February WIPocalypse

Since I'm always a few days late with this kind of checking, and hearing the same lame excuses over and over is just boring, I decided that everything less than a week doesn't count, so I can just lunge right into the February WIPocalypse! The question of the month is What is your favorite stitch other than the standard cross stitch?  (bonus points if you provide a how-to link or diagram it on your blog post!)
Problem is, I don't have very much experience with specialty stitches. I love them when they come up, and I've done a few band samplers that did use a lot of them, but I can't really name them or decide on a favourite, sorry. I really need to work on that more!

Now for something I can show, that is progress! I did finish the next page on my Fire and Ember SAL, which was a bit difficult - somehow, the left and right side of the fix didn't want to stay aligned, and I had to work some serious magic to get them to comply - but I think it does look pretty okay in the end. I hope the next page will be more cooperative, so this won't take ages!

I also couldn't help stitching a bit on Fans of the Far East, despite all the other stuff I should be working on (I did work on some of it and even have a finish to report, but one of the can't-show-yet kind!). I finished the blue on the left (as far as it fit inside the frame) and also a bit more of the gold background of the first fan.

Next, Felix helped me to finally frame the Hobbits Mealplan for his brother - we'll be meeting him this weekend to finally give it to him, so it was high time! We picked a simple old-ish looking silver frame, and I think Felix did a marvelous job again.

Last but not least, I continued stitching my one length of black on the Puppeteer each day and finished the first page. There's actually a little mistake in there, but it's just background and it would have required a LOT of frogging (like, one week backwards) so I decided I'll either fix it when I get there or leave it. This first page has about 1.800 stitches of black, and the second page has even more as it's almost entirely black. So far, I only got around 125 stitches into that second page, though (I'm only doing the exact counting as I finish off a page, I was always off with the daily count anyways!)