July WIPocalypse

The second half of July went by in a flash, and now it's time for WIPocalypse again - and in a rare occurrence the last day of the month falls on the last Sunday of the month, so I get to post on time, woo! Did you have a good stitching month? I'm actually pretty pleased with myself, and one of the reasons I will get to show off today. First, though, there is the question of the month - What five patterns do you really want to purchase (or start) right now? I think we've had this question before, but I tried to find five all new patterns that I haven't showed before. I didn't quite check, but I think these will do the trick! A good mix of want to start and want to buy, I think.

1) Circular Logic by Ink Circles - top of my list because I picked up some super pretty Silk4U fibres I want to try out! However, I'm reserving purchasing & starting this pattern for a special occasion, so not quite yet.

2) Encanto by Cloudfactory - just picked this one up in their Christmas in July sale. I love their whole Disney series and eventually want to purchase and stitch all of them, but Encanto is my new favourite Disney movie so it only seemed appropriate to start with this one.

3) Moonlight by SmartyOwl - I recently discovered this on Etsy and I'm kind of obsessed with both the way this designer uses specialty stitches and the soft colours and....kind of everything! I think I'll soon cave and buy this one.

4) Piggy in the Middle by Bothy Threads - This one was a gift from my grandma recently, I believe it was last Christmas. It's high up on my list of 'wanna' start because I just adore all the Wrendale designs, and this on is especially cute!

 5) This pillow from Vervaco was another gift, a birthday gift from a dear friend. After finish-finishing my first pillow not too long ago I wouldn't mind having a second one, and these two bunnies are just so cute, aren't they?

Maybe next time this prompt comes up, I will remember to look back here and see how many of them I started in the meantime! But now, moving on from theoretical to actual stitching. Every month I share my progress on The Loneliness of Autumn, which I am SALing with Rachel. She hasn't touched hers in a while but has plans to get back into it in August, so fingers crossed for her! I, on the other hand, had a very productive month with this in June, adding a total of 2922 stitches! That included the entirety of 1663 stitches of 78, and a good deal of the 1599 stitches of gorgeous 720! A lovely, rich orange that was so much fun to stitch (and will for the 300 something stitches I still got to do).

My new total is 67240/118800 stitches, or 56.60%. After the 720 we're moving on 762 which doesn't sound all that exciting on its own (especially not to us used to the TW colour palette!) but will fill in some of the as of yet blank spaces, so that's kind of nice too!

But wait, there's more - July was another one of WIPocalypse's challenge focus months, and for the last two years I've used these to finish the black on The Puppeteer. And this month, after putting in another 1668 stitches, I finally did!

Tadaa! So proud I managed to finish this colour, more than 60,000 stitches of black! But I'm not continuing this one in extreme cross country style. I'm really looking forward to filling in the blanks with all the missing colours. In fact, I already did so for the first page, which was missing just under 600 stitches:

The purple photographs a little weirdly, but I'm sure is one of those 'looks great from a distance' things. Not sure how I'll continue with this now, focus wise, but think I'd like to try to finish the first row of pages this year, which all don't need too much more stitches. We'll see. For now, let's head into August with a lot of stitchy goals, and see what we can accomplish!

July Gifted Gorgeousness

This month, I wasn't quite as productive on my gift projects - no new baby gifts started or finished - but I did work on my big project that was a gift TO me, and that is the Snuggle Up blanket. Every part takes a little longer than the last one, so it's taking up more and more of my crochet time, but I still hope to finish an other gift or two in for next month! For now, here is Snuggle Up up to part 5 - it's getting hard to get a picture of the complete blanket, at least without getting my toes in there!

Another really fun pattern - it made the edge a little wavy because there was a lot of increasing and decreasing, but I think it'll even out after the next pattern or two. 

The next three parts will form the next pattern together, so the next two months might not look like much on their own...we'll see. Hopefully, they will still be fun to crochet, though!

Bellatrix - 30 Hours

This month, I gave myself another ten hours to play with Bellatrix - one of these days I'm going to have to make her more of a focus, she's so fun to work on! I think I got all the beads and Kreinik together now as well, although of course it'll be a long time before I'm going to get to use the beads.

Last time I worked on her, I stitched up her hair, and made a small start on the big arch in the background:

This time, I was having a lot of fun - stitching up her face first, including wonderful metallic green eye shadow, then I did about 500 stitches on the arch (because it's big and slightly boring, so I'm trying to split it up) and then worked on her dress for a bit more:

Next time, I'll probably put a couple more stitches into the arch, then get started on her shawl (which introduces a new set of colours, yay!) working towards her right arm (our left).

July Fully Finished Gallery

This month for fully finished gallery, I have some good new and some bad news...lately, I've been rearranging my crafting/office corner, to finally organize some stuff in a way that has me NOT looking for things I need for extensive amounts of time, and also to get a better work-from-home space than my current arrangement on the couch. In any case, I stumbled across a box full of finished, but not fully finished stitchings! So that's good new, because I had been wondering where some of these had gotten to, but also bad because now my pile of shame has almost doubled in size. Guess I won't be running out of stuff to finish for this SAL any time soon!

I also have an actual finish to share, although a new one, not from the pile/box of shame. I finished the NYE SAL I stitched earlier this month into a biscornu! 

I used my usual technique, whip stitch with two different beads, and also added dark blue crystals to the center - I bought a bunch in different colours when I needed one to finish the Zoe box, so it's nice to be able to use them for other things as well!

The June SALs

So turns out, even stitching the Magical Kingdom SAL ahead of time doesn't prevent my from posting a week late when there is too much stuff to get caught up on - but I'm sure none of you care as long as you get to see pretty stitching now, right?

The part I stitched in June - which was originally the 7ths part released - was another not-so-classic Disney movie (after Princes and the Frog back in May). Can you guess which one?

Yes, it's Kuzco and Pacha from The Emperor's New Groove! How fun to see that movie in a pattern like this. It's a fun one that doesn't get a lot of attention!

On the subject of the temperature tree, I've reached the half way point (a little more than that in number of stitches, as all the trunk is already in), and have now used most of the colours! June was quite hot at times, so all but the very hottest colour got used.

Still loving this one! We are due another heat wave this week, so I'm not sure if I should hope for that last colour to make an appearance, or not...

Hufflepuff Pride Socks - 70 Hours

I really want these socks finished before it gets cold enough to wear them again, so working on them a little bit here and there and it's gone a long way! Last time, I was here, halfway done with the third badger:

Now, after ten hours (that went surprisingly frog-free) and two badgers later...

I finished the leg! Yesss. The pattern is fun, but the leg is seemingly endless, so I am really looking forward to working on the heel again now.

The People Chose: Pets

This month for Jo's wonderful all purpose SAL, our subject is pets. I don't currently have any, but if we had the space, we'd love a pair of bunnies. That, or a group of guinea pigs! Felix had bunnies as a kid, I had three piggies, so either would be fine. 

I think my pet stitching shows my preference pretty well, although there are also some cats and dogs in there! I think that all animals are cute.

June WIPocalypse

Yesterday was more busy than anticipated, so it took me until today to get that WIPocalypse update going! We are halfway through the year, so the topic this month is Half-year recap: How are you doing with your goals so far this year? I started the year with out too many hard plans. I wanted to finish Fans of the Far East for grandma's birthday in March, which I did, and to continue working TLoA, which is going well, but just how well you will get to judge yourself in a minute. Other than that, I've been working my way through several of my WIPs, already finishing some older ones, like the NYE SAL and even my oldest WIP. Other than that, I've been making good progress on a couple of projects, finishing some with no unplanned starts. Right now I am at 48 WIPs, and while I don't have any set plans for that number, I'd love to get it a little lower still before the year is over! Overall, I am quite content so far. If you want to know what I worked on in more detail, here are my statistics for the first and second quarter of 2022!

Now, pictures! Every month I share my progress on The Loneliness of Autumn, my long-term SAL with Rachel. I think she's a little behind on hers now, but that's okay because so am I! I have been ever since January, and hardly worked on it in February at all, but I'm slowly working on getting caught up and hope to get there by the end of the year. All of January is already caught up, so that means if I can just do another 4-5 lengths a month, I will be golden. In June, I added 2464 stitches, which means I finished the 221 I had been working on...and all of the next colour as well, which was 976, a darker yellow that filled in a lot around the shine from the street lamps. As it wasn't spread out as much, it stitched up quickly!

Next up are 1663 stitches of 782 - another yellowish brown that blends in around the leaves and the reflection on the wet ground. But after that, I think I might get to stitch some more 'exciting' colours! Woop! The turnover rate of colours is also bound to increase now that there are less stitches to go of each one. I wonder if that will make me go faster or slower?

In any case, the new total is 64318/118800 stitches, 54.14%, which is more than 2% up from last month!

My other project I have to share this month is The Puppeteer, which I am using for the WIPocalypse focus challenge. I am trying to get all the black done on this one, so during the month of June, I stitched one length of black for each day - a total of 1761 stitches!

So far, this is 60283/112000 stitches or 53.82% done. And since July is another focus challenge month, and I only have 1668 stitches of black left to go, I am quite confident I'll be able to celebrate a mini-finish next month! Fingers crossed.

Stitching Stats, Q2

As promised, here I am back with my statistic for the second quarter of 2022! I hope you love statistics as much as I do, otherwise, you might want to skip this one, as there are no pretty pictures in it for you.

First things first - I broke my stitching streak (started January 1st) sometime in early May, and I'm okay with that. Felix' sister and her boyfriend were visiting, we were having a great time together, outside most of the day, and then I way laying in bed at night and remembered...shoot, no stitching involved. I think I did a couple minutes of stitching, but honestly, I think I just don't care about it enough. At this point in my life, I'm making sure I can have a good time and get some time for myself without tracking it in a hard manner. Maybe some day it will be right for me, but not just now.

Surprisingly, I did less crafting April to June than I did January to March, despite being out of work the whole time. But I guess that's up to being busy meeting people (which is finally an option again after another locked-down winter...although we are still being careful as much as we can), gaming, and being busy with finishing my thesis/job hunting/reorganizing stuff. I'm still pretty happy with what I got done! In total there were 239h (compared to 251h last quarter) of crafting, split over 15 (22) projects, 6 (10) of which have been finished. That's pretty focused for me! 

The biggest chunks of time went into my Snuggle Up blanket (42h), The Loneliness of Autumn (almost 40h) and Guardian of Wayfarers (30h). All of these are going to be around for a while longer, so this might look similar in Q3. In general, I've been focusing on some bigger projects lately, so many of these might stay the same for next time, while I am also trying to finishing some smaller things. As you might recall, Geostar had been stitched a couple of years ago, so those 51 minutes were all about finish-finishing.

Looking at the graph by craft, as usual, the biggest chunk was stitching, but there was a fair amount of crochet and knitting (all of the latter on one project, the Hufflepuff socks - will have an update on those soon!)

I also have an update on stitch numbers, which are a little lower than in Q1 as well. But between knitting more, and crafting a little less over all, that's a small surprise, as I logged about 10 hours of stitching time less per month than previously!

A good chunk of this was TLoA, which got over 2k stitches each month. Not too bad, eh? An update on this will be up either today or tomorrow I think, whenever I get around to finally posting my June WIPocalypse! 

We'll see how things will go over the summer. I got big plans, both crafting and non-crafting!