November Gifted Gorgeousness

I am still working on a number of gifts, and even though I can't show all of them to the internet just yet (and have already shown you a number of others, like my latest progress on Fans and the secret Santa ornaments), but there are two crochet projects that I have progress to show on!

First, there's the shawl I'm making for my grandma. I've been steadily working on this and finally reached the purple - how exciting! This also means I'm getting pretty close to the end of the yarn. I think maybe one more repeat of the pattern now before I have to start working on the border! Should be done in plenty of time for Christmas.

I'm also still working on my Ubuntu blanket, the yarn for which was a present for my birthday. Last month, I finally finished all the single parts of the blanket, so this month I went to attach them all and made a start on the blanket. Let's just say it's a good thing it's getting cold outside, because working on the blanket now means sitting UNDER the blanket! 

There are about twenty more rows of border to do at this point, and each one takes over an hour at the moment, so still a ways to go, but it's fun! It is getting harder to photograph properly, though, so I think for now I'll show you my progress on the border like this:

Fans of the Far East - 11th Rotation

It's been almost a month since I talked about this piece, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on it! In fact, I made some pretty meaningful progress, and in a moment you'll see what I mean by that. 

After starting fan #3, I had to get back to working on the border...one last time! That's right, because after about four hours...

...I made it to the other side! No more green border leaves on this project because they are all in there. I kind of liked working on the border, but it did get a bit monotonous after a while! 

Since my rotation wasn't over yet, I went waaaay over to the left side of the design...to make a start on the backstitch! As is usual, the transformation of adding backstitch to the full crosses was STUNNING. Really, so much worth it! And it goes pretty quickly too, in fact, I managed to finish most of the first page in what remained of the rotation:

Back to the other side for ten hours of cross stitching...but right now I am very excited about both sides of this project!

November Fully Finished Gallery

The end of the year always is this weird time when I seem to finish a lot, but have little to show because I never know who might prematurely catch a glimpse of their gift! In this case, I took part in a secret Santa exchange over one of my facebook stitchy groups. According to tracking information, it was delivered on Monday, so even though I haven't heard from my partner yet, I don't think she's reading this blog, so I'll just post it.

The theme was Christmas ornaments, and she said her favourite colour was orange - of course, that's not quite so easy to bring together, but I think I managed quite well in the end. I even managed to use all things from stash - a bit if fabric I picked up earlier this year because it was an off-cut and I liked the colour, floss from previous projects, and some fake leather tassles I bought with a collection of charms some months ago. And I got to use two patterns I had saved for years! You can find them here and here, if you are interested.

I hadn't tried this style of finishing before - don't quite know what to call it, either - but I found it pretty interesting and think it'd work well with many biscornu-style symmetric patterns. What do you think?

The October SALs

That's right, we're back to plural! During the month of October, I actually managed to pick up the NYE SAL and add two more parts - I believe it was 25 and 26:

And then there is, of course, the classic, my Temperature SAL that I work on every month. October was a cooler month for sure, as is made visible by lots of green:

Seeing this design always reminds me how far along the year really is - just two more months to stitch, can you believe it?!

The People Chose: Funny

It's the first weekend of the month, so, once again, it's time for Jo's famously fun all purpose SAL, The People's Choice! Each month we are voting for a theme, then doing out best to shoe horn any of our stitching in there. See, fun! And, fittingly enough, this month's theme is 'Funny', so I went through my finishes looking for anything with comedic value. I found more than I thought! Most have some kind of text, but my Halloween stitch is pretty funny all without words, I think. So...have fun!

October WIPocalypse

Hello my friends, another month has passed and it's time for our WIPocalypse checkin again! I spent yesterday furiously stitching on TLoA to get caught up, so I am only one day late, which is pretty good for me! The question of the month is Do you prefer Halloween or Christmas stitching? and I think that might be a tie for me, with a slight preferance for Halloween, perhaps. I really love cute Halloween designs and the colours used, but the holiday is not that big around here so Christmas is what I stitch for more in terms of ornaments and gifts.

Now for my stitching - last time you saw it, TLoA was here at 48,568 stitches or 40.88% done, and I had just started adding 780, my 9th colour:

As the 780 was quite spread out, it took me a little longer to get is all done, and I finished it on October 25th (or the length that equaled Oct 25th, I did the actual stitching yesterday):

So I had 5 days to make a start into colour #10, which is DMC 934 - a very dark green. As the first green of the design, this is kind of exciting, but it's very dark and very spread out, so doesn't look like much for now. The first five length already saw me through 3 pages on the top left:

There are 2375 stitches total of this colour, of which I have 2109 left do do. Not sure I will get it done this month, it depends on how much I really need to jump around, but it will be close either way. New total is 50,669 stitches or 42.65% done!

October also was a one-a-day focus challenge, and I had picked up The Puppeteer:

I managed to stitch at least a stitch a day, but most days I did much more, averaging at a bit over one length a day, and I ended up adding almost two thousand stitches of black. Which leaves me at just over 5k stitches left to finish the colour!

 I think I will continue picking this up for focus months until all the black is done. I can't wait, honestly!