The February SALs

 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.