Hufflepuff Pride Socks - 50 Hours

It's been a while since I posted these socks - beginning of January, I believe. I kind of lost steam on them, which is sad because I'm making them for a friend, plus, they are blocking my favourite set of sock needles! So, I made a deal with myself that I'd need to work on them for a bit between other projects, and finally finished another rotation. And a sock!

Yup, you've read (and seen) right, the first sock is finally done (I totally dig how that foot is constructed, will need to look into similar patterns once this is done) and I made a decent start on the second one. I usually 'suffer' from the opposite of second sock syndrome - usually the second one goes faster for me - so hopefully, that will help me push though as I make my way down the leg!

Bellatrix - 20 Hours

Earlier this month, I picked Bella back up for another ten hours. Last time I left her (back in January, when she was my New Year's start, I had only worked on her dress so far, so she was here:

As you might remember (or at least will remember now that you see the lovely greens!) I am stitching her in a colour conversion - redhead with green dress instead of the original black hair and purple dress. So it was only natural I wanted to see some more of those lovely new colours, and this rotation, I started -and finished her hair. Love the subtle shading there!

I know she looks a little ghastly without her face in place, but by the time the hair was done there wasn't enough time to finish it, and half-stitched face would look even weirder, so I decided to make a start on the background instead (there's plenty of that to get bored with, anyways). I still really like where this is going and hope I'll get to work on her some more throughout the year!

Stitching Stats, Q1

I've been meaning to blog this since the beginning of the month, but there was always something more urgent to take care of first, so it took a while. You might remember that back in 2020 I did monthly crafty statistics, and I quite enjoyed them, but felt like it got a little boring and repetitive after a while. So for this year, I decided to do them by quarter instead! I've also been keeping track of stitch counts on top of hours, so maybe that'll be fun as well. 

So, the first three months of 2022 were pretty busy for me - I was finishing up my job at university, there was lots to do around the house (and grandma's), some family health drama and then there was all of us catching covid in March (but at least that one was good for my crafting times, being stuck at home for ten days!). 

I did 251 hours of crafting total over three months, split over 22 projects. 10 of these have been finished too! As you can see, the biggest chunks of the first quarter were Fans of the Far East and the Ubuntu blanket. Both of these are done now, so there will be different projects in the pole positions for Q2! You can also see that I missed about a month on TLoA (at a bit over 10 hours a month that I usually do), but I'm getting caught up slowly. Finally, for the Deluxe blanket, I finished most of it in December and then took a couple weeks to get around to weaving in the ends!

 

And here it is by tags:

As usual, the biggest chunk went into stitching, but I did a fair bit of crochet too. Knitting and Beading where just one project each, the baby surprise jacket and the beaded clip, respectively.

On top of taking my stitching times, I've also been using a spreadsheet (designed by my friend Moirae) to track the stitches I did on every project. Here is the overview over the first three months of that:

Not sure what happened in February there, but you can clearly see the extra time I got being off work sick in March! The spreadsheet also tracks how many stitches I did on each project, but I forgot to get a screenshot of that at the end of April. What I can tell you is that here, as well, Fans of the Far East is in the lead, with 5385 stitches done this year (that's a bit over 20% of my Q1 stitches), but as it is finished I think it will soon be dethroned.

As a nice side effect, tracking my daily stitches allows me to track that I did, in fact, stitch every day of the year so far! Probably for a lot longer too, but I have no way to check for 2021, so I'll be counting ma streak from 1/1/22. A fun new thing to track...I love my statistics and hope you found them entertaining, as well :)

April Gifted Gorgeousness

Once again it's time for one of my favourite SALs, the Gifted Gorgeousness hosted by the wonderful Jo! As you might know by now, I mostly use this SAL to show all my crochet and knitting projects that are gifts, and for the past year I've also been showing progress on a big blanket, which was a gift to me - or well, the yarn for it was! And, as you might also remember, I finished it in March, and started a new one. I haven't really been working on any gifts this month, but I did work on this new blanket, a lot actually! I finished the first two parts (there are twelve again)

I have to admit that I like part one (the diamond in the centre) a lot more than part two going around it, but it was still fun to make and I love how the colour changes are starting to show. Hopefully, by next month I'll have another part ready to show. And maybe finish this fox doll I have (or rather haven't) been working on for months...

Beaded Clip Finish

On the morning of my birthday (which has been almost a month ago...gosh, I really need to pick up the pace here!) I was down to 50 WIPs (as my long term followers might know, that's the magic number for me - anything more just feels overwhelming!) and I really wanted to keep it that way, but knew I had my birthday start planned for later that day - so I went through my list, looking for something that could quickly be finished, and I found this beaded clip, a Mill Hill kit I had started years ago and abandoned. It was, however, almost done, and as such perfect for my cause! So I spent the morning beading, and was done by lunch time:

And I'm glad I finally pulled through - it's very pretty, and dangly, and sparkly, and was a lot of fun to make. I really should do more beading...but where to find the time?!

April Fully Finished Gallery

Another month of fully finishing our work...and another month that I have just one small finish to show (and it's not even one from the box of shame, but one explicitly stitched for this SAL and the Easter Blog Hop). I am, of course, talking about my Ukrainian-style Easter egg. Here it is before assembly:

The pattern is by NevaSirenda. She has Ukrainian roots and has been releasing these eggs for the last ten years or so, one pattern per year. I'd been meaning to stitch them for years, and this year it felt fitting. So I started with the 2021 pattern (you can find it here and click through to the others, the 2022 was just released and is so pretty!)

As you can see, I fitted the outline to the egg shape and then whip stitched it shut with the cord you can see on the right. It wasn't all that easy to follow the shape of the egg and I'm trying to think how to finish the others in a better way while still making them look like a set (I'll probably go with the egg shape for the bigger ones and put the smaller ones in a square or something).

Easter Treasure Hunt Blog Hop 2022

Happy Easter, everyone! I know a lot of people won't really feel like celebrating this year, but I think if two years of pandemic has shown us anything, it's that we need to take and treasure the good times as they come up, so I wish everyone as much happiness, sunshine, and family time as possible. And chocolate, of course, don't forget the chocolate!

As every year, Jo is sending us on a wild egg hunt to look at pretties and collect letters, and as every year, I am proud and glad to be part of the fun. If you have no idea what I am talking about right now, I suggest you check out her post here to get all the rules and details.

If you do now, you are probably here for a letter. I can offer you an E, and this picture of my little spring corner with a Ukrainian style Easter egg I stitched this year (details to follow in my Fully Finished Gallery post, probably later this weekend).

Now hop on to the next participant, which is Beth!

The People Chose: Series of Designs

This month in Jo's wonderful all-purpose SAL, the topic is Series of Designs - ahh, series. They are both a blessing and a curse, don't you think? So many of them are so pretty, but of course if you start, say, a monthly series, you can't just do one of them, you need the whole set! At least I can't stop at just one. I do like more open series though, like holidays or just different animals...I still have that urge to stitch all of them, but if noone can tell it's an incomplete series, it's not quite as bad, haha :D 

Sadly, I have quite a few unfinished series going on, myself. There are my ornaments of the month, of course, which I started when they were released in 2015(!):

I added one or two since I took this line up, but there are still a couple missing (there is more than one ornament for some months).

There is this cute seasonal series by Durene Jones and as you can see there is only one more missing! So hopefully, this one will be finished this year.

And then there are the Little Sheep Values I started last year. These are fun because they were technically a monthly series (themed through the seasons too) but they don't have the names of the months on them or anything, so you could also just stitch a couple of them! I do have all the charts and buttons though, and hope to add to the collection soon:

So many more fun series out there that I can't wait to start, but can't stitch everything all at once, sadly!

The March SALs

In the last days of March (and the first days of April, actually) I was once again working on my SALs. That means I stitched up the 4th installment of the Magical Kingdom SAL (since I started this one in December) - it's one of my favourite Disney movies, and maybe my favourite panel of the SAL. I think it's also the biggest one, but doesn't have a lot of detail so it stitched up more quickly:

I also stitched up the March branch on my Temperature Tree (and made a start on the April branch as I needed some more stitches for one of my stitching games). March saw a pretty steady progression from the cooler blue to the warmer greens (but then temperatures took a nosedive again in the beginning of April).

March WIPocalypse

And just like that, a quarter of the year is already gone! My sense of time is still totally of, but I guess I'll just have to believe what my calendar tells me. It's been a weird year so far, but there's still nine months left to turn it into a good one. Of course, a month being over also means it's time for my WIPocalypse checkin, so let's get to that! The question of the month is Tell us about a technique, designer, pattern, or anything else in stitching that you’ve been nervous or afraid to try. I think my answer on this has been the same for the last couple years, and maybe this will be the year I conquer my fear, but I also say this every year - Hardanger! I really want to try it, it looks so pretty, but I'm also terrified by the idea of cutting into my fabric.

So March for WIPocalypse was a focus month, and we were to pick a project to work on every day. I picked my The Loneliness of Autumn, which I am SALing on with Rachel. I've been falling a little behind lately - I'm supposed to stitch one length of thread every day, but I fell off the wagon sometime in January. For March, I decided to not try and catch up, but just stitch my one length every day, and I managed to do just that! I even doubled up on a couple of days, effectively catching up five days or so, but that's just a bonus. In total, I managed 2079 stitches over the course of March, and finished the DMC 869 which had been dragging me down so much...only to be replaced by 1966 stitches of DMC 400, which sadly doesn't look all that different! Of those, I still have 1439 stitches to go, which should be doable over the course of April. Current total: 57,592/118,800 stitches or 48.48% done.

 

I had actually picked a second focus project for April, and that was The Puppeteer by UXS. I'm doing just the black on this for now, extreme cross country style, and I managed one length per day for a total of 1718 stitches. New total here is 58,522/112,000 stitches or 52.25% (and yes, that is all black!) with 3429 stitches of black left to go. I can do that this year! June and July are the next focus months, so you should see it again no later than that.