Mad Summer Finish Dash - Day 14 & August Gifted Gorgeousness

Day 14 of the MSFD will double as an entry for WIPocalypse this month - I know that the 14th is technically a day early, but I am posting this on the 15th after all! And this is an exciting day to post, so you'll understand why I wanted to combine the two!

The exciting thing is...drumrolls please...I finished the grandchildren project! Huzzah! On sunday morning (mainly while Felix was still asleep from the long night before) I stitched the two tiny flowes and the three names (Felix and his siblings) and then I also added a free hand little heart in the middle, because with the way we arranged the names (we divided them in four groups, each for the children of one of the four daughters of Felix' grandma) the middle looked to empty. I just checked my older blog updates, and I worked for almost three months straight on this! Can you believe it? I'm pretty contend with how it looks, I made a few changes as I went along (mainly because the trellis didn't continue in some places where it was supposed to continue - I only have one mistake left that I realized, and hopefully noone else will!), I translated and re-charted the 'Grandchildren are the flowers in the garden of life' saying on top, and added the already mentioned little heart in the middle. As soon as we return from our work retreat, this will be framed and we'll give it to Felix' grandma two weeks from now.

On the car ride back, I did a bit more knitting (like 5 rows or so) on snowflake party, then, when we got home, another exciting thing waited for me - the start of Carla's and my Halloween SAL for the year! We're doing Cloudfactory's 'Whacky Witches' design, one of the nine blocks each week, and everyone is welcome to join with this design or something else. I'm stitching this on a 28ct marbled Jobelan, and I decided (after Strawberry Sampler is ths proof that I can get a tension I enjoy working with using scroll frames) to go all out and buy myself an easy clip frame in the right size and also a floor stand to try on this project. And so far I'm really happy - stitching with two hands is possible, although still slowly, but with a bit of practice this will work marvelously I think. It's also easier than I thought to just work with one hand like I'm used too - the main point is, I can use scroll frames now, which I'm really happy about for projects that use a ton of speciality fibres, speciality stitches, or beads!

Now the plan for the rest of August is the following: I took the Fire and Ember SAL with me to the retreat, since it moves the easiest of all my remaining MSFD projects, and I'll work on that (plus a ton of knitting during presentations and discussions - thank God for my understanding professor!) until we return, than I will alternate my focus between the Strawberry Sampler (for an August finish) and the Halloween SAL (to keep up with deadlines). We return thursday night and have friday of, so preper for lots of stitching progress on the weekend, and lots of knitting until then!