September IHSW & SFS - Mamooth Update

So with all the stuff going on, my posting times tend to become a little unstable, and I beg your forgivness for that - I know I wanted to post on Monday for the end of IHSW, but as I was leaving for a university/business trip on Tuesday, I decided to rather stitch a little more than to write about it, and I think that was a good descision :D I'm also able to distinguish pretty well between what I did on IHSW and what I did in the time after that, so no information was lost, hooray! Okay, enough chitchat, let's get on to stitching stuff...

During IHSW, I worked a bit more on Angel of Frost. Just as I had planned to, I did a bit more of her cloak, then went on to stitching the left wing, which went really smoothly and is now finished as well. Now I'm starting to fill in the head, which is quite a lot of detail in a rather small area: the hood of the cloak, the hair, and, of course, the face. The latter is stitched over one, and will be kind of a test run for any big over-one projects I have planned for the future. I'm a little nervous, but really looking forward to the challenge as well :D



On Saturday evening, I also got to take part in my first IHSW-hangout in almost a half year, and for the first time ever (I think) we also got to have all four of us (well technically there are two more of us, but while we deeply love both of them, they are not as 'involved' with the group at the moment, if that makes any sense) online at the same time. It was great, and imagine what fun it would be to have all six online together!

While on the hangout, I worked on a quick little project from a kit I picked up really cheap on ebay earlier this year. It was a birthday present for our hairdresser, who's also a friend of the family and who loves sheep. The kit was a bit strange, as it didn't come with stranded floss, but rather some kind of really thin cord to stitch with, but after some getting used to it, it became really fun and easy to work with - it stitched up really quickly and I'm more then pleased with the result! It also came with this little plastic hanger in the kit, which is a really smart and fun way to finish such a cute little project, don't you think?


As I already mentioned, Felix and I both went on a universtiy business trip to Saarbrucken starting Tuesday, and only got back yesterday afternoon. It was fun, we learned lots of interesting stuff and we got to meet a lot of people from both Oldenburg and Saarbrucken that we really enjoy working with but don't get to meet in person really often. We had booked a cozy little room in a lokal hotel, were we got to spend quite some time (schedule wasn't as busy as usual), so my Halloween Town Sampler which I had brought with me made a little progress, both on the actual journey and on those breaks - I finished block three on the right and continued working on the middle block. I also brought my knitting along, which I had terribly neglected during the past weeks, but it was just the right thing to keep my fingers busy and my mind focused during the discussions and presentations, and so Hitchhiker (that's the official name of the design in case I didn't mention it before) has grown quite a bit :)

So much for my stitching, now for me SFS report! With our move looming over our heads and all the expenses waiting for us, I wanted to be a little more careful with my spending, but still make use of my budget because there are SO many things I still need to build a proper stash! So in order to compromise I decided on some digital download patterns and to save on the shipping and tax (which can get quite a lot when ordering from overseas). I got the Whacky Witches Halloween Sampler from cloudsfactory (I'm kinda hooked on Halloween stitching right now, and scared it won't be avaiable anymore next year) for $16,99 and Impossible from Satsuma Street on Etsy, which I want to hang on the wall in my future office one day, for $6.00, so my total for this month is $22,99 without any further strings attached - hooray! Also, both are patterns I reallyreally want to stitch, nothing to massive either, so I have a good chance of actually doing so one day :D

Of course, non-crafty stuff happend as well this week - I finished a book I was reading, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma by David Boyle. It's more of an essay than an actual book (maybe 60 pages), but how I got it was a real strange coincidence: I had just answered one of those tag-blog-things on dA and was asked what famous (contemporary or historical) person I'd liked to meet, and never really having thought about it I chose Alan Turing - one of the great pioneers of computer science who died much to young, when he commited suicide aged 41. Later that day, I was browsing the kindle deals on amazon and there was this book, for 99ct or something like that, and I just had to get and read it. Is's actually quite informative - the math described is mostly wrong, sure, but I've known the foundations of Turing's math for long enough, I don't need to read about those again - in the ways it describes his life. I guess I will get a 'proper' biography eventually, and I also learned that there will be a movie about his life staring Benedict Cumberbatch which I HAVE to go and see (called 'The Imitation Game' - if you are in the US or UK, it will start showing in November, I will have to wait until next February :/ ).

Also, Felix and I visited a friend yesterday, and we finished a game we had been playing together for a few years (because we got together way to rarely) - The Book of Unwritten Tales, or more precisly the expension, The Critter Chronicles. Both are really good pont & click adventures that kind of make fun of fantasy games in general, but are great fantasy games by themselves at the same time that we really enjoyed, despite all the bugs.

For watching stuff, there was, of course, more Supernatural (S1, E12-21, we will finish season 1 later today) and also two movies: Bad Grandpa, a Jackass production featuring lots of people who had no idea that they were being filmed at the time it happend (they were told later, of course, but their reactions were priceless) and Not Another Teen Movie, which bascially makes fun of every highschool comedy ever made - do you know that feeling that you shouldn't be laughing because this is not really funny and also kind of offensive, but you have to laugh anyways? That's what both of these movies made me feel like; I still can't really decide whether I enjoyed them or not...and while I will continue thinking about that, I will just hit post and let you read through this really long update; have fun :D