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Falling in Love with Wasps:
I fell in love with wasps the first time I saw one -- they have such an elegant and delicate flower shape. I'm working on several different wasps right now -- a yellow wasp, a red wasp, an improved green-edged white wasp, and a fantasy wasp. The yellow has been the toughest so far, but I'm hopeful that the batch of seedlings that I'm growing out right now might have the first one or two hopefuls.
My ideal wasp right now would be a bright solid yellow blossom held high above very dark green, red-backed foliage and maybe throw in some pink or blue fantasy specks just for fun. I'd guess that this is still three or four crosses off in the future from where I'm at right now.
Wasps and bustled foliage seem to be linked very tightly genetically. I have yet to see a plant with bustled foliage that did not have a wasp flower, although I do have several plants that have wasp flowers with non-bustled or minimally-bustled foliage. Bustled foliage is very interesting and pretty to look at, but usually does not form a well-behaved rosette. Most of my hybridizing with wasps right now is with the non-bustled foliage in the hopes of getting a plant that has both wasp flowers and well-behaved foliage. I don't personally show African Violets, but it would be nice to have some wasp varieties that behave well enough to be shown should someone want to.  There are a couple of my new wasp varieties that I would like to register with AVSA in the near future -- one is the green-edged white wasp (pictured on the background of this article), and the other is a girl-foliage wasp that forms a nice rosette and holds the blossoms up nice and high. There are a few others that I'm still growing out before deciding.
Hybridizing Goals:
I'm a big fan of exotic looking violets. I'm presently working on heavily lobed girl foliage. Solid yellow flowers are up there at the  top of the list, and a solid yellow wasp is at the very top. As far as non-wasps go, I'm working on yellows, bell-shaped blossoms, longifolia and 'Project X' -- sorry, can't say any more about it than that right now! Alchemy Gold The mechanics of hybridizing are really pretty simple. Get some pollen to the right place at the right time, and there you have it. I think that what is most important is to have a specific goal in mind when you start, and to be willing and able to throw out lots and lots of plants that don't meet that goal. Limited shelf space is great at forcing that discipline on you. That being said, if something really special comes along that was not part of the original goal, don't miss it!
MOST of my crosses are goal oriented -- that is, one parent has one trait, the other parent has another and hopefully a couple of the seedlings or the F2s will have both traits. Some of my crosses, though, are intentionally done as pure curiosities. I like to take two very different plants and cross them just to see what will come up. Some of my favorite plants have come from these 'what if' crosses.
Except in cases where I'm growing specifically for foliage (longifolia in my case) I do grow almost all of my plants out from seed to full bloom. It usually takes four to six months from pollination to viable seed, and then another three to six months to first bloom. Most of my plants are either semi-minis or minis, so I don't ever throw one out just for being small. If I have a plant that is not growing well or appears to be stunted, I'll usually repot it or put down a leaf just to see if it is the plant itself or how I was growing it that was the problem.
I'm amazed at how often violets will mutate or sport, and at how much material there is out there to work with. I love setting a hybridizing goal, picking the 'parents', and growing out the crosses to get to there, but one of the very best parts of hybridizing are the unexpected 'gems' that pop up from time-to-time that had absolutely nothing to do with the original goal.
I've had a few unexpected and interesting results along the way -- the most recent, and one I'm still growing out to see where it goes, is a girl-leaf violet that branches. Some of the leaves have branched as many as five times already. Each successive branch grows a couple more leaves that in turn, branch themselves. It may be a dead-end genetically, though, since it has yet to flower. I've put down a few leaves to see if I can force a flower using a bloom-booster fertilizer. When hybridizing wasps, you never know what you will get. Wasps come in LOTS of different shapes -- some have petals that  look like long, skinny tubes with flared ends ('horned' wasps), some have the typical wasp petals, but they refuse to open up completely (quite frustrating when you can see that the inside is just what you were shooting for!), and others can't decide whether to be wasps or just plain old pansies. And just like the yellows, it seems that my favorite ones are always the ones that are most difficult to use in crosses. The other difficult thing with wasps is that the foliage is often bustled which means that it will not form a nice even rosette. 
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