August Gifted Gorgeousness

I'm a little late for the August checkin, but I have lots to show for it, so let's get right into the action!

I finish-finished my latest two baby gifts - the cuddly hippo and another one of my beloved BSJs:

I picked up Lady Justice a few times for various challenges, and she made some pretty decent progress:

My Blackwork Water Lily also came out to play for a challenge, and I finished three petals - this was gifted to me a few years ago:

And last bet definitively not least, I've been making progress on my Mermaid, which is quickly filling in now - so close I can almost taste it!

The 2019 Halloween SAL

As you might remember from last year, Carla and I are hosting a yearly Halloween Stitch Along every year. This year, our designers are Durene Jones and Jody Ellis from Unconventional XStitch, and we are lucky enough to actually have both of these awesome ladies in our group!

Our official start was August 15th, and I actually managed to get some stitches in that day, and every day since. Since I never actually finished my planned patterns in the last years, I'm trying to start small this year, hopefully not ending up with another bunch of WIPs. For my main pattern, I chose Blood Moon from Jody, which isn't super big, but extremely pretty - I started and finished 816, which is the colour with the most stitches at 955, and now I'll be working on colours in decending order of stitches.

Once I finish this, I have a couple of Halloween freebies by Durene lines up, and if I actually finish these as well, there's plenty of beautiful patterns I'm just dieing to get!

Plus, as my Puppeteer is also a little Halloween-y, I'm trying to finally catch up those stitches I didn't do when I was on vacation earlier this year. I'm hoping to get a row finish before Halloween - another four pages, but three of them barely have any black on them, so it should be very doable.

Fully Finished Gallery - August

I'm cutting it pretty close this month...both with the date (12 hours until the linkup expires!) and the theme (the rules say 'cross stitch or similar', and this is very much on the 'similar' side of things), but I do have a fully finish, so I can check in with Rachel this month!

In fact, I finished (and fully-finished) my Sashiko coasters, I little project I bought in Japan and have only shown once before. Sashiko is seemingly simple technique - a fabric, often dark blue, is printed with a pattern, that you then follow with needle and thread. It's not quite that easy, though, since the fabric is super fine and the needle and thread super thick, and I had a lot of issues with the fabric getting warped and out of shape. With the second one, I was extra careful to pull it flat after each line of stitches, and it was a little better, but still not as nice as I'd have liked. Thankfully, a little blocking helped, and once I had attached the backs (which I'm guessing I was supposed to do...my Japanese is a little rusty and I was mostly working by the pictures), both turned out quite nice, even if they're not perfect by far:

They did stitch up super quickly, and I can definitifly see myself doing more Sashiko in the future...and the coaster-finish also gave me an idea for something in my pile of shame, so there is that!

The People's Choice SAL: Monochrome

Can you believe I'm actuall writing this way ahead of the end of the month deadline? I know, it feels so wrong, and I'm being so proud of myself at the same time, haha :D
So this is Jo's Monthly Themed SAL, and the theme of the month is 'Monochrome'. I came to realize that I don't actually do a lot of monochrome stitching - I have some projects that certainly FEEL like they are all one colour, but most of them actually aren't! I guess I'm just too big of a sucker for colourful designs after all. Here are a few more-or-les monochrome designs I did stitch - this lovely bandsampler hosted by Stacy a few years back:

 

Next up are my Ornaments of the Month by Magical525 (2015 edition). I picked the seperate pictures this time so you can see the colours better, but I think there are a few missing...sorry!

Also by Magical, last year's New Year's Eve SAL  - all in blues:

 

 And last but not least, this square I did for a 'Stitch for Syria' charity quilt project in 2016, using a nice fall-coloured DMC Colour Variations thread. The charity project has since concluded, but you can find what information I still have in this post.

Finish It In - August Checkin

Another SAL due this week is the monthly 'Finish It In', hosted by my wonderful friend Magical525.

I'm still working on my list of six projects I want to finish this year:

1) The Mermaid
2) Reindeer
3) Wuffi the Dog
4) Whacky Witches in Stitches
5) March Fobs
6) Viajante

This month, I made progress on three of these - of course, I'm still and always working on the Mermaid, and just this week actually had a page finish - one more to go!

I also worked on Whacky Witches, finishing part 8 and making a good start on the final part. Just a couple hundred stitches and this will be done!

I also worked on Viajante for a bit, getting from 221 to 210 g left, so I used up 11 g of yarn this month. Not a lot, but every bit counts!

As I had no new finishes, the list remains unchanged.

July Stitchy Pie

Another one in the list of need-to-catch-up-to posts: Stitchy Pie! The only pie with twice the fun and none of the calories! I was pretty busy in July, but as I was traveling a lot (again...), not a lot of it was stitching. I still made nice progress on some things, and as usual, I'm going to show you the best off (minus the ones I'll just showed, or plan to show soon-ish):

So, most of my time went into the Sekamelsa shawl, and I still love it - I finished parts 2-4 and I'm halfway through part 5 right now. So far, part 2 is my favourite, it uses these really cool extended front post triple stitches that I've never seen before. I'm currently stalling, thinking about how I want to make the extensions...according to the pattern, there's just one more part to go, I still have more than half of the yarn left, and the shawl is tiny! Which is interesting, as it's turning out really differntly for different people. I'll let you know how I decide!

I also made some nice progress on the Pumkin Doodle Cats, filling in a lot of the actual cats. I think I might be able to finish this one, maybe even before Halloween!

And last but not least, I picked Kitsune up for a good round of stitching for some group homework, and made a good start on the next column.

Summer Postcard Blog Hop

Hey lovelies, I've had a pretty exhausting week and I'm already falling way behind again, so I'll try to get a few catching-up entries up this weekend. To start off, here's an easy one (for me), the Summer Postcard Blog Hop, hosted by no other than the mistress of blog hops herself, the one and only Jo of Serendipitous Stitching!
The theme was 'International' and we were supposed to send her a picture of some stitching along with a message. The following was sent by Clare-Aimetu:

Bonjour toute les monde – I’m currently at home resting after another superb holiday with my travelling owners. We’ve been to many places since my first trip which was to Paris for their 25^th Anniversary. Our latest holiday was their first cruise, round the Eastern Mediterranean celebrating their 30^th Anniversary, how times flies. It’s great fun seeing the world doing my important job looking after their passports – Bon Voyage ! 

July WIPocalypse

I'm not going to tell you a big story about how I am late yet again because I think I've used all of those up, I'll just get into the post itself!
The topic of the month is How do you get yourself out of a stitching drought? and I'm not really sure I've had one of these (well, not since I started stitching again and made this blog). Yeah, my hobbies ebb and flow, sometimes I will spend some more time on one or the other, but there's always room for a little stitching - and I've learned to just let the slower times happen, they always pass on their own :)

Now for my SALs - all that delay gave me actually time to work on them! Mamluk and the Blackwork SAL are both past their halfway mark now:

The Temperature SAL now has all of July - as you can see, we hit another hot spell last week. I even got to break out a new red...there's just one more on my scale now, and that would mean an average temperature of 30°C+, so I really hope I won't need that!

I also did the 'Stitch a Day' thing again for July, and I think I missed a day or two but I still made good progress on my Mermaid. Still no page finish, but I'm getting close!

Then, of course, there is my '-19 in 19' thing still going on, even though I'm not doing so well...probably a good thing I forgot to even mention it last month for the half year recap, because things did not look to good then, but now I made it to 46 at least, and hope to have a few more finishes this month!