For the third weekend of Mischievous March, I made good on the promise I made with my New Year's start and started the nest on of the Little Sheep Values - Love! And since these are cute, very fun, and not too big, I already finished it a couple days later:
Between all my crazy March starts, I also had a finish - I managed to put the last couple of hours into House Rules, and finished at 42:39h! Not a bad time for a project his size. Here it is in all it's glory, and I am very happy with how the colours turned out:
Full translation:
- Laugh a lot
- Say 'please' and 'thank you'
- Dance in the kitchen
- Keep your promises
- Love what you do
- Say mostly the truth
- Sometimes break the rules
A little tongue-in-cheek reminder for my very rule-following friends to have some fun too :D I hope they will like it. Now I just need to pick out a frame (I'm thinking a plain dark red one) and get Felix to frame it, so we can give it to them the next time we are able to meet!
Once again, I'm sweeping in at the last minute and this is going to be a very short post, as I haven't been good at finishing lately. But I did promise myself to get at least one in every month, so I did!
Remember the ornament I stitched up last week? I went ahead and finish-finished it too, in the same way as I did all the others.
For the second weekend of Mischievous March, I was kind of good and bad at the same time - I streched and bended the rules a bit, and my new start was actually from a series that I am already counting as one WIP on my list! It's Magical525's first 'Ornament of the Month' series from back in 2015. I stiched a lot of the ornaments when they came out, but some months had more than one birthstone (and thus, more than one ornament) associated with them, and I was still missing four of them. June has a total of four ornaments, I already stitched Pearl and Pink Alexandrite, and this past weekend, I started (and finished) stitching Moonstone!
This was a pretty quick stitch - took me just 3h46m for the front and the back! I'll move right along to finish-finishing this in the same way as I did all the other ornaments.
Now there is one more June ornament - Green Alexandrite - and two December ornaments left to go. Depending on how mischievous I'm feeling, I might make one of them my final start on the last weekend of March, but for now, I got something fun planned for next weekend - which is my birthday!
After all the fun, crazy starting challenges last year (You might remember me joining in Naughty November), Rachel and Tiff are bringing some new challenges into play this year - one of them being Mischievous March, again with one start a weekend. And once again, I am trying to balance joining into the fun with not overloading my WIP list!
Week #1 was an easy one for me, though - with House Rules almost done (in fact, spoiler alert, it is done now and waits for a frame) I had room for a new focus project, and there is one I had been planning to make for my best friend's mum's birthday in July! Elephants are her favourite, so this is perfect for me - it's a Wrendale Design by Bothy Threads called 'Age is Irrelephant'. I made a start on Sunday the 7th and already finished my first ten hours over the course of last week:
Progress is a little over the place here - I started in the middle of the fabric, with the tusks, then worked my way up and right and now I'm working down the first elephant. I think this will take about 60 to 70 hours, which should be doable by July if I stick to my usual two-rotations-a-month plan.
This will probably be the biggest start of the month too. I got the 2nd and 3rd weekend all planned out (the 2nd is already started, of course), and they are both projects I should be able to finish right away. For the last weekend, I'm still debating how sensible or how fun I'll going to be!
I am dreadfully late for this post - so much so that I skipped posting my pies for January entirely, and am now posting both months together!
So January was a pretty good crafting month for me. I did a lot of stitching, but also a bit of crochet, and spent a reasonable amount of time on Finish-finishing stuff:
Projectwise, I spent some time with the House Rules and the Little River Blanket, stitched and finished Love you to Death, the Sheep, finished the last of the Zoe Box, and worked on my usual SALs:
So far, so good for the start of the year! Then in February, my times plummeted, more than the short month accounts for. I spent a lot of time gaming and reading, so that's where the time went, I suppose, and I'm just glad that I managed to more-or-less keep up with everything, despite the smaller amount of time!
After finishing one rotation on the House Rules, I made the executive rotation to continue with another rotation (instead of switching, as I could have). I'm glad I did because I didn't get much else done (except for SALs), and this allowed me to stay on track with my dead lined projects!
I'm doing pretty okay with March so far, so I hope my numbers will be back up to normal next time.
This month for Jo's wonderfully open-ended SAL, the theme is spring - something I can't feel in the air yet, but I am hoping to feel soon! And just for this occasion, I mustered the most spring-y things I ever stitched. Granted, some of them are just animals I associate with spring, like bunnies and sheep, but looking at this selection still makes we feel warm and fuzzy inside, and I hope it does that for your as well!
So - looks like my SAL work is turning out a little different this month, instead of me being on top all *cough* of the time as I was last year, and in an attempt to self love I'm trying to be accepting off that. I still want to show you what I've done!
First, there was the Temperature SAL. Remember how cursed this project seemed to be last month? This trend continued somehow, as I first discovered that all but the first of January's flowers were missing one stitch (which was a pain to add, starting a new colour for just one stitch of blackwork sometimes) and on the February part I somehow repeated a colour somewhere and ended up frogging a whole week. Well, I did pull through, and added a bit more on the border too, and I'm very pleased with the result:
I did work a bit on the back of the Autumn SAL, and stitched what I declared the border section of the pattern (it isn't actually that clear a devide, but it works in my mind). This looks like deceivingly little progress, but was actually almost 1k stitches! I think I got about the same amount, if not a little less, left to finish the whole thing this month.
And last but not least, there was the Sampler SAL. This month is almost completely cross stitches, but with variegated threads. Since the fabric is so uneven, I wanted to try out making my crosses not over 2x2 threads as usual, but 3x2 to even things out, and it worked - looks almost normal now! It did make the counting a little awkward, and several frogging incidents later I declared that I was okay being behind on this (I might need to intentionally stay behind on later pages anyways, to see if and how I need to fudge it to make up for the uneveness of the fabric) and only stitched part 1 (of 4) of the second page. Here is what I did so far, with page 1 for width-reference below - I think it's working out!
So that's it for February. The goal for March is to do the Temperature SAL, finish the Autumn SAL, finish page 2 of the Sampler SAL and make a start on page 3, but with everything else going on this month (the one-a-day challenge on Puppeteer, the Mischiveous March New Start Event, and my usual work on TLOA), it might not all happen, and that's okay! I'll get caught up eventually.
February wasn't a very good crafting month for me, but I did work on House Rules a good deal, I just never got around to posting about it! So I guess I better do now. Early in February, I finished my third rotation of the project, getting me here:
As you can see, from last time, I finished the top most row (Laugh a Lot), added one row at the bottom (Love what you do), and made a start on the next one. Just one more row to go after that one is finished!
And to tell you the truth, I continued for another rotation right after (good call on my part, with how my stitching mojo went down low shortly after), and right at the 40 hour mark (with two and a half letters to finish) I ran out of the Kreinik...so next update will be a finish, probably at around 42 hours or so, and hopefully soon as the new thread I ordered has arrived last weekend.
