As Sae has said in her last post, time has really just whizzed by so fast! I feel as if it was just yesterday that I said to her "Do a HAED too, we'll race." And now, we're less than half a day away from the start of our 5 year competition.

Over the weekend, I gridded my cloth. Sae suggested using a water soluble pen so I went and got one. I tested it on another bit of cloth, drew it on, wiped it with a damp cloth and the mark went away. However, after about an hour, it came right back! So I decided to dump that idea and went back to good ol' pencils.

Here's a pic of my gridding, it looks so nice and neat that its made me really itchy to start:


I also cut off the excess cloth and taped the edges with masking tape to prevent fraying. I also organised all the threads into two boxes with compartments according to the DMC numbers. There's a whole lot of purple! Here's more pics of my preparations:

One more thing I've done to gear up for this race is to set up a savings account for the monthly USD$20 that we'll be putting aside as prize money. I hunted around a little bit and decided on HSBC's Serious Saver. Mainly because I already have a HSBC account and the interest is at 7.5% for every month that I don't make any withdrawals. So it sounds pretty perfect for this purpose. It'll take about 5 days til I get access to the account, but 5 days loss of interest isn't that much. Especially when Sae's account is only going to be generating 3.9%.

Another little prep I've done is to pick out the first 5 colours that I'll need and separate out each strand, all ready to be threaded into a needle. I might thread all 5 colours onto 5 different needles. I can do that tonight before midnight.

I really can't wait to get started! I'll get a 2 hour headstart on Sae, but she's got all of tomorrow off so she'll definitely beat me this week. But we have 5 years to go so slow and steady wins the race!