Obligation Stitching

I just love giving friends & family handmade gifts especially for those big occasions but I hate working to deadlines, even self imposed ones. Over the years my friends & family have come to accept that special gifts from me arrive years after the event which the gift was originally intended for example my sisters wedding gift is yet to be finished and she & BIL will celebrate 6 years of marrage in September and my niece will turn 3 in September and her birth sampler is still a WIP. However, my oldest friend (I met her when I was 6 months old) is getting married in the summer and I am determined that she will get a specially stitched gift in the year that her wedding takes place. Originally I had promised myself that it would be done by her wedding day but I have been putting off starting it since the start of the year. I have finally come to the conclusion that the reason that I am putting off starting it is because I absolutley hate stitching on a piece which has to be done by a particular date and the feelings of guilt which come when I end up either stitching on something else or miss the deadline. So in an effort to make this piece a more enjoyable project to stitch and in an attempt to finish the piece sometime before Christmas (which is when I would like to be able to give the piece to my friend) I have decided to set up a rotation. I have broken the wedding gift down into 12 parts and once I have finished each part I shall stitch on a different project for 10 hours (about a weeks worth of stitching) before going back to the wedding gift (WG). Hopefully this will see the gift finished before the end of 2006 as I have estimated that each 12th of the WG will take about 20 hours to stitch and I think there are 36 weeks left till the end of the year. In order to also make progress towards finishing other projects I have decided that I will pick 4 projects for the in-between times. That way I should get to stitch each of the in-between projects 3 times before finishing the WG. Now I just have to decide which 4 projects to choose.