line and discover that you can get sari silk a lot cheaper – but obviously you don’t get to choose your hank.
19. Drink glass of white wine too quickly.
20. Return to viaduct embroidery – maybe…