March Gifted Gorgeousness

Welcome again to my Gifted Gorgeousness for March, Jo's wonderful SAL after everything gifted and giftee! For me, it's usually a place to talk about my yarn work rather than my stitching, as I love to craft for family and friends, and they in turn like to gift me yarn. 

This month, I have to report a failure on my biggest goal...I did not make a lot of progress on my Snuggle Up blanket, and so it won't be done by it's one year mark on my birthday next week. I managed another two or three rounds, but it doesn't look much different, and I don't want to show it again before it's done! Hopefully in April. 

I did, however, finish one small gift, and that was a new pair of Jacobi Wristwarmers for my grandma, using the leftover yarn from my Hermione socks. I gave them to her for her birthday this week, but here they are on my own hands before I parted with them:

I've also done some crochet. Last time I showed you the start of an Amigurumi I was making...I have added a couple parts, but not as much as I had planned. Time just got away from me this month! Still, I could not resist starting yet another crochet project just this weekend. A friend had given me some super bulky yarn a while back, and I decided to use it and make a basket to hold some other yarn. Basically a win-win on the stash buster front! Here's my start, hopefully this won't take more than a few days, and also the collected parts of the blue Amigurumi:

Hermione Everyday Socks - Finished

I'm one of those people who have the bad habit to always craft for other people and not for myself, but last October, I finally started a pair of socks for myself! I've been working on them on and off, and as usual, the first sock took me about four months, and the second was done in less than two weeks!

I used a pattern I've been meaning to do for years, the Hermione's Everyday Socks by Erica Lueder. It's a wonderful pattern with just the right amount of texture to keep things interesting, while also being quick to knit and really pretty!

The yarn I used was Regia Premium Silk Color, a sock yarn with just a *touch* of silk to make it really nice and shiny and soft! I can highly recommend both the pattern and the yarn and might use both of them again.

March Fully Finished Gallery

I was really hoping to have something new finished for this SAL this month, but I'm having one of my worst stitching and blogging months in recent history (nothing dramatic, just a lot of other stuff going on), so I'll have to do a bit of recycling. So today we're talking about a project that has been on this blog before, but it's been finished after the last FFG so I think it still counts as 'new'! This is the Binary Heart I made for Valentine's Day this year:

As you can see I finished it in a hoop - I bought a whole bunch of these small ones a while back, and it's quickly becoming a favourite technique! As usual, the back was secured and cleaned with some felt, and I stuck with the colour scheme on the front:

I'm not sure if I've talked about that before, but the cute dotted aida was part of a set of ornament cut fabrics I got a while back. I'm never sure what do do with printed fabrics, but think this was a nice fit. 

So that's it for this month...hopefully, I'll have something more impressive for April!

The People Chose: Science

Well, I had a good run with hitting all my SAL dates this year, but I was bound to slip sooner or later! The March check in for Jo's wonderful all-purpose SAL was last Saturday, and this month's theme is 'Science'. 

So what does science have to do with stitching? Let's see. Some say baking is a science:

Genealogy can be a kind of science:

Potion brewing is a bit of a science - witchy chemistry!

Meterology is a science too!

February WIPocalypse

 Hello again! How nice of you to check in with my for the February check in of WIPocalypse this year. 

The question of the month is What stitch-a-longs (SALs) are you participating in this year? This year, I didn't start any new stitch-alongs, but I'll be trying to get caught up (read: finish) a couple that I started, sometimes years ago, and dropped along the way. Currently I'm working on the Jacquie SAL and hope to finish it in April or May. Blogwise, I'm just doing my usual four - WIPocalypse (this one), Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness and 'The People Chose' SAL, as well as Rachel's Fully Finished Gallery! Not super exciting, but I got my monthly routine and I like it. And even with just those four, I'm often struggling to get my posts up in time!

On the other hand, this SAL is my place to show my monthly progress on The Loneliness of Autumn by Lovy Thy Thread, which I am stitching at the steady pace of one length of floss a day (or the equivalent amount of lengths per month). Last month, I had just started the 825, a very pretty (and comperatively bright) blue. This month, I finished that, and most of the next colour, which is 920!

Of course the 920 isn't all that exciting and just filling in gaps in the existing brown and reddish colours, but just 103 stitches left and then I get to move on to 471, which will show up for sure as it's a nice light green! Whee. There will be a number of nice colours this year, and I'm very excited for each of them.

Current status is 81,861/118,800 stitches or 68.91% done, with 1,604 stitches added in February.

The Jacquie SAL - Part 5

I just sat down to work on my monthly part of the Jacquie SAL, and realized I never even showed you the part I finished in January! That won't do of course, so here we go. 

So in January I stitched part 5, and that covered the second main panel. It has a lot less stitching than the first panel, so it stitched up quickly, but I still think it's very pretty!

That leaves two panels, and me with a choice: I could do the easy version of the SAL, and that basically copies the first to panels, or the expert version, which is the same motifs, but with more specialty stitches and even some stump work. I'll keep you guessing, but I assume it's pretty obvious what I'm setting out to do!

Guardian of Wayfarers - 80 Hours

Guardian of Wayfarers is supposed to be my current focus project - I'm stitching it to give to a very dear friend - but the reality is, I hadn't touched it since September! For some reason or other, I was always working on something else, or there was something that needed working on, however you want to put it.

But now, after months of negligence, I'm finally back with my favourite dragon, and loving it!

I spent ten hours, mostly on the red and brown leaves, and aren't they gorgeous? Each colour looks so drab and boring on its own, but when they all come together, wow! I also completed the upper left quadrant and am working into the upper right now, so there will be some more foliage and trees in my near future, and I'm very much looking forward to it! 

Currently, this project is at 13,235 stitches or 35.85% (that's including back stitch, of which there will be quite a bit) and I'm hoping to get to 50% before I get too distracted again. We'll see how that goes!