June Gifted Gorgeousness

 Another month has passed, and it's time for my favourite SAL, Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness! Of course, this is my favourite partly because so many things I'm working on anyways fit in there, as I love making gifts. This months, I have three to show you, and one you have already seen - of course I am talking about my elephants, a birthday present for my best friend's mum, and finished in plenty of time, too:

Next up is my Ubuntu blanket. I was gifted the yarn to make this blanket for my birthday, and I'm on a mission to finish it by my next birthday! So far, I am a little behind schedule, but I did manage to finish part 2 - that is 13 rows on all of these diamonds:

 They are each about 50cm long at this point. But of course, I couldn't then resist to pick up one of them and add the four rows that make up part 3 (and also introduce the last colour, the main colour of the blanket that hasn't made an appearance so far): 

 That's the final size of the diamonds, and at 67cm in length perfect to gauge! Now let's see if I can repeat that five more times by the next checkin.

Now if you know me, you know I'm always working on some baby present too. The last couple times, I showed you a yellow blanket I was making, but alas, there has been a change in plans. The yellow blanket, while very sweet, is a rather small one, and the child it was intended for is almost a year old now - so I decided to make them another ragdoll instead, and finish the blanket later for a younger baby. So I got to start another animal - can you guess what it's going to be? Of course you could just check the name of the picture, but that would be cheating, wouldn't it? ;)

Age is Irrelephant - Finished!

 The legs of the second elephant went a lot quicker than I thought, so after finishing the next ten hours, I was so close to the bottom that I just pulled through, and had a full finish at 61 hours and 57 minutes - that includes just 26 minutes of backstitch, by the way, and was considerably shorter than the 70 hours I had estimated for this project, so I am quite happy!

Here they are, already washed and pressed:

(the blue is actually my ironing board shining through, the fabric is white with speckles - but they'd have looked nice an sky blue as well, wouldn't they?). The frame has been picked out and arrived a couple days ago, so whenever Felix has an hour or so, this will be finish-finished and shipped off to my friend :) 

I really loved this project - thought it'd be kind of boring with all the grays, but I enjoyed it start to finish. I don't have any more Wrendale designs in my stash right now but I think that will have to change soon, there are a couple more I got my eyes on!

June Fully Finished Gallery

 It's the tenth of the month, so that means it's time for the Fully Finished Gallery as hosted by the wonderful Rachel - and this time, I actually come prepared! Last weekend, I dug deep into my box of shame and pulled out this pillow top that was finished in 2013 - yes, that's 8 (EIGHT) years ago! I actually owned the pillow back for finishing it for just about the same amount of time, all I needed was a little push to finally sit down and attach one to the other! It took me almost 2 hours to get it right, but still, now that it's done, I really don't know why I let it sit for so long.

Isn't it pretty? All bright and colourful on our couch. I might just want to make another pillow one day (as I got one more of the premade pillow backs, too!).

The People Chose: Butterflies

 It's the first Saturday of June, and thus time for Jo's wonderfully versatile all-purpose People's Choice SAL! This month the subject is butterflies, and to my surprise I found I never really stitched any of those. I finished several projects that have butterflies, but always just as a small piece of a bigger design:

One of my current projects also has some tiny butterflies - this is Nan's Garden, a (not quite current) SAL at the Just Nan Junkies facebook group. I *should* have finished this in May, but still need to finish the last three bands + beads, so I'm a little bit behind! I've been distracted by lots of elephant stitching but hope to catch up soon.

The May SALs

With all the quest-stitching going on in May, I didn't have a lot of extra time to put into older SALs. The NYE one got pulled once and I added two parts - 19 and 20, about 160 stitches:

I tried to make up for it by putting some extra work into the Temperature SAL, though. Almost finished the brown in the border, so I think the whole outline will be done long before the end of the year! The past four days I spent adding the flowers for May; we had a pretty cold May but still firmly in the greens. And the way June is starting off, I think there will be lots of yellows and maybe even some oranges!

Age is Irrelephant - 50 Hours

 Since the deadline is looming ever closer, I've been pretty focused on Age is Irrelevant lately. I'm still greatly enjoying working on these gentle giants and making good progress too!

So today, I reached 50 hours working on this project. The head of the second elephants (it's the male in my head) is pretty much done, eyes, ears and tusks. There still is some trunk left to do, and then it's pretty much all legs!

I had to move the hoop after taking this picture, so I tried to take a full shot too, but it turned out a little blurry and by the time I noticed, I had already started working on it again - sorry! Still, to give you an overall idea where this is going:

As he is much slimmer around the legs then around the ears, I think the next ten hours should get me pretty far. Probably not finished, but hopefully close!

May Crafty Pies

 Wow, can you believe it's June already? It's certainly starting to look and feel like summer out, but gosh, were has the year gone?! May was a pretty exciting mont for me personally - not only did we travel for the first time in almost a year (visiting with Felix' family for a couple of days), but I also had some time off work apart from that and got a lot of crafting done! Mostly stitching, but also a fair bit of crochet and some knitting:

I wasn't quite as...focused as I had trying to be all year. You know I am part of the Stitchy Quest group on facebook, and we get stitching quests - usually every other week. Every quest has some tasks, like 'stitch 200 stitches on a project that has a tree', and then if you don't have a project that fits or just don't want to, you can do twice the amount of stitches on whatever you want. That's usually the option I go with, because I want to focus on my regular rotation! But in May, we had a special anniversary quest, that has us visiting all the previous quests - we randomly pick 65 tasks to do 100 stitches on - and you can only stitch 'penalty' if you actually don't have a project that fits. At first I was annoyed at how much jumping between projects that was causing for me, but after a couple iterations I really enjoyed it and decided to embrace it for my own kind of Maynia madness. So you'll see quite a few projects showing up for just an hour or two. I'm not done with the quest yet (I just finished 35/65 tasks) so I'll continue doing it, and show you progress on each project in the end...expect for one, but we'll get to that in a moment:

So if you scan this list carefully, you'll see some old acquaintances...and then there is 'Tablecloth with Houses'. Wait a minute, long time readers of this blog might think, wasn't that...? Did you really...? Yes it was, and yes I did - I finally went and picked up my very oldest WIP/UFO! This is a tablecloth that has four sets of one house and two trees along it's ages. The kicker (one of them) was that I lose the pattern. I had one house done, so I could copy from that, but less than half of a tree, so I needed to chart that almost from scratch. But I'm so proud of myself for doing just that, and look!

What do you think of my little tree? I quite like it. The second tree on this side is also almost finished, and all that in under five hours. I'll have to frog and restitch the parts that were done before, because this was a time before I realized simple rules like 'don't use knots' or even 'start and finish all your stitches in the same direction', but even though, I could easily finish this within the year I think...maybe if I just stitch one motif every month, or two? It sure would be exciting to finally get this off the list!