Naughty November #2

 No more starting binges I promise, from here on out it's a nice and slow one start per naughty weekend...and I might or might not be two weeks behind in posting, so here we go!

My - very modest - plans for the remainder of this event is starting one Christmas ornament per weekend, so I can gift them to Felix' mum, sister, and grandma, respectively. For my first one, I picked out a little kit from a Cross Stitcher magazine I got from a friend some years ago. It's charted to be a brooch, but I'll add a loop hanger instead and save the ornament backing for something else.

Isn't he cute? I've made pretty good progress and only need to fill in the light blue of the sweater, then add a minimal amount of backstitching. Should be done by Christmas easily! Bonus point if you can guess which of the three ladies I'm making this one for :D

November Gifted Gorgeousness

 It's that time of year when almost everything I'm working on is a gift but I can't show half of it! Might be a good thing to, because I do have a lot of things I can show as well! So for this month's Gifted Gorgeousness, let's jump right in and next month, there might be a slightly overlength Christmas special!

I'm saving an update on Zoe until I finally fully finish that (aaaany day now), but I am going to show you Ho Ho No again - it's still stuck in transit to my exchange partner in the US, but I hope it'll get there soon!

I also finished the  cat ragdoll I had been working on - she and the horse now have going to our neighbors' kids, and I am told they are both dearly loved so full success!

And then, as every month, my bookmark of the month (well, of October) - another one for the collection of emergency gifts!

That's it for stuff I finished, so let's move on to current gifty WIPs...I picked up my Beaded Wooden Cactus to work on in between SALs, and it's almost done! Full update coming soon, hopefully (I bought this from a gift card a friend gave me for my birthday):

The House Rule project I started for Naughty November is a double GG hit, as the fabric was a gift by my friend Carla and the finished project is going to be a gift for two friends of mine. This is also going to be my new ten hour focus piece come the new year, but I'll probably be busy having fun finishing up gifts until Christmas!

And last but not least, with the cat finished (but a new baby on the way and on my list...) I moved on to working on the Little River Blanket I put away in January. I even have plans to maybe make another blanket using the leftovers if I am careful! And I'm having a lot of fun with this one for now.

My other three starts from the Naughty November will also be gifts, I have three crafty gifts going into the mail this week, and a new craft I need to try out for yet another gift so...as I said, see you for a nice over length GG in December!

November Fully Finished Gallery

 As every month, I'm linking up with Rachel the Ten Hour Stitcher for the Fully Finished Gallery, and I finally have some fully finished things to show! And one half-fully finished thing, but we'll get to that in a moment.

But first, let's start with a finish you might have already seen - my October Bookmark of the Month:

I stitched this on a piece of linen banding (somewhat mystery banding, as I got it in a grab bag a couple of years ago), and this had a bit of a hemstitch thing going on around the border, so I was struck by a creative spark to pull some ribbon (that had been laying in my craftin area for months) through the holes. I added a second piece of banding for the back to hide the back of my stitching, and used a bit of double sided tape to secure the ends and prevent excess fraying. This has worked out amazingly well - Jo would call it serendipity I'm sure - and I am very happy with it!

Speaking of Jo, my next finish was the Morning Meadow sampler that she and I had been stitching over the summer. I had a dig around in my drawer of frames and found a lovely light gray one I bought a couple years ago with no real plan, and the size was a perfect fit, so I pestered Felix to frame it for me and he did!

Next there was Ho Ho No that I promised you before! I finished this as a flat fold, mostly following the tutorial by the TwistedStitcher. 

For the backing, I used leftover fabric from my Halloween wallhanging, and I applied some orange pom pom cording I had ordered a while back on a whim to the edges (I love how all this finishing was working out with stuff I already had around!)

And last but not least, what (I assume) you've all been waiting for! Well, confession time - I did NOT fully finish the Zoe Box yet. I did, however, make a start on the finishing! I finished the base of the box last weekend, and as it took me more than four hours to get this far, so I didn't do the lid yet, but I'm pretty sure I can pull it off by the next checkin. But even if it's only halfway done, I still wanted to show off, so here you go:

In the end it was less scary than I thought - a lot of work, a couple almost-broken fingers, but in the end it just boild down to careful measuring, lots of pins, and a ton of whipstitch over 2-4 layers! All the same things go for the lid, so I feel much more secure facing that now.

Naughty November #1

 Rachel and Tiff cooked up another new start challenge for this month under the heading of 'Naughty November' and this time, the timing was just right for me (having finished my last focus project) and I'm in! The official schedule is four starts for the four Saturdays of November, but I had two SALs starting on the first so I shifted it over to Sundays, and having a total of six new starts (well, and my bookmark later in the month, but I'm not really counting that as it was planned from the beginning of the year!). I *might* also have carried this over to the Stitchy Quest to Destory the One Ring facebook group as a type of 'start all the things' event, where about 20 people have joined in doing between 1 and 30 starts for the month, and I don't even feel guilty :D

So, back to my starts. On November 1st, I had two starts - one was Magical's Autumn Mystery SAL, which she releases at the pace of one part (about 60-80 stitches) per day. I'm not entirely caught up, but will be again soon, so here it is up to part 12:

The original colour scheme for this was greens, reds, and browns, but Magical helped me convert it to oranges and purple with the greens for a bit of a halloween-y look, and I'm loving it.

The other SAL I'm doing with Jo - we had so much fun with out Morning Meadow SAL this summer, we decided to do another one for Winter. As there were only two Just Nan Christmas Samplers we both owned, the choice was easy and now we are stitching Snowfire Christmas. I have to admit I am super in love with this, the way the grays and white go with the bold reds and greens...this is a bigger sampler, so after three weeks I spent about 14 hours with this already, and made it through the first 8 bands - that's about halfway there! Well, actually, made it through the first band, and then 3-8, as band 2 is almost entirely beaded, and we'll add the beads last.

So those were my pre-starts...now the first proper starts, on the first Saturday of the month, will be my new focus piece. It's a German Houserule-style design by Schrägstich Design. You can see the original here, but I'm doing my own colour way in blues and reds, on a Jodyri Limited Edition Christmas fabric from last year called Snowy Skies.

This will be a (late) housewarming gift for a good friend of ours, who just moved in together with his boyfriend this summer! Red and blue are their respective favourite colours, so I'm doing my best of bringing them together without going for a 'naval' look. There will be sparkle, too! This first word is going to be 'Versprechen' (promises), I will translate the rules for you as I finish them.

Ho Ho...No?

 Sorry for chucking out so many short updates lately, but some things really deserve a post of their own on top of being tucked away into some SAL, I think! This one I stitched for the Secret Santa gift exchange on the Stitchy Quest to Destroy the One Ring facebook group. My partner hasn't received this yet, but I really wanna share and don't think she reads my blog, so I guess it's okay. 

The theme of the exchange was, unsurprisingly, Christmas and winter, but we each did a short questionaire to get our likes and dislikes and my partner told me she likes Halloween much more than Christmas, so that got me thinking. I looked around and finally stumbled across the store of WitchyStitcher on Etsy. She's a new to me designer but has so many fun patterns - and one of them was just what I needed! Meet the adorable little reaper:

I love him so much! There's a Valentine themed one I want to stitch for Felix next year too :D And I got to break out my lovely orange evenweave again, so that was a plus too. I changed out a couple of colours (the gray was charted as one of the new DMC colours I don't have yet, and the fluff on the santa hat was a yellow-ish off white that kind of faded into the background), but otherwise I completely enjoyed this pattern. Only I though this would be a quick stitch...turns out it was about 1.4k stitches and took me 13 hours! But that is including the finishing, and that is for another post ;) 

The People's Choice SAL: Magic

 This month's them for the 'People's Choice' SAL, hosted by the most magical Jo, is Magic! Pretty close to last month's theme of Wizards, but this time, I actually have some stitching to show. For example, there is this witchy cat, who I am pretty sure has some magic of his or her own:

There is this tiny witch flying on her broom under a cheesy moon (which I really should finish into something sometime):

There is my Whacky Witches that I finished last year - tons of witches, and some other magical creatures too!

And last but not least, my little blood moon witch I finished this summer:

So it seems that when it comes to magic, I am mostly drawn to witches. I have some other magical creatures in my stash though, like this Fall Fairy kit I bought years ago:

Looking at how much I love fantasy, dragons, unicorns, and everything magical, I sure don't stitch a lot of it! Maybe I'll need to change that soon.

The October SALs

 Two posts in one night? What's this? Could it be...my desperately trying to get caught up while I have time (and am in a mood) to write? No, of course not! This is just a...happy little coincidence, nothing more.

So, let's talk SALs. I was better keeping on track with them on October, only the Temperature SAL took some extra time and was only finished yesterday - but one thing after another. First up, the Blackwork SAL:

I just realized that picture is awfully blurry but you can clearly see that his is filling in quickly! Due to a mishap with counting patterns this main shape will be finished this month. but never fear, I do have plans for the extra patterns coming out in December! Fun ones too. 

Next, let's talk bookmarks - the October one was kind of a diagonal band sampler, and super fun! I dug out my Nina's Threads from the Hobbits Mealplan project once again and I saw love how the colours look on the raw linen banding, especially the green:

The finish on this one was fun too, making use of the special structure of this band, but I'll talk about it a little more in my FFG post, hopefully soon. 

Last up, and hot off the needles, the Temperature SAL! We are firmly back in the greens, with a couple forages into the blues and onl two pale yellow sunny days. November has been even worse so far, so expect to see a lot of blues from here on out...

October Stitchy Pies

 How did I end up in the middle of the month with none of my blogging done again? At least I can happily report that my crafting is on a good way again, and has been for all of October, and here are the pies to prove it!

A good mix of crafting, actually. Lots of stitching, but I also started new knitting and crochet projects - Christmas projects that I'll be able to show later in the year - and got some beading done, which I will be able to show soon! 

Namely, I pulled out the Beady Cactus and hope to have a finish soon! Apart from that we have TLOA (right on track), Zoe Box (awaiting finihs-finishing - maybe this weekend?), my crochet cat (done and waiting for GG) and Hounds Tooth, LYS and Purple Hearts are gifts I'll be able to show later in the year. There are my SALs I'll blog about soon, I don't think I've talked about Ho Ho No but that deserves a post of it's own, which leaves...my Never Ending Band Sampler! I continued stitching one band every week for all of October, which brought me here:

This is taking a little break until the new year though, as I started a new band sampler SAL with Jo! Boy, there really is a lot of stuff I need to tell you about...November is proving to be an exciting crafting month so far, so I hope to get you up to speed soon.

October WIPocalypse

 Helloooo, lovelies! (yes, I am in a good, but silly mood tonight, so please bear with me!). As usual, I 'cheated' a little with my WIPocalypse post, moving it to/after the very end of the month so I could show you all my progress on TLOA, but first, the WIPocalypse topic of the month: How do you choose what you’re going to stitch on next? I don't really have just one method of doing that. There are a couple of set projects in my rotation, like my monthly SALs that I work on when they come out, TLOA, on which I work (almost) daily, and I usually pick one focus project (Zoe at the moment) that I try to spend every second rotation on. Now for my other slots, Im mostly free to choose - sometimes I pick something that is close to a finish, or I draw randomly, or something just calls to me in the moment. 

Now on to TLOA...I'm still plunging away on my 3371, while Rachel should have gotten to her first 'real' colour this month (I'll put a link her once I got to her post, I'm still a little bit behind on my reading). Last time I was here, about halfway through the 3rd row of pages in filling in the 3371:

This time around, I actually managed to finish the 3371 on that row, and also made it through the first 3-and-a-bit pages of row #4! That means I got to work on that bench again. For some reason I'm still super obsessed with it, so that was fun :D It feels like I'm getting really close to finishing this colour now, but the first page on the 5th row seems to have a MASSIVE amount of 3371 in it.

So, new stats: As of now, I got a total of 24.280 stitches done on this, which amounts for 20.44% of the whole design. Only 3740 stitches left to go in this colour! So I might finish a little earlier than the end of the year. I still need to decide if I'll sit it out to start the new year with a new colour, or just keep going in that case. Let's see how far I can by the end of November!