July WIPocalypse

I'm a little late again, flying in just under the radar before the month is over ;)  I have a good excuse though, I promise! But first, the question of the month:  What new charts or designers are catching your eye this year? I have to admit, I've mostly been stitching old favourites this year so far, so I haven't actually tried anyone real new this year. One that has been catching my eye a lot lately, especially because of the extremely popular blackwork SAL she's hosting, is Peppermint Purple. She has some absolutely stunning blackwork patterns, I really want to stitch her world map and maybe the bee hive one!

But now for something more exciting and the reason why I'm late - I took a couple extra days to actually finish the first colour on The Loneliness of Autumn! I am caught up on stitching up until the 29th and that was just enough to finish the 939. That is 16.670 stitches or 14.03% done!

So far, I've spent 91:56h on this. I think it's amazing how much of the design is recognizable already! Next up are a bit over 11k stitches of 3371, a very dark brown. Judging by the image on PK, that colour won't really show anything new but 'fortify' what's visible already, just making the excisting stitching a little more dense. With any luck I'll get this done by the end of the year and it should bump me up to about 25% too! So, guess there won't be a more excisting colour for me, but that's alright, I'm pretty content with the progress I am making ^_^

Now if you want, you can hop over to Rachel's, whom I'm SALing this with. She just finished her second colour and starting the third, so things are very exciting over there as well!

July Gifted Gorgeousness

It's time for the July Gifted Gorgeosness, hosted by our most wonderful Jo, and I have a whole lot to show for it this month, so I hope you brought some time!

First things first - I'm stitching the Zoe Box as a wedding gift for two very close friends of mine. You've already seen her this month, but just as I don't get tired of stitching on her, I also don't get tired of posting pictures, so here we go again:

There is also June's bookmark of the month - I'm stitching the whole series as last-minute gifts, so that makes them count for this SAL, right?

And now we can finally go to the fun new things! Well, mostly new. Last month I showed you the little sheep ragdoll I was working on, and that doll is now all finished (and still so cute in my opinion, I hope you agree!)

I also had a very productive knitting weekend - we went to visit Felix' relatives for a weekend in a somewhat pandemic-appropriate way, so we spent two days sitting outside and talking and I spent the whole time knitting, two days of five+ hours each, two little shawls for the two kids of one of Felix' band mates. The one with the shell edges is for a little girl who was born this year, and the one with the pointy edge is for her 'big' brother who's already a little over a year old. This one even counts as a double GG, as the yarn was a gift from my deat friend Carla a couple years back!

Aaaand last but certainly not least, I am SALing Just Nan's 'Morning Meadow' with our very own hostess Jo (I bet you were wondering where I would fit this one in!). I won the chart in a giveaway a few years back, I think it was from rosey at ishkabibble (who hasn't been active in a much too long time, honestly!) with the explicit promise that this was SAL-able with Jo as she already owned the chart. So when she and I got talking earlier this year about doing a summer SAL, naturally this is what we agreed on. We're doing a couple of bands each week, both doing our own colour scheme to avoid buying the expensive silks - for me it's two 'Hand dyed by Nina' colours I had left over from my Hobbit mealplan project, and one by Jodyri. Here it is after three weeks and seven bands (minus the beads as we will add those in the last week). The rabbits don't show up very well on the fabric (Jodyri's Holmsey Hare Limited Edition), but I kind of like them this way, all soft and cute!

Zoe Box - 20 hours

For my first full rotation in July (yes, I'm a little behind on blogging again, why do you ask?),  I went back to my focus piece, the Zoe Box.  Last time I finished the outline of the outside of the box, and the cross stitch of the fall and half of the summer panel:

After I had some serious frogging issues with the green on summer, my second rotation started off pretty good, and I finished summer and most of spring before I realized that my outline was off by one stitch! So I fixed that and got back to cross stitching, finishing spring and winter too (winter didn't have a lot of cross stitch anyways). I then started on the backstitching, first doing all the strong stems and vines with 6 strands of DMC (yes, that is a lot) and did a small start on the regular backstitch too (the leaves in autumn). For my next rotation, I plan to finish the backstitch and hopefully most of the specialty stitches in this part, too!

Next up is Dark Forces for its July rotation, though. That will be a drastic difference to the Zoe Box!

Fully Finished Gallery - July

It's time to check in with Rachel, the Ten Hour Stitcher for July's Fully Finished Gallery! At the beginning of the year I promised her to have at least two finishes to show each one, but I didn't finish anything extra (besides the monthly bookmark) since the last checkin. So I needed to dig into the box of finished stitches, or rather, I picked up one that I started finishing a while back - it was The Halloween Town SAL by the Frosted Pumpkin stitchery that I finished a couple years ago and started finish-finishing into a wall hanging. Now I've been putting this off for ages - my usual excuses were 'I don't have time to sit down and sew' and 'I need to fix up my sewing corner first, it's a mess', but this week I finally got down, shoved stuff aside (because let's try this the other way around, maybe using my sewing corner will make me want to tidy it up? in any case, I can still used it) and sat down and took me just about one and a half hours to get it done!

I might play around with the actual hanging a bit. I think I'd like to not have a string attached but have the ends of the stick 'sit' on a nail or something on both sides. But I also want to put it on my apartment door in autumn...so maybe a fancy cord? Not sure yet, but I still consider this done now - finally!

My second finish is much less exciting as you've already seen it - the June bookmark, stitched on 8ct aida and finished with an identically sized back piece and a simple edge stitch:

The People's Choice SAL: Designer Most Stitched

Our most wonderful Jo has held a most wonderful monthly SAL for some years now, and this month we have a bit of a special theme - The designer we most stitched. Now most people have interpreted this as 'the designer they have the most WIPs and/or finishes by', and I'll get to that, but I also want to offer two more interpretations! (and just as a disclaimer...and don't really have statistics about any of these measurements, so this is all my best guesstimates!)

So first, let's take things literal...the designer I've most stitched...the designer I spent the most time stitching! I'm pretty sure that for me, this is Teresa Wentzler. I have two big finishes from her, The Mermaid took me a good 300 hours, and I'm convinced that Angel of Frost didn't go too much quicker (especially since I had much less practice at stitching then). I also stitches one of her knotwork bookmarks and spent a good deal of time on the border of Peacock Tapestry. This is the last picture I found of it, but now that I don't have any other TW WIPs, maybe I'll pick it up some time soon...

Designer most stitched could also be the designer I did the most stitches by. This would probably be Jody from UnconventionalXStitch - I finished Fire and Ember at 54.200 stitches and already did over 50k on The Puppeteer. I also finished Blookmoon (I think about 8k stitches) and made a start on Kitsune and Sacrifice...both of which I really hope to pick up again soon!

And now to the final interpretation - designer I stitched the most designs by! I think this title goes to Magical525. Her ornaments of the month are probably enough alone to get her that title (even though I still have a couple more to finish!) but I've also been stitching a few of her bigger SALs, the first five of her Mini Mysterys, and six bookmarks this year! She just releases so many pretty and fun patterns, I probably have a hundred more saved that I hope to stitch some day.

The June SALs

We're almost ten days into July and I still owe you my SALs for June - let's change that! This time, was wasn't quite as much behind, actually stitching the blackwork and bookmark while it was still June, and finishing the temperature stitch during the first couple days of the new month.

First off is the bookmark - you've already seen this one before the finishing in all it's 8ct glory. I finished it as suggested, which was by cutting a second, identical sizes piece of fabric for the back, and sewing them together with a fancy edge. Now the original finish was meant for perforated felt so I was a little nervous about fraying, but it went pretty well - one corner turned out a little wonky as I pulled the thread too hard, but I think it's barely noticable.

I think it's actually one of my favourites so far in it's simplicity!

Next is the blackwork SAL. Again, I got to add to motifs this month, and again I did two full crosses as I really enjoyed the patterns. (I also just realized how dirty my couch is after taking this picture, so please ignore the crumbs!).

Hard to believe that this is just halfway through the year, eh? We had slightly 'too many' patterns released per month for the first couple of months, so we only get two now. Apparently that will still make have two too many, but I have some plans on what to do with them.

Last but not least, the temperature SAL! June was a bit unsteady, so we have a good amount of yellows and oranges (including a new colour for 26°), but also some greens. So far July seems to be more of the same, but we'll see how that turns out.

June Crafty Pies

So it feels like the new month has barely started...but it's already more than a week in! Which might explain why I'm already a couple of blog posts behind again. Yet again I'm having big plans to get caught up soonish (at least my reading and commenting is less than a week behind now!) so we'll see how that goes - for today, at least, we have my June crafty pies to talk about!

As you can see, I've been a bit more monogamous this month. Mostly stitching, but a good deal of crochet too (and some finishing, but that was mostly sewing crocheted pieces together!). Now to look at it on a per-project basis...

It looks like a lot, but was actually quite focused! Of my three crochet projects, two are finished (BB8 and the Sheep, the latter of which will be in my GG post next week). Stitchingwise, I finished the Hummingbird, May Bookmark, and Mini Mystery 4 (which you've already seen), did my monthly bit on the SALs (Blackwork, Bookmark, Temperature, which I'll post about soon, and TLOA, which I already did post about), as well as one rotation each on Dark Forces, Possibilities, and the Zoe Box. I kind of hope to get back to four rotations a month in July, but we'll see how that goes.

So the only thing I haven't really talked about lately is the Kanata Kerchief Top. I think I showed this one once when I started it, in September '18. It's a bit of a stash buster project as I've had a ton of this purple yarn for ages with no real plan what to use it for, and finally found this pattern which I think works nicely! While I still have a lot of baby projects to work on, I'm trying to finish something from my WIP list in between too, and this one shouldn't take too much longer. With the work I put in in June and this month, I finished the third panel and made a start of the forth, so hopefully I'll get to assembly soon:

Depending on how much yarn I have over, I might try to make a matching hat or something. I really want this gone from my stash, as pretty as it may be!

Oh, the Possibilities!

Remember those two sneaky new starts I had in May? Well, in late June I finally managed to work on one of them and managed to do a full ten hour rotation, so it's time to talk about it! This project is a superlative in a couple different ways. For once, it's my biggest project so far, by far (with a total of 391.500 stitches), my first HAED, and, because it is so big, my first project in tent stitch. I have a new stitchy friend who does all her full coverage projects in tent, and they look amazing, so I wanted to give it a try as well, and I am pretty happy with it! (the coverage looks a bit patchy if you zoom in on the picture, but I think that was the flash, it looks way better in person, especially if you take a step back). So what is this project I am talking about? It's The Possibilities Eveelutions rainbow, featuring all the evee-evolutions from Pokémon. I totally fell in love with it when I saw it and even went for the max colour version (which uses about 250 different colours, but as it's so colourful, it's worth it I believe). This is what it will look like (eventually, probably in about ten or twenty years judging by my current pace...):

I started in the top left corner and so far I don't really notice any max colourfulness - I only stitched black. 3745 stitches of it (which sounds like a lot, but remember, it was tent stitch and one colour only). Which is almost, but not quite, 1% of the whole thing (it's 0.96% in fact).

Not sure when I will pick this up again as I have a bit more black to go (and then a blob of 939), so it'll be a little longer until it gets really exciting! Also, there's this whole bunch of drama going on at HAED about whether the new DMC colours are charted correctly, and this pattern uses almost all of them, so I might wait and see how that blows over, and if/how other people decide to change out colours. Not like I don't have enough other projects to work on either!