Halloween Blog Hop

Good morning, spooky ones! Here is the second Halloween thing I threat promised you yesterday.
When I started the Halloween SAL this year, I had big plans to stitch three of our chosen patterns... then life happened, and I barely finished one. I did start two new ones (one of them unplanned) though:

And that unplanned one is what I have finished! It's a mini pattern that came free with Ashley's Pumpkin Doodle Cats and I think that little birdie is just sooo cute:

But of course, that's not what you're here for. You are here for the letter - which is an N -  and the link to the next blog - which you can find here. In case you have absolutely no idea what's going on here, check out Jo's post about the blog hop to find the start.

Happy Halloween!

Monthly People's SAL - Halloween

Our beloved Jo's latest brilliant idea is a themed SAL where the theme is voted upon each month. Most fittingly, the first theme, for October, is Halloween, and even more fittingly, I have been stitching on some Halloween projects this month!
...and totally typical for me, instead of getting the SAL posted in the beginning of the month, as I had intended to, I'm only sneaking in on the almost-last day and with the Halloween Blog Hop (also Jo's brainchild) going up tomorrow, you will have to suffer through two Halloween themed posts in a row!
I even had the stitching done almost two weeks ago...but of course, getting it ironed and picture-ready is the much bigger hurdle. And then apparently didn't even get the hoop marks out properly...it looks fine in person, but they are stull visible in the picture:

So here we go! This is one of my Halloween SAL projects, Happy Halloween by LuckyStarStitches. I used waste canvas to stitch it on a purple tote bag. Perfect for collecting treats...or just put anything else in there!

October Gifted Gorgeousness

I'm ages behind with my posting, but my stitching is quite on track! And besides, stitching is just a small part of this post, I have a lot more things to share.

On the stitching front, I put some more hours into The Mermaid, steadily working away on the sea-area and finally reaching the lower end. It doesn't stretch too much further to the right, so I think I should be able to finish it soon!

The other thing(s) I want to talk about were all amazing gifts to me (although I was involved in one of them). You might remember how, a few months ago, I announced  Felix' and my wedding and asked if anyone would like sending some small things for decorations? Well, I was not disappointed and got some great things!

First there was Pamela, who sent us these lovely placemats all the way from Japan:

Then there was my friend Nancy from Canada, who stitched this lovely little pillow, modeled after the writing on our 'Save the date' cards:

Next was Jo, who has outdone herself to send us a full set of twelve Bride's Tree ornaments. And such lovely little ones, too! My favourite is the rose, but really, I adore all of them.

My friend Magical designed a special pattern for us, which I stitched up myself the days before out wedding. I finished it off into a little pillow, using a piece of fabric from my wedding dress (from where it had to be shortened; there is no pillow shaped hole in my dress now!)

   

And last but not least (although regretably a little late for the party; turns out the postal services don't know when they should hurry up!) where these cute little coasters from Rosey - four dark and four mint green. I love them!

I have to say, I am so very happy to be part of a community that is so loving and generous. I (or rather, we) love everything you made for us. Those pieces made our wedding just a little bit more special, and we will surely treasure them forever. Thank you so very much - this is true gifted gorgeousness <3

Who wants some pie?!

I have always admired Jo's monthly pie posts. I have a thing and love for all things scienc-y and spreadsheet-y, but I am usually not organized enough to keep them myself. I even tried to keep track on the days worked on each project briefly, but...that didn't last long. And besides, plagiarism stinks, right? Sooo...no fancy pie for me. Unless...

Well, when I did the Longest Day (or weekend, in my case SAL) in June (another one of Jo's babies), I realized how many lovely WIPs I have, and how terribly I am neglecting most of them. I didn't really know what to do about it, but the thought stayed on my mind as I visited other blogs and saw the many, many ways people will arrange their rotations...until a few weeks ago, I finally had an idea: I'll be picking one of my WIPs at random and work on it for an extra ten hours, while still keeping up with my current projects. The goal is to make it through at least one of these random-rotations each month.

So far, so good - only problem was how to measure the ten hours, since I've never really been keeping time, either. So naturally, I went to the app store and tried out a few (one seemed to think it was appropriate to add an extra 24 hours to every timer running past midnight) until I found Timesheet, a neet little app that let's me track different projects, lets me add or remove time at will (in case I mess up)...and let's me create neat spreadsheets and statistics for each day, week, or month! Do you see where this is going?

Now I can create those lovely pie diagrams at the end of each month as well...and they are logging total work time instead of days (which is good, since I'm working on 2-5 projects on any given day, anyways!). I'm not actually sure whether I will show them each month, that is still kind of Jo's thing, but I can have them and look at them, and keep track of my random rotation too. Just to give you an idea what I'm talking about, here's the pie for half of September - I didn't actually start using the timers until the middle of the month:

Oh, and about that random slot? In September I drew...Fire and Ember, which I would have been working on anyways. So I finished that page, and drew the next one for October...which was The Puppeteer, which I am working on EVERY DAY. I was behind by about to weeks though, so I'm taking the opportunity to play catch up. Hopefully the random thingy will start playing nice soon-ish!

September WIPocalypse

Hello, my lovelies! Apologies for being so late with this update (or any update, really) but the pre- and post-wedding stress was holding me firmely in its claws. Today, I have at last a glorious free day (still off work, but no more organizing to do!) to get caught up with my life a little, so it's time for the WIPocalypse too!

The question of the month was How do you keep your stitching stash organized? and I think the honest answer would be 'Just barely'...but if you want details, here we go:

Almost all of my stash is living in my beloved Kallax shelf from Ikea (please excuse the chaos...as I said, post-wedding-stress!). You can see my DMC boxes and two shelves of books and patterns, the red drawers hold beads and specialty threads, the blue ones miscellaneous knitting, crochet and sewing supplies. I have one box of back-up threads, one box of WIPs, one box of stitching fabric, two boxes of yarn, one box of kitted up cross stitch projects and two boxes of mixed stash that I really need to get sorted out. That x-shaped shelf is supposed to be for wine bottles, but now some of my crochet and knitting WIPs live there. One box has sewing fabrics, and then there are some mixed craft supplies and non crafty stuff on some of the other shelves. I think I'll need to do some form of destashing soon, I really don't have any more room!

1) Fire and Ember SAL

Somehow I managed a page finish amongst all the busy-ness, so only two more to go! I'm hoping for a finish in early November.

2) The Puppeteer

I've been doing some catching up and while I'm not quite therem I made some nice progress and actually had a page finish! I love these shots of the whole project...

5) The Mermaid

I added two more colours to the border (one was only used in the corner blocks, so not a lot of stitching there) and started on the sea. More lovely blues and grays, so much fun!

16) Ornaments of the Month

I finish-finish the already stitched up Blue Topaz ornament from December, and stitched back to September Sapphire, which I finish-finished too!