August DESIGN

It's time for August's DESIGN update - in fact, it's almost to late for it, so I better hurry up and post!

What project are you talking about this month?

This month I will be talking about the Hare Hop project by Gale French/Stitchers Anon.

Have you stitched a project by this designer before?

 

Nope, this was a first.

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

 

I most surely will! I actually have the first installment of her Year of the Hare at home that I recently won in a giveaway Gale was generously holding, and I'm planning to stitch this and the other eleven sometime soon.

What made you choose this particular design/designer?

 

This pattern is part of a stitching hop, so I was the first in a group of stitchers to receive it and will send it on to the next one. I really liked the idea and the pattern to, so I decided to join in and I haven't had reason to regret it :)

Did you notice anything that distinguished this designer from others? 

 

Gale has this adorable head-canon of Holmsley the hare who adopted an orphaned deer, Fergus, and the two of them are featured in many of her patterns.

As far as I've seen, her patterns are usually full stitches with little to none backstitching. She doesn't seem to usually use hand dyed fibers, but some of her designs really inspire me to use some nevertheless, like in the picture above where I used 'Mist' by Nina's threads for the writing.

The Alphabet Club: Letter A

When Chiara from The Grey Tail first announced the Alphabet Club SAL, I was pretty excited, as it combines two of my favourite things: cross stitch and languages. I can not describe as well what Chiara and Jo have thought off, so if you are interested please follow this link to read the full decription. The short version is that starting this August, each month covers one letter, and we post about words, sayings or other stuff from our native language, which coresponding crafts pictures.

Now after the initial excitment, the busyness of summer washed over me, so I can only now on the very last day of the month actually do my post, but I have put some thinking into this before. I thought of doing some kind of theme, maybe flowers, or cuss words, or nursery rhymes, but I really can't find those for each letter of the alphabet...so I decided that this posts will just follow my fancy, sometimes goofy, sometimes more sophisticated, whatever strikes my mind ;)

So for this first month, the letter is A, of course, and my word is *drumroll*...

~ Angel ~

Now wait a minute, you might say, 'angel' isn't a German word! Well you're right, and you're also wrong. Now an angel as shown above in 'Angel of Frost' by Teresa Wentzler, which I stitched last winter, is called 'Engel' in German. But there is also the word 'Angel', which means fishing rod! Now you now these little arguments on facebook, where one party posts pictures of their baby/dog/kitty stating 'my little angle' and someone anwers 'yes, she's so acute' and then an argument breaks out whether confusing angle and angel is an understandable mistake or not? No you know one more meaning of the word for extra fun!

August WIPocalypse, Halloween SAL & More

I am still very much behind with my blogs and everthing, but after a few VERY busy weeks (friends of Felix visiting, Felix' parents visiting, stuff like that) we are currently having a suprisingly lazy and gloriously stitchy weekend, and I slowly feel like I'm getting back on top of stuff. So first of all, I have three stitching updates to show.

The first one is my progress on My Day Off. It's been a bit neglected to to other, deadlines stuff (see below), but I did finish all the ground below the bath tub and am now moving onwards to the lower right corner.

Next up is a Halloween SAL I started with my girls. Carla, Nancy and I are SALing on the Halloween Spooky Sampler by the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery, doing one block per week, and Ashley and Magical are tagging along with Halloween projects of their own choice. For my sampler, I decided on using the fabric 'Pumpkin Patch' by Sparklies, a bright orange, and I think t's working out beautifully :)

And last but not least, I'm taking part in the Hare Hop, a stitchy hop designed and organized by Stitchers Anon - in teams of four, we're passing around the specially designed pattern, each one of us having four weeks to stitch it. I took three weeks, although I could have been much faster if it wasn't for all the aformentioned busyness. To make my interpretation unique, I used 'Mist' by Nina's Threads for the writing, and swapped out a few of the other colours for ones I had in my stash.

Now this month's question for WIPocalypse is to talk about my stitching journey on one of the projects posted above, but as two of them have been started since my last update, and the other one only a few weeks back, there's not much to tell here. I actually wen through my WIPs and realzied that, apart from three UFOs (tablecloths are started waaaaay back and I'm not sure if I ever want to finish them) all of them have been started since the beginning of this blog, so less than two years ago. I think I can be a bit proud of that :)

So much for my stitching progress. Other things to catch up on:

• I finished the second volume of the Case Closed/Detective Conan manga
• Mostly during my vacation (but I just finished the last two chapters this week), I read Death of a Gossip, the first of the Hamish McBeth mystery novels my friend Carla loves so much. And I quite enjoyed it, it wasn't very impressive where the case is concerend, but did a great job making the characters really life-like, with both likable traits and little quirks. It was also not very long and a nice quick read, I have three more of the novels on my kindle and am looking forward to reading them.
• Felix and I had a thing for older movies this past weeks, so we watched Hook, Karate Kid and Jumanji (Hook being the only one I've seen before, but it's been a while). I really liked all of them, and once again, I feel like I'm 'getting' many more jokes now :D 
• We also finished watching How I Met Your Mother (S8, E21-24, and S9, E1-24). I know that many people hated the end. I already knew where the show was headed (we've been way to late with watching this to avoid spoilers), but I still enjoyed it, and frankly - in my believe, the ending is PERFECT. Having watched the whole show while knowing where it's going, there are so many hidden pointers throughout the seasons, and it all just makes so much sense.
• We also started watching Fear the Walking Death (E1). Amazon prime is releasing the episodes one by one, right after they air in the US, and I really wanted to have this experience (of having to wait a full week for each new episode) once, although I like binge watching, this suspense is nice as well. Oh, and the premiere was really promising as well!
• Now where watching Season 9 of Bones which just showed up on prime, so far we've seen the first five episodes and it's great to see all our beloved characters again. Also, Season 8 ended with a big spspense-thingy (not really a cliffhanger, but still) and we couldn't wait to see that resolved!
• I also saw another episode of Once Upon a Time (S1, E11), but I'm really slow at watching stuff alone at the moment...

August Gifted Gorgeousness

And once again, I'm way behind on both my crafting and on blogging about it - but for some reason, I don't really feel like writing a lot, so I hope you'll forgive me when I keep this short.

In the last week, I've been working on two projects, and fittingly enough, both fit the GG theme. One was, of course, My Day Off, on which I'm still trying to focus - this time I filled in the part of the shadow I had already outlined last time. Now I'm moving the snap to focus on the next section of the shadow and ground:

The other project, while not cross stitch, is also supposed to be a gift: The wrist warmers Mostly Warmness that I started about a year ago. I had them almost finished, sewd the first on together and knitted the second one, but never got around to actually finish them: The first one was a bit tight, so had planned on un-sewing it and adding anouther repeat, but now I decided to make them a present for my dad's girlfriend instead, who is a bit smaller and much slimmer than me. I'm going to give her the whole set when she comes to visit, so I still need to finish the shawl and knit the hat. I have to admit that I'm still not very good with the 'invisible' stitch used to sew the wristwarmers together, but I don't think it will show a lot when worn.

Otherwise, Felix and I have watched more How I Met Your Mother (S8, E6-20) and Case Closed (E44-53). A friend who is just as much of a Case Closed fan as I am also lent us the first of the movies, The Time Bombed Skyscraper, which we really liked, and the first volumes of the manga, the first of which I already finished :)

Catching up - July WIPocalypse 2, August TUSAL

I've returned from the away part of my vacation yesterday - I had a good time, both at Felix' parents and at Gamescom, although especially the latter one was really stressful and exhausting - and now I'm almost caught up with reading what everyone's been up to, so it's now time to add my own little pile of pictures and other stuff. I have at least two SALs to catch up on that I can think of right now, and I'll check what else I missed later.

So, the first one was July 2 WIPocalypse - thanks to the blue moon we had two WIPocalypses in July. The topic of the second one was What makes you pick up a long-abandoned UFO rather than beginning a new piece? I think it's a mix for me really. Sometimes it's just guilt that tells me to at least put a few stitches in that old design before starting another one, sometimes it's someone asking me what happend to that one WIP from way back, but mostly it's just me falling in love again - maybe by seeing pictures from other stitchers, maybe by seeing other designs from that same designer, or maybe just getting some awesome idea what to do with or how to finish the design once it's done.

The other sign in I'm probably late for again is TUSAL - here I have to containers to show, one is my usual jar, the other is a little plastic baggie I took with me on my vacation:

Now to my actual progress...before I went away, I finished the next section of My Day Off. I filled in the sandy part and stitched the outlines of the shadow-area (or as much of it as I could reach without moving the hoop). Next up is filling in the shadow and doing the little light parts under the bathtub before I actually move the snap.

At Felix' parents, I worked a bit more on Lady: I tried to finish the next column, but I didn't actually make it. I still made a nice bit of progress, especially on tramp himself and the ground below the two.

For the car rides and the time at the camping trip, I chose to bring a project that is a bit more mobile: Halloween Town by the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. I finally received the black thread I had run out off, so I set out to finish the final clue..aaaaaand I made it! Now I just have to find out the best way to clean and press the finished piece and finish-finish it, probably into a door-hanging or something.

So much for my stitching progress. I'll try to make lots of progress on My day Off, but I also have lots of interesting new projects lined up, most of them rather small, so I hope there will be a lot of pretty pictures to show you soon.

While away, I also did a fair bit of gaming and reading: I finished to more Lego games on my Vita - Marvel Heroes (not the best one I have played yet) and Jurassic World (maybe the best one I have played yet), and I read Gone Girl. I had heard many good things about that book, so I wanted to read it for a while, and then I finally picked it up and it was good for about half of it, then it became amazing. There were so twists and suprises, I could hardly put it down, and the end was not at all what I expected as well.

Now I need to really wreck my brain for what we watched...I knew we saw Ant Man in the theater, which was much better than I expected, and when we were at Felix' parents we saw Mocking Jay Part 1, which was as good as we epected. We also watched more of How I Met your Mother (Finished S7 and then S8, E1-5) and Case Closed (E33-43), and a bit of Once Upon a Time (S1, E-8-10). And now enough wrecking, more stitching!