WIPocalypse - 2021 Intro

 Welcome, welcome - it's the tenth edition of WIPocalypse, and for me personally, it's the eighth time taking part. It's still one of my favourite SALs, as it is so low stress and low effort, and everyone can just make it fit their own style of stitching and posting! The usual signin is at the end of the month but as usual, January gets an extra post as in introduction, so here we go - slightly updated from last year (and the year before that, and before that...):

Hi, I'm Leonore, I'm 31 years old and from Southern Germany. I life together with my husband, and my extended family includes my grandma, who lives nearby and with whom I still spend a lot of time. In real life I'm a computer scientist working towards my PhD, which makes me travel around the world from time to time (although thanks to the pandemic, it's been a while...). I love cross stitch, knitting and crochet, and I'm also trying to learn how to sew. I also like to try out new crafts and have a few things lined up, we'll see if I can get to them this year! My other hobbies include reading and videogames, and I like to watch movies and shows while I craft.

As for my crafting goals - I'm getting less ambitious every year as I never seem to get around to any goal I set in January anyways! For the last two years, I tried to stop my WIPs from soaring over 50, and just barely managed to achieve that - I never really got below that number, either, but I'm still trying. No promises, though! I will continue my ten hour rotation from last year, alternating working on a focus project for ten hours with something else from my stash, as that seems to work quite well. Hopefully I'll manage a couple of finishes while still touching a decent number of my older projects!

As for focus projects, I got several planned this year. I still need to fully finish the Zoe box for a wedding present in April (hopefully, considering the current situation!), I started my a House Rules project in November (update on that soon-ish) that needs to be finishes asap for a house warming gift, and after that I'm going to start a Wrendale for my bestie's mum's birthday in July. After that I have another, as-of-yet secret project lines up, but still need to finalize the details. Nothing as massive as Lady Justice or The Mermaid last year, but plenty of fun stitching to do!

I also have a project on the go that is going to show up throughout my WIPocalypse posts, and that is The Loneliness of Autumn as charted by Love Thy Thread, after a painting of Leonid Afremov. It's a big colourful project that I am SALing with Rachel the Ten Hour Stitcher - she has a different version of the chart, but we're both going extreme cross country, one colour at a time, at a pace of about one length a day/ten hours a month, and we are both about 25% finished! At the end of 2020, after one year of working on this, I had just started my third colour, and the first one to really pop and show up:

I hope to finish this colour by March and make my way through a couple more this year!

As for other SALs, I will continue to link up with Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness and The People Chose SAL, as well as Rachel's Fully Finished Gallery. Stitchingwise, I will be doing Magical525's new Temperature SAL and possibly her new blackwork and/or Sampler SAL, but somehow time got away from me in December and I haven't finalized my plans yet! So there might be a couple surprises along the way. I'm also planning to join in with the "New Starts" events Rachel is planning to host (hopefully without totally ruining my WIP count!), so I'm sure I won't be bored ever, as usual!