Fully Finished Gallery - September

It's the tenth of the month (shut up, I know it's actually the 13th already!) and against my usual norm, I am here and ready and have had a finish to post for a while, actually! Sadly, it's a 'boring' finish, in that it's both a new one (and not some deep-buried treasure from my box of shame) and just a simple framed one, but I like it all the same, and there's a bit of a story to it.

Felix' youngest cousin is ten years old now. She's grown up seeing me sitting and crafting at all kinds of family functions, and has always been curious about it and asking questions (she's asked me to show her how to do it on several occasions, but yet lacks the patience to sit still for more than five minutes). This summer, she asked me if I would stitch her dog for her, and I said yes. Now I knew I wasn't going to stitch a photorealistic full coverage design or anything, but I still wanted it to be HER dog, not just a generic husky, so I got a little creative. First, I looked for small husky patterns, and found one that I liked at cross-stitch-pattern.net (can't recommend that site, though - you need to sign up for $2.50 a month for unlimited access to the patterns, but once I signed up there was no option to cancel the subscription again, and the owner didn't reply to my email. I ended up grabbing just that one pattern I wanted and canceling the automatic renewal directly via Paypal. The pattern itself was really nice, though.) Then, I collected a couple of pictures of Maggie (that's the dog, not the cousin) and compared her fur markings with the pattern. Most of it was already pretty close, just the face of the pattern was super dark and serious, and Maggie is a very sweet, goofy dog - so I changed her eyes to the characteristic light blue, lightend the fur a little, and added a cute lolling tongue. Totally Maggie now! I bought a very small frame and it was just a perfect fit that I am super proud of.

Felix' cousin and her mum loved it, so I'm very happy how everything came together!

The People's Choice SAL: Bees!

It's another month, and as such it's time for Jo's beloved 'Let the People Choose!' SAL.
This month, the theme of the SAL is 'Bees', and for this, I had to dig pretty deeply. While bees seem to be a very popular theme around us stitchers - and there are some gorgeous bee-themed designs out there - I haven't really stitched any of these yet. I did discover some small bees in two of my projects, though - can you find them?

I do have some small bee-designs in my stash, though, and I've seen some other great ones around, so maybe I'll stitch some busy bees soon!

Oh, and a bonus - I've also used these cute bee buttons on one of my baby jackets:

Finish it in - September Edition

I'm just a few days late and still in the right week for this SAL, so I guess that's a win :)

I'm still working on my list of six projects that I want to finish before the end of the year:

1) The Mermaid
2) Reindeer
3) Wuffi the Dog
4) Whacky Witches in Stitches
5) March Fobs
6) Viajante

I worked on three of them, one is a finish and one is getting really close!  The very, very close one is, of course, my Mermaid. I've been stitching on her like mad all week and this is were I got (but I'm guessing that's at least ten more hours to finish the cross stitching...still, it's exciting!)

Then there are my Whacky Witches, and I am very happy to report that I managed to finish the last part and they're all done now! No idea how to finish-finish them yet (I don't really want to frame them, they're arkwardly big for a seasonal decoration), but I had so much fun stitching them.

Last up is Viajante - no new picture as the progress is really hard to see, but I weigh my yarn again - I went from 210 to 186g left, so I used up almost 25g this month!

 So now my list is down to five - I'm quite tempted to add another one of my mid-sized cross stitch projects on there to focus on, but I think I'll profit more from trying to actually finish the remaining five, so five is what it'll be:

1) The Mermaid
2) Reindeer
3) Wuffi the Dog
4) March Fobs
5) Viajante

August Stitchy Pie

Oh boy...another month is over, and with August gone, we're heading straight for autumn. Didn't the year just start? Where has it all gone? It doesn't help that I've been extremely tired those last few days and time is just flying by. I really hope everything will stay calm now for a bit!

In any case, it's a new month, and thus time for a new stitchy pie. I did manage to get quite a bit of crafty time in again, so here we go:

That's a pretty long list, but considering I finished six of these (Summer Jacoby, Husky, Whacky Witches, the Sashiko Coasters, the BSJ and the Hippo) that's pretty okay, I guess! By the way, I totally forgot to show the Summer Jacoby, I had planned to include them in my GG update - they're a new pair of wrist warmers for my grandma, made from a more summerly yarn (45% cotton, 55% Acrylic) so could wear them at night more comfortably. It's the same yarn used for those colour-changing yarn cakes, only solid, and it was an absolute joy to knit with!

I've also made progress on the Sekamelska shawl and finally finished part 5. It's growing slowly, but I still enjoy working on it! I made a start on part 6, but that actually happend this month. Do you see the little trees? They are fun (and hopefully will be very pretty once I added the next row to hold them in shape), but they do take forever. It took me about 90 minutes to get that far, almost 5 minutes per tree, and there are almost 50 of them in this row, and than 50 and some again a few rows later!

I'm saving the Husky for the Fully Finished update (spoiler alert: it's really cute), and a few things are scheduled to come up with the Finish It In (maybe tonight, but more likely later this week), and the Pumpkin Hat wasn't a proper start yet, I only played around with the yarn a little, so between that I think you've seen everything I have to show right now :) This month, I'm planning to get a lot of time in on the Mermaid, as I'm on a bit of a sprint to get the cross stitching done...we'll see how that goes!

August WIPocalypse

It's high time for another one of those WIPocalypse checkin thingies! Actually, I'm a week late, but I did want to finish my SALs for the month and I can't very well do that before the month is over. We'll get to those in a moment, but first, let's talk about this month's question, which is What do you have on your stitching bucket list? I think my answer will be really similar to lots of other people - I want to do more specialty stitches, I want to stitch a Chatelaine someday, and I really want to learn more about different techniques like Hardanger, Gold Work, or Black Work. Now if only the days had 40 hours! Oh, and I want to stitch all of the Mucha Princesses and the Disney Dream collection...so, better make that 60 hours :)

Now, I did get all of my August SALs stitched - Mamluk and the Blackwork SAL are up to date, and I'm itching to get them finished now, and I did stitch all of August on the Temperature SAL as well - it's cooling down a little, and while the last few days were still uncomfortably hot, we didn't have another heatwave, so that's good, isn't it?

I also managed to get my WIP list down by another counter to 45. I'm seriously doubting I'll manage to get to 30 before the end is out, but I'm still hoping for under 40 at the least.

August Gifted Gorgeousness

I'm a little late for the August checkin, but I have lots to show for it, so let's get right into the action!

I finish-finished my latest two baby gifts - the cuddly hippo and another one of my beloved BSJs:

I picked up Lady Justice a few times for various challenges, and she made some pretty decent progress:

My Blackwork Water Lily also came out to play for a challenge, and I finished three petals - this was gifted to me a few years ago:

And last bet definitively not least, I've been making progress on my Mermaid, which is quickly filling in now - so close I can almost taste it!

The 2019 Halloween SAL

As you might remember from last year, Carla and I are hosting a yearly Halloween Stitch Along every year. This year, our designers are Durene Jones and Jody Ellis from Unconventional XStitch, and we are lucky enough to actually have both of these awesome ladies in our group!

Our official start was August 15th, and I actually managed to get some stitches in that day, and every day since. Since I never actually finished my planned patterns in the last years, I'm trying to start small this year, hopefully not ending up with another bunch of WIPs. For my main pattern, I chose Blood Moon from Jody, which isn't super big, but extremely pretty - I started and finished 816, which is the colour with the most stitches at 955, and now I'll be working on colours in decending order of stitches.

Once I finish this, I have a couple of Halloween freebies by Durene lines up, and if I actually finish these as well, there's plenty of beautiful patterns I'm just dieing to get!

Plus, as my Puppeteer is also a little Halloween-y, I'm trying to finally catch up those stitches I didn't do when I was on vacation earlier this year. I'm hoping to get a row finish before Halloween - another four pages, but three of them barely have any black on them, so it should be very doable.