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!