The December SALs & 2021 Plans

 I finally got around to finishing the last of my 2020 SALs (two weeks into the new year - that's not too bad to get caught up, isn't it?) and of course I want to share them with you all!

The first one to get finished (this was still in December, even) was the Blackwork SAL. You might remember that I actually filled my square-made-from-plusses shape in November due to a mixup with the number of patterns given, but I had a plan as to how to deal with the remaining two patterns! See, my plan for this is to make a tablet/laptop cover/bag at some point, so I used the extra patterns to stitch a little extra thing to go on the flap of that. The as of yet empty rectangle is meant to hold initials and/or a date - I'm not sure whether I'm making the cover for mine or Felix' hardware, so I'll fill it in when the time comes.

Next I finished the Temperature SAL earlier this month. December had a lot of  wasn't even *that* cold - January has been much worse so far, but that's a subject for a new Temperature SAL! For now, I am quite happy to have this one done, it was a lot of fun and I think at some point I'm going to have to dedicate a whole wall to all of these.

Last but not least, I stitched up the bookmark for December! I am deliberately saving the close up for another post (as to avoid too many duplicate pictures, don't want to bore you guys!), but a while back I was asked for a completely lineup of all twelve of these bookmarks, so here we go:

December is the bottom right - again I got to use some aida banding I had laying around and I went full Christmas on the colours! 

In any case, lining them all up like this really shows that I put some work into them this year! Do you have a favourite? For me it's really hard to pick, but if pressed I'd probably go with the diagonal band sampler from October. I really loved how everything came together on that one.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've also been thinking about what SALs (if any) to join this year. Of course Magical is hosting a couple of interesting ones again, and her's are always my first go-to! I knew I wanted to do her new Temperature SAL as soon as she announced it. There are two versions this year, and I'll have a hard look at my fabric stash and decide from there which one to do (one is slightly bigger than the other). She's also doing a Sampler SAL that sounds pretty interesting, using all kinds of materials and stitches. This one is a weekly SAL, doing one 'page' of stitches every month, and I hope to use up some more stash joining in.

I was thinking really hard about wether to join her new Blackwork SAL as well, or maybe this year's Ornaments of the Month, but finally decided against it. Instead, I will be trying to finish some of her older SALs on my WIP list, namely the 2019/20 NYE Mystery SAL:

And the 2020 Autumn Mystery SAL:

I've also been working on the 2015 Ornaments of the Month, and the 2020 Mini Mystery SALs - for those I don't have a design currently started, but as I am counting the whole series as one ongoing WIP it'd be nice to get them off the list. There are so many more of Magical's patterns that I want to do, but I should be sensible and take care of these WIPs first, as they really aren't too big!