May WIPocalypse

May has been a strange month for me - we had so much going on (two weekends of people visiting, and one weekend of us being away and visiting people), and it both went by in a blur, and felt like forever! It was all fun, though, but I still hope June will be a little quieter. I got some time of work, so hopefully that will give me lots of time to do some crafting, finish a couple projects, and maybe even get caught up with blogging for once! At any rate, here I am checking in with May WIPocalypse. The question of the month is What project brings you the most joy and why? and while I love all my projects (otherwise, I wouldn't be working on them!), the answer to that can only be The Guardian of Wayfarers. Why? Just look at those colours!

Yes, that is the very same picture I just shared a couple of days ago, but seriously, I never get tired of showing this off OR stitching on it. It's positively *glowing* on the fabric. Also, while using quite a few colours, there is not a lot of confetti going on, just very well planned colour changes and no more than maybe 5 colours in each area (like a given set of foliage). Such a joy to work on!

Another project I really enjoy for its colours - although sometimes it can really get on my nerves, too - is The Loneliness of Autumn, which I'm showing you for WIPocalypse every month. I continued to work on this, one length a day, throughout May (although I still got a little to catch up on from back in March) and added a grand 1,765 stitches - that finished both the 3842 and 311 and brought me to 921, which is the first colour that has less than 1,000 stitches total in the design! Which means the colours are spread out a lot more, of course, but I'm still able to change colours more quickly, which is kind of exciting.

My new total is 86,334/118,800 stitches or 72.67% done. I don't know when exactly it happened, but there had been a shift in my mind from 'look at how much white space I still have to cover' to 'this is getting really close to a finish'! It's still going to take well over a year, which is a bummer, but maybe at some point I'll decide to start focusing on this instead of doing the one-thread-a-day thing, to speed things up. We'll see.

Speaking of one thread a month, June and July have us diving into WIPocalypses very own 'one a day' challenge, and I'm going to pick up my Meadow Tablecloth again. It's a very slow going projects, as it's stamped and has giant stitches, but experience has shown that one month at a length a day is just enough to finish one side of the table cloth, so hopefully by the end of July, I should have a finish!

(this picture was after the last event in March - I have since finished the flower block in the left corner, but it gives you and idea of what I'll be working on this month.) I'm actually a little low on the colours needed for the satin stitch flowers - this design uses Anchor, so I might have to go out and buy more, but at least that brand I can get locally, so it shouldn't slow me down too much!