The People Chose: Outer Space

Being away last weekend, I missed Jo's wonderful all-purpose SAL (but who am I kidding, I wouldn't have posted on time anyways!), so here we go. This month the theme was Outer Space, and I believe that's not really a 'classic' stitching theme...at least not for me! I went through my pictures and found just three, including one WIP and one knitting project.

First, this is Dark Forces, which is of course from Star Wars and set in a galaxy far, far away - this is the cover picture as I only got about 24% of the actual stitching done:

This is the Hitchhiker, inspired by the famous book by Douglas Adams (and because it has a total of 42 'spikes' on the one side):

And last but not least, there is Blood Moon from Unconvential XStitch:

So not a lot to show all in all, and I don't even think I got a lot of outer space patterns, even on my wish lists, either! So I'm very curious to see what everyone else might have pulled out for the occasion.

2022 Summer Blog Hop

Welcome to the 2022 summer blog hop! I'm scheduling this post in advance, as I will be traveling home from a weekend away on the day off, so hopefully, this post should appear on Monday, the 8th. I will add a link to the blog hop itself so you can check out other participants as soon as I can. Update: Link!

For this blog hop, Jo has assigned each of us a secret stitching friend. We are to post a short description of said friend without mentioning their name, and show some stitching we think they might like. So here we go...

My stitching friend is actually a bit of a celebrity as she co-hosts a long-running stitching show on Youtube. She herself practices many different kind of embroidery, from cross stitch over crazy quilting on to proper needle point. Lately, she seems to have been drawn to big sampler style projects, and one can often spot chocolaty snacks in her stitchy pictures! Who could I be talking about?

As she has stitched a couple Mill Hill designs herself, I hope she will enjoy seeing Sophie the Sheep which I stitched and framed several years ago. Still haven't figures out who I've been talking about? Click here and find out!

Hufflepuff Pride Socks - Finished!

So you already know about my happy dance on The Puppeteer, where I finished all the black - the other mayor happy dance moment I had towards the end of July was finishing my badger socks!

Last time you saw them, they were here, I had just finished the leg and was getting ready to dive into the foot:

So anyone who's knitted socks knows that the foot comes in several small sections. At least it comes in this pattern, and it's kind of fun to work through one after the other (and very rewarding to throw out each corresponding page of the pattern, as this is the second sock and I don't need them anymore! - don't worry, it's a digital pattern, so I still have it if ever required...). And suddenly things went very, very quickly, and just over 81 hours the seemingly endless socks were all done, and with plenty of time to travel to Norway before it gets cold!

In fact, it took me some self-conquest to actually put on the socks in the heat, but you deserve to seen them on actual feet!

I'm very proud of my accomplishment and want to do more colourwork knitting in the future, but I'm also happy to not knit another badger again soon, thank you very much :D

July WIPocalypse

The second half of July went by in a flash, and now it's time for WIPocalypse again - and in a rare occurrence the last day of the month falls on the last Sunday of the month, so I get to post on time, woo! Did you have a good stitching month? I'm actually pretty pleased with myself, and one of the reasons I will get to show off today. First, though, there is the question of the month - What five patterns do you really want to purchase (or start) right now? I think we've had this question before, but I tried to find five all new patterns that I haven't showed before. I didn't quite check, but I think these will do the trick! A good mix of want to start and want to buy, I think.

1) Circular Logic by Ink Circles - top of my list because I picked up some super pretty Silk4U fibres I want to try out! However, I'm reserving purchasing & starting this pattern for a special occasion, so not quite yet.

2) Encanto by Cloudfactory - just picked this one up in their Christmas in July sale. I love their whole Disney series and eventually want to purchase and stitch all of them, but Encanto is my new favourite Disney movie so it only seemed appropriate to start with this one.

3) Moonlight by SmartyOwl - I recently discovered this on Etsy and I'm kind of obsessed with both the way this designer uses specialty stitches and the soft colours and....kind of everything! I think I'll soon cave and buy this one.

4) Piggy in the Middle by Bothy Threads - This one was a gift from my grandma recently, I believe it was last Christmas. It's high up on my list of 'wanna' start because I just adore all the Wrendale designs, and this on is especially cute!

 5) This pillow from Vervaco was another gift, a birthday gift from a dear friend. After finish-finishing my first pillow not too long ago I wouldn't mind having a second one, and these two bunnies are just so cute, aren't they?

Maybe next time this prompt comes up, I will remember to look back here and see how many of them I started in the meantime! But now, moving on from theoretical to actual stitching. Every month I share my progress on The Loneliness of Autumn, which I am SALing with Rachel. She hasn't touched hers in a while but has plans to get back into it in August, so fingers crossed for her! I, on the other hand, had a very productive month with this in June, adding a total of 2922 stitches! That included the entirety of 1663 stitches of 78, and a good deal of the 1599 stitches of gorgeous 720! A lovely, rich orange that was so much fun to stitch (and will for the 300 something stitches I still got to do).

My new total is 67240/118800 stitches, or 56.60%. After the 720 we're moving on 762 which doesn't sound all that exciting on its own (especially not to us used to the TW colour palette!) but will fill in some of the as of yet blank spaces, so that's kind of nice too!

But wait, there's more - July was another one of WIPocalypse's challenge focus months, and for the last two years I've used these to finish the black on The Puppeteer. And this month, after putting in another 1668 stitches, I finally did!

Tadaa! So proud I managed to finish this colour, more than 60,000 stitches of black! But I'm not continuing this one in extreme cross country style. I'm really looking forward to filling in the blanks with all the missing colours. In fact, I already did so for the first page, which was missing just under 600 stitches:

The purple photographs a little weirdly, but I'm sure is one of those 'looks great from a distance' things. Not sure how I'll continue with this now, focus wise, but think I'd like to try to finish the first row of pages this year, which all don't need too much more stitches. We'll see. For now, let's head into August with a lot of stitchy goals, and see what we can accomplish!

July Gifted Gorgeousness

This month, I wasn't quite as productive on my gift projects - no new baby gifts started or finished - but I did work on my big project that was a gift TO me, and that is the Snuggle Up blanket. Every part takes a little longer than the last one, so it's taking up more and more of my crochet time, but I still hope to finish an other gift or two in for next month! For now, here is Snuggle Up up to part 5 - it's getting hard to get a picture of the complete blanket, at least without getting my toes in there!

Another really fun pattern - it made the edge a little wavy because there was a lot of increasing and decreasing, but I think it'll even out after the next pattern or two. 

The next three parts will form the next pattern together, so the next two months might not look like much on their own...we'll see. Hopefully, they will still be fun to crochet, though!

Bellatrix - 30 Hours

This month, I gave myself another ten hours to play with Bellatrix - one of these days I'm going to have to make her more of a focus, she's so fun to work on! I think I got all the beads and Kreinik together now as well, although of course it'll be a long time before I'm going to get to use the beads.

Last time I worked on her, I stitched up her hair, and made a small start on the big arch in the background:

This time, I was having a lot of fun - stitching up her face first, including wonderful metallic green eye shadow, then I did about 500 stitches on the arch (because it's big and slightly boring, so I'm trying to split it up) and then worked on her dress for a bit more:

Next time, I'll probably put a couple more stitches into the arch, then get started on her shawl (which introduces a new set of colours, yay!) working towards her right arm (our left).

July Fully Finished Gallery

This month for fully finished gallery, I have some good new and some bad news...lately, I've been rearranging my crafting/office corner, to finally organize some stuff in a way that has me NOT looking for things I need for extensive amounts of time, and also to get a better work-from-home space than my current arrangement on the couch. In any case, I stumbled across a box full of finished, but not fully finished stitchings! So that's good new, because I had been wondering where some of these had gotten to, but also bad because now my pile of shame has almost doubled in size. Guess I won't be running out of stuff to finish for this SAL any time soon!

I also have an actual finish to share, although a new one, not from the pile/box of shame. I finished the NYE SAL I stitched earlier this month into a biscornu! 

I used my usual technique, whip stitch with two different beads, and also added dark blue crystals to the center - I bought a bunch in different colours when I needed one to finish the Zoe box, so it's nice to be able to use them for other things as well!