July DESIGN

Aaaand again on the very last day - also, forgive me for a rather quick and uninspired post, I worked about twelve hours today to prepare for our well-deserved vacation and now I'm just really, really tired D:

What project are you talking about this month? 

My project for the month is My Day Off, a Design Works kit. It doesn't actually include the designer, but it's made from the art of Ronald West, and there's a wholse series of kits designed after this work, so I'm treating that series as my designer today, if that makes any sense. Also, I'm actually quite a bit further along than the picture on the right shows, but here you can also see what the whole thing will look like :)

Have you stitched a project by this designer before?

No, I haven't.

Would you buy/stitch a design by this designer again? Why/Why not?

I probably would/will. The designs are really fun to look at and, so far, also to work on :)

What made you choose this particular design/designer?

It's a birthday present for Felix' mum who always strugles to keep her 'Day off' actually free. It's perfect for her, especially since she has a black cat as well, just like the lady in the picture :)

Did you notice anything that distinguished this designer from others? - For example specialty stitches, fractionals, much/little 'confetti', beads, special fibers...

It's quite classical cross stitch, mostly full coverage, no fractionals or anything fancy. Some backstitching, but not too much. Some areas (like the flower pot and the vines above or the cake) are quite detailed, but for the most part it's large chunks of colour, so it stitches up pretty quickly. 

As far as the kit is concerend,it's decent quality - pretty stiff aida and what appears to be enough of all the threads. The quality of the threads, however, is a bit curious: Most is normal and okay, two colours (the light sand and light blue) are reeeally soft, and three (dark sand, light brown, and one of the medium grays) are pretty hard and non-shiny. I decided to use them anyway, but I wonder what happened there :D

Dark Force - Row finished!

In an attempt to updates this blog a bit more frequently, I tried to get a lot of stitching in last weekend so I could have something to show, and here we go :) This is the time of the month were I would normaly write my SFS update, but since I'm no longer part of that, I won't - still feels a bit strange, but honestly, I went a bit wild with buying stash now that I'm free so I'm quite happy I don't have to confess everything ;) I'll probably show most of the things in later posts, though.

So, progress - was stitches busyly away on Dark Force, and finally finished the last column of the first row. 24.000 stitches, a bit more than 1/6th of the whole design, is done. I now reached my goal for the year on this, so I'm putting it away for a bit, but I'm sure I'll get back into it sooner rather than later to see if the remainder turns out just as pretty as this first row :)

The rest of the weekend I spent working on My Day Off, filling in that bit of wall on the very left, then doing the outlines for the sandy part underneath, which I now need to fill in as well :)

I'm now planning to work more on My Day Off untill I get tired of the colour blocks, then switch to one of my other projects for a while :)

On friday night, Felix and I watched Jupiter Ascending. We've hear plenty of bad things bout this movie, but it's really not THAT bad....but it isn't really good either, and the strange bit is that I can't say why. There are plenty of stunning visualy, the plot is interesting and original and seems to have so much potential, but still...we didn't really get into it. Something was off, can't put my finger on it.
We also watched a bit more of Case Closed (E28-32), and I watched This is me, a short amazon prime-produced docu on trans lifestyle and mosty problems - a 'raising awareness' kind of thing. Still pretty interesting :)

July IHSW & Gifted Gorgeousness

So it took me almost another week to get that 'almost good to go' post out that I kept blabbering about, but here it finally is! Let me jump right in with the reason it took me so long: I was finishing up the second BSJ (the baby has been born a few weeks ago, a healthy boy named Alwin), and as I couldn't find wooden buttons I got for this (and I'm pretty sure my holes are to small anyway) I ordered more of the cute owls, and I had to wait a few days for those, but now it's all done - I' going to wash and dry it over the weekend, then give it to the proud dad on Monday ^_^

I made quite a few mistakes (everytime I counted, my stitches were a little off, but I was always able to fix it), but I'm still quite proud of how it turned out in the end ^_^ Now I can finally focus on finishing a few of my other knitting/crochet projects, but this won't be the last BSJ I'm working on this year: Just this week I learned that the daughter of a friend of the family is pregnant, so I'll get to make another one for her.

Now for my SAL-checkins...the jacket kind of fits into GG, although it's no stitching, and I also worked some more on DF and started page 5 - just one more column left in this row! I should be able to finish that this weekend.

Now for a quick catching up on what we watched: More How I Met Your Mother (S6, S13-24 and S7, E1-9) and lots more Case Closed (E5-27). When Felix' friend visited for the weekend, we rewatched Big Hero 6, and we also went to the cinema for Minions, which was really great and sweet and hilarious ^_^

July TUSAL & ToT

Just when I thought I was back in a regular blogging-flow again, two pretty busy weekends (one with Felix' parents, sister and my dad - graduation day went smoothly, but didn't really feel that big since we've already been working for half a year now - the other with Felix' friend Frank). On the bright side - it's the first update I'm writing from my shiny new laptop! It's soooo fast compared to the old, semi-broken one, I'm totally loving it ^_^

So while I have another post almost ready to go (just need to finish a teeny-tiny bit first), let me start my latest catching-up-run with two more than overdue SALs. The first one is easy as usual - witness my mighty TUSAL jar (lol):

For Ton of Tiny, I finished te July installment of Magical's ornaments of the month. I really like this one, it reminds me of poinsettas and trees of life ^_^

I also worked more on Dark Force and finished page 4 (and a bit more, which I'm saving for my almost-ready post). Page 5 is only two columns, so I haven't taken it out of the snap for a full picture yet, but I will soon ^_^

I also had a bit of prgress gaming and reading: gamingwise, I finished Sound Shapes, a music-centered game where one of the main tasks (besides some jump 'n run action) is rebuilding melodies and rhythmns by listening, and I picked up a really old GameBoy Colour Game, a Jump 'n Run to the Papyrus-cartoon that I never finished when I was younger, and played right through it so I can finally put it away.

Readinwise, I finished The Martian - I recently saw a trailer for the movie version and that reminded me of how strongly Carla had recommended the book, so I picked it up on my kindle and read the whole thing in less than two weeks, which is really fast given my current schedule and reading speed. I loved it, it was hilarious, while still being technically acurate. I might even read the whole thing again sometime, or listen to the audio book of which I have heard great things as well ^_^

A bathtub and a missing ornament

Before I start in the lightly stressful weekend - Felix and I are having our graduation ceremony tomorrow, so his parents and sister and my dad are visiting, we've been cleaning all week, and on monday it's his birthday and I still need to bake something - there are two things I wanted to share with you.

First, I've been working on My Day Off the past two weeks, and I managed to finish the bathtub. This is stitching up really nice and quickly, but the large colour blogs do get a tad boring over time, so I'm glad I have a few other projects to switch to :)

The other thing I wanted to talk about is the missing June ornament - as you might have noticed, I didn't stitch any of Magicals ornaments in June, and there's a reason for that. You see, having three birthstones, one with two different colours, Magical made a whole of four ornaments for June. As I only have exactly twelve pieces of the fabric I'm using for the others, we quickly decided that I'd do the pink Alexandrite on that - there is going to be another green pattern soon, so this will keep the balance, and Moonstone and Pearl just won't show up as nicely on the white. Problem is, I didn't have the threads for the pink one - but I did for Pearl, and it was going to look great on that natural linen I got recently! ....or so I thought. While the colour really worked out nicely, the fabric itself didn't - it's just not even.

See? It just won't turn out quadratic. Which makes me a bit sad, because I really liked the colour (I'm going to get a piece of raw Zweigart linen or something now), and also, I have a big piece of fabric that I need to find use for now that it's kind of useless for cross stitch. But I'm sure I'll think of something. But that's why I don't have a June ornament stitched up yet - but I will get to them eventually!

I also wanted to catch up on what we watched, so here goes: More How I Met Your Mother - S5, E21-24, and S6, E1-13. We are now getting to episodes I haven't seen before - lot's of stuff going on actually!

We also watched S4 od Downton Abbey and are now all caught up with what amazon prime has to offer. I really love that show, I'll be sad to see it end when it does.

Then I got Felix to start (re)watching one of my alltime favourite anime with me - Case Closed (E1-4). So far he likes it, which is good, because we have about 750 more episodes to go :D

Last but not least, we started Vikings S3 (E 1 + 2) as soon as it showed up on prime. Lot's of potential for drama and tragedy again, I'm curious how it will play out in the end.

July WIPocalypse #1

I'll spare you the usual 'oh my god I'm late posting again' and cut right to the point - June sign in for WIPocalypse! I feel like the heat is slowing me down a little, but I still managed to finish my weekly column of DF, plus some other stuff that I will safe for other posts, hopefully soonish.

The question for this month was Reality or Fantasy. Which do you prefer to stitch? Figures or Abstract? and I have both no answer and a very easy answer to this - I don't prefer either, I like both :D I do love fantasy, fairies, and dragons, but I also greatly enjoy stitching animals or pretty florals. And while I lot of what I do would classify as Figures, I also have some word, mandala and band sampler types stashed and wishlisted. It's like a design can speak to me, no matter what it is, and I want to stitch it, and vice versa :)

So since it's July already and half the year is over, I thought I'd use the opportunity to reflect a bit on my yearly goals, and adjust them where neccessary:

My 'Do your very best to achieve' goals are:

• Finish Cut Thru' Cottage - I did get 3 more pages done, 6/9 now - should still be possible!
• Keep up with the Mystery Band Sampler SAL - I fell behind quite a bit, but it is finished by now, so I'm calling this one a sucess
• Keep up with the Ornament a Month SAL - I've done January to May, had a bi of a hiccup with June (will talk about that later), and hope to finish July this week - still on track
• Finish at least one small/tiny a month for the Tons of Tinies SAL - so far, so good
• Work a bit on each of my WIPs at some point so they won't become UFOs - I haven't worked on Peacock Tapestry and Cross Stitch Angel yet, but still very much doable

My 'I would really like to achieve' goals are:

• Six pages (one row) of Dark Force - actually, I realized that one row is just a bit over four pages, so that's what I'm aiming at - three more columns, or 2400 stitches, to go!
• Finish border and get to actual Motif on Peacock Tapestry - haven't worked on it yet
• Finish Halloween Town - finished the third clue, now waiting for some floss to do the last one
• Finish Lady & Tramp  - far from it - let's revise that to 'finish one page on Lady and Tramp' and see if I can do that
• Stitch another gift for my grandma - stitched two little guinea pigs for her birthday
• Stitch at least one ornament for easter and christmas to keep - not yet, but I never said they had to be done by Easter/Christmas, right?!

And last, my 'Would be nice to achieve' goals:

• End the year with no more WIPs than I started with - nope, not going to happen ;)
• Start another Teresa Wentzler Design (most like 12 Days or The Enchanter) - might still happen, we'll see
• Start another cloudsfactory or Frosted Pumpkin Design - Halloween SAL is planed with Carla and Nancy :)
• Stitch up all 12 Little Ship Virtue Designs - haven't started those yet, so I'll probably push that to next year

I think I'm doing pretty good actually! My immediate goals are:

• Finish page 4 + 5 of Dark Force
• Finish Cut thru' cottage
• Finish My Day Off
• Finish Halloween Town before the new SAL starts (or at least alongside it)

Also some smalls, but I'm doing those when they are calling to me :)

In non stitchy news - I finished Contrast, an amazing Indie game about a girl who can walk in the shadow. It's set in a Noire-setting, and the story is pretty short, but really bitter sweet, I liked it a lot.

I also finished readgin Four: A Divergent Collection, some short stories from his perspective...I loved them, but then I thought about the stupid ending of Allegiant and I was sad again :(

Watching was quite a bit, so I'm saving it for another post, I'm afraid my laptop will die of heat before I can finish typing it up. I really need to decide on a new one and buy it...