Guardian of Wayfarers - Finished!

I had originally planned to talk about this with my WIGO report, but decided it deserved its very own post after all. On September 20th, whilte at the Stitch Basel retreat, I finished The Guardian of Wayfarers by Nadezhda Gavrilenkova aka PatternNadGavr after two and a half years and 224 hours of stitching!

It was a fairly big stitch for me, clocking in at almost 40k stitches including back stitch, but I have to say I enjoyed every minute of i. The colours are so nice and almost glowing on the fabric. Finishing this at a retreat, getting to ring the bell and having everyone oh and ah over it just made it more special. 

Now I handed it off to Felix to figure out the framing...but I think I'm going to help him pick out a frame first, or it'll never happen!

The Waterflow Sweater

As a little side note in between more recent updates, I wanted to show you something I finished much earlier this year, in April to be exact. I never managed to get a good picture of it as it was always too warm to wear it, but now it's cooling downit's finally time to shine for my Waterflow Sweater!

I just love asymetrical sweaters, so when I saw this pattern on Hobbii, I knew I wanted to make it. Then the yarn (which is a gorgeously shiny viscose/wool mix) was on a really good sale last winter, so I treated myself and started this around new year. I worked on it ins purts here and there and finally finished it all about four months later. And now I get to wear it and am very happy with it!

September WIPocalypse

Can you believe we're into the last quarter of the year already? Time sure is flying! I had a wonderful stitching September, not least of all thanks to Stitch Basel, which I attended with two of my very good online stitching friends, and had a blast! My stitchy bug had been super charged ever since, and I will have some progress and finishes (and new starts!) to show very soon! For now, though, it's time for WIPocalypse, and I am a little sad to report that over all the other stitchy endeavours, I didn't find time to work on The Loneliness of Autumn in September. I hope to make up for that soon! So today, I will only talk about the question of the month as well as the currently running focus challenge.

For the question of the month - How did you learn to stitch? I must have been about seven or eight years old, and we did at little embroidery at school. I think we embroidered tote bags with perle floss and little stars. I really enjoyed the process and my grandma, ever supportive of my crafty endeavours, got me a printed cross stitch breadcloth and pink perle floss, and after I finished that, for summer vacation, I got a cross stitch book and some aida fabric and Anchor floss and that kept me busy the whole vacation. My grandma didn't stitch, so other than what I did at school, I pretty much taught myself from that book!

For WIPocalypse, October is a focus month challenge, so we pick a project and try and work on it a little each day. Traditionally, I pick my oldest WIP for this, and if you've been reading along for a while, you might recall that I got one more really old table cloth from my very early stitching days. This one had a little more stiching than the last two, so I kept it until now. It looks like this - times four:

Ideally, I'd like to finish this side, so I can try and do one side during each focus month from now on, but I find it hard to estimate the number of stitches and now my progress will be slow on the printed fabric, so I'm not sure yet if it will be feasible. We will see at the October checkin how much I got done!

September Gifted Gorgeousness

For our monthly SAL of all things gifted and giftee, hosted by the lovely Jo, I am still hard at work on my various baby gifts. This month I have one finish and two works in progress, but the latter are in a messy state of lots of loose ends and I'm going to wait a bit longer until I show them. The finish is the one I already showed in a messy state last time - my little frog!

Both Frog and Monkey are with their new little owners now, who both seemed very happy (well, the big sister did, the little brother is a little young yet to seem happy about gifts!)

I already started the next of these animals, a little mouse, and also worked a bit more on my baby blanket, but as I said, those will be a thing for next month, hopefully. See you around!

September WIPGO

I just realized September is more than halfway gone (gasp) and I haven't yet told you about my WIPGO goals and progress! 

For August, I hit my goal of ten hours on Things Unseen - in fact, I made it 12 hours, as I had only 8 on the counter and wanted to get to a clean 20. I basically addad anything below the text, the bees, flower basket and some border. Aren't those flowers pretty? They are what drew me to this design in the first place!

I also did not just 10, but 20 hours on Guardian of Wayfarers, as I had been carrying along an additional called goal on that one. It went from 79 to 87% done and just look how close I got to finishing the cross stitch! Of course I have worked on it again in the meantime, but any progress I made this month will have to remain a surprise yet.

For September, the numbers called were 11 and 4 - another round of Guardian, and the oldest WIP on the board, Peacock Tapestry!

Yes, it's been many years since I worked on this, and it would be nice to put in a couple hours, get closer to finish that border!

So that's the plan for this month. I'm also going to be at Stitch Basel this weekend, so hope to get a good chunk done, have a couple new starts and a LOT of fun! If any of you are around, come say hi!

August Smalls SAL

Remember the little blotch of blue I showed for my failed July checkin to the Smalls SAL as hosted by our dear Rachel? Well, is is a blotch no more, and instead has been finishe into this lovely flower - it's July's Larkspur from a Flower of the Month sampler by Kooler Design Studios:

This is going to be a mini birth sampler for my little niece who was born this July, so I still need to chart and stitch her name and birthdate, but I'm going to blur those out when showing it online anyways, so might as well share it now! 

August WIPocalypse

Welcome to August WIPocalpyse, were we stitch as if it's the end of the world! I'm checking in with Measi the Geeky Witch, our host for this SAL for...basically ever (at least longer than I have my blog). The question of the month is Do you belong to any stitching groups or guilds (either in person or virtual)? If so, tell us about them. I don't belong to any organized groups or guilds, but have several seperate groups of stitching friends that have formed over the years. There is my original group from back when I started blogging and discovered the wonderful world of online stitching communities on deviantArt, but most of them are not all that active anymore online. katjykay still checks in with WIPocalypse semi-regularly though, and of course many of you know Ashley aka PinkyThePink!
I also consider our little bloggoverse here a group of stitching friends, namely the regulars who check in with Jo's SALs and bloghops throughout the year.
And lastely, my newest stitchy home is a group of stitchers from the 'Stitchy Quest to Destroy the one ring' facebook group that came together on Discord during the pandemic, when many of us felt lonely and isolated. It's not quite the same constallation as back then - some have left, some have joint in the years since - but we've become quite the tight knit group, and two of them will join me in real life for Stitch Basel this month!

As we are moving closer to autumn, naturally I start thinking about my stitching goals for the year, and what still seems reasonable to reach at this point. One of my big (hopeful, but not actuall important) goals for the year was to finish The Loneliness of Autumn, my regular WIPocalypse project. At this point I can say with confidence that is not going to happen; as I neglected it way too much throughout the year in favour of different goals - I still hope to make a little progress, but won't burn myself out trying to push for anything. In August, I managed another page finish (or actually two, but one was a partial page and barely ten stitches wide), and thus finished the second row of pages on this design. I was only missing some very scattered about stitches for this, so actually only did a little over a hundred stitches this month. Hopefully, the next row should bring some actual progress in stitch numbers, as there are a couple larger areas left to in, and not just confetti stitches!

 

My new total is 101,356/118,800 stitches, or 85.32%. Not much of a progress, but every stitch counts!

Measi has also reminded us that October will be a new One-Stitch-a-Day challenge, so I want to finalize my plans for that. As usual, I am torn between using the opportunity to really press for a finish (or progress) on a focus piece, or revive an old project that has been neglected for far too long. Currently, I am leaning towards focusing on Guardian of Wayfarers, which is getting awfully close to a finish - depending on my progress in September, focusing on this in October might mean a finish, and leave me free for other projects the last two months of the year...still pondering, though!