A Mermaid and two Unicorns

 I didn't post about my Magical Creature Sampler in July, but I did stitch on it - so now you are getting a double feature! 

In July, I added Marina, the Mermaid. By what I am sure is sheer coincidence, she looks an awful lot like Ariel from the Disney movie...but she got some different friends, a jelly fish and an angler fish. Very summery and cute! 

 

In July, we got two new additions -  Rainbow Dust and Plum Sparkle, the Unicorns. I don't think there are Unicorns anywhere in the mainstream Disney movies, so no one to compare these to. These were so much fun to stitch, just look at all the pretty colours!

 I'm still really enjoying this sampler and looking forward to the next section to stitch in September. Hope you are too!

 

The Puppeteer - Row 1 done

 Over the last couple months, I've been picking up The Puppeteer (my most done full coverage design at this point) here and there. You might remember I stitched all the black in the design years ago, which got me to about 50% done, and now I am filling in all the other colours per page. I recently finished the first row of pages, which was going pretty quickly because there is a LOT of black going on.

 

Row 2 will be a little more work, but I'm also looking forward to seeing more of these spooky colours show up. 57.94% done now - I'll try to give it some more love this year to eventually push towards a finish! 

July WIPocalypse

 Let me make use of a rare break between heat waves to get out my WIPocalypse checkin for July...just *slightly* late! This will be a short one, and without pictures, but I got some pretty things coming up to update you on soon! 

So the question for July was What is your comfort zone regarding the number of projects to have kitted and in progress at any one time? Great question! I am currently in the process of figuring that out. I do not care about kitted projects - got a ton of these and I'll get to them when I get to them - but as for works in progress, I can only tell you that 53 is not the number, as I still feel a bit uncomfortable with that! I *think* below 50 (all crafts combined) will be better, but ideally, I'd like to see a number so I can actually work on everything in a year, and not keep smaller, quicker projects around for ages, so probably somewhere around 30?

So I already spoiled it, but my total number of WIPs is still sitting firm at 53. I finished the mimic, but started another crochet thing (that will be done soon), and as I got a long to do list of stuff to make for family and friends I am pretty sure each finished one will be swiftly replaced by a new one for a while yet. So if I want to get the number further down, I will have to work on a couple older things! There are a few candidates for being finished soon, though, so I am hopeful we can dipp to 52 or 51 in August. Fingers crossed! 

Don't touch these dice!

I don't know if I've told you before, but for about two years, I've been playing both D&D and DSA (the German equivalent) with various groups, and really loved it! For my birthday this year, I even got a book of D&D crochet patterns, and there are lots of fun things in there I want to make. One of the first things I started and finished isn't for me, but for a good friend. Meet Friedrich, the Mimic!

 Issn't he cute?! He's got a bit of an overbite, but that's okay. He needs a big mouth to eat all those pesky adventurers who are after his dice!

 So cool! Lots of fun things going on here, from the whole chest being stabilized by plastic canvas, over a wire-supported tongue, to magnets in the closures to keep this mouth shut. I had tons of fun making him!

Pattern is from 'Dungeons & Dragons Crochet: A Book of Many Patterns'.  

Fiery Phoenix

 I was off work sick the last two days, and while I was feeling truely miserable yesterday, this afternoon I was feeling a lot better, so will be back at work tomorrow - but that still gave me a window of a couple hours to actually make some crafting progress, AND even get up and iron my latest finish!

I've shown you a progress picture of my phoenix already, but here she is in all her finished glory!

 I might have been worried about my fabric choice in the beginning, but now I am SO glad I went bold. Still, it's a *tad* stressfull to work on something for 37 hours before you know your choice was correct haha! Now I have to think about how to frame her...do I go with simple black? Do I make it even more bold? What do we think?

Fiery Phoenix by NeedleLotDesign, on 32ct Murano 'Devil's Kiss' my xJuDesign. 

June WIPocalypse

 It's finally cooled down a bit, and I'm hoping to be able to catch up on some things! One of which is this WIPocalypse check in that I am...somewhat late for. Well. 

The question of the month was Half-year recap:  How are you doing with your goals so far this year? My goal for the year was to get from 58 WIPs down to below 50, and it's actually going quite well! In June, I finished the Phoenix (just need to give it a nice good iron...and couldn't bring myself to do that during the heat wave, but it's also on the list for this week!) and scrapped one WIP - it was Magical's Sampler SAL, which is never going to get finished due to her indefinit hiatus. So I finally decided to just bin it, and gave what was left of that fabric (a not quite evenly woven linen) away to a friend who wanted to try embroidery. That's technically two WIPs down, but I also decided to add my two small-ish crochet WIPs to the official count as they are taking longer than I thought. Will show them to you soon. So we remain stable at 53, which is still more than half way there!

I am especially proud of myself for getting the number of WIPs down without denying myself any new starts or just going for the quick wins - in fact, I have made a ton of progress on some of my bigger WIPs this year, as well! It's a nice balance, and I am hoping to continue this trend for what remains of the year (although I got a gigantic list of gift crafting plans again, oh my.). That's it for today, posts with pictures coming up soon! 

Poison Garden Part 9-13

 Is anyone else really struggling to stay productive in this heat wave? I'm fine slowly melting on my couch, binging some TV show and stitching, but staying on top of everything else - including blog reading and writing - has become a chore. I think I am slowly getting used to this and feeling more productive, however! So here I am, trying to catch up on some things I've been up to.

I've been slowly working on my Poison Garden - most of this stitching happened in May and June, although one page was finished last August (I just didn't want to post it for just one page back then). Here are all the pages I finished since you last saw this:

 This is all the stitching on this project finished! Now I still have the quite elaborate finish-finishing left to do, but my desk is currently covered in another miniature project I'm working on, so it will have to wait a while longer!