November Gifted Gorgeousness

Remember when in my last post, I talked about to kinds of people around this time of year? Well, seems I have now crossed from the one group to the other! I'm freezing and sneezing and all that good stuff, but so far I am not quite bedridden enough to stop crafting and blogging, just slowing down a bit. So once again I am here (very late) for my favourite SAL, Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness! Once again, I have two projects to share with you, one gifted to me and one to be gifted. Or actually, it was already gifted - I took the left over yarn from with socks I made last month, and made some new wristwarmers for my grandma. I even tried to incorporate the little braids from the socks but messed up a little on centering them. Gladly, grandma doesn't mind, it's not all tha noticable unless you do a posed picture like below, and I know what to do better next time!

For something that was gifted to me, I did part 2 of the Spirits of Volcano CAL, the kit for which was a gift from my grandparents a couple years ago.

Part 2 used a fun mosaic technique that I had not tried before, but got the hang of after a couple rows and really love the effect of it! I might try something like this again in the future again, maybe even an all mosaic pattern.

Part 3 uses some overlay techniques that I've used before, but it can never hurt to practice some!

2023 Q3 Stitching Stats

Once again I am very running behind on everything...it's just that time of year, when half the population is out sick, and the other half has to do twice as much work to make up for it! Not telling you which half I currently belong to, but you can probably make an educated guess!

So, (very) late stitching starts for third quarter, because I love my statistics and I won't be parted from them!

To no one's surprise, stitching still had the pole position among my crafts, but to some surprise, it no longer has the absolute majority! I really picked up my knitting and crochet this summer, and got a lot done of both.

In terms of projects, I worked on 20 in the third quarter, and finished 9 of them in the meantime. A couple were new start and a couple I picked up after not touching them for years - I think it was a good mix!

Alas, all that knitting and crocheting took its toll on my monthly stitch numbers. Not the lowest monthly totals since I started documenting, but pretty down there! But then if I counted knit stitches that would be way up, so it's not all bad I guess. You can also see a clear uptick from when I got my stitchy bug back at the retreat in September!

November Fully Finished Gallery

Once again, I am sneaking in right under the radar for this one...you might have noticed I didn't have anything framed in the while. That's because Felix usually does all my framing, but he hurt his hand in May and hasn't been able to do much. But now he's playing his drums again, so I figured that means he'd also be able to do some framing again, and some proding and nagging later...here we are!

So right after finishing my Pumpkin Doodle Cats, I picked up this cool dark-silver frame. Please excuse the bad picture, he literally just did the framing after I mentioned that I really didn't want to break my streak of checking in (just) in time for this SAL!

 

The People Chose: Circles

Welcome to Jo's wonderfully versatile all purpose SAL, where you get to pick the subject! This month the people chose circles, and usually this would be where I go through all my old picturesand pull the most appropriate projects up. But this month, I got something different planned! The sad thing is I had it ready to go on the actual date of the SAL and it still took me until now to write up this post...but never the less, here we go.

This month I want to use this space to introduce a new WIP...if you followed my retreat posts, you might already have caught a glimpse of it. This project fits the subject so well, I've already seen several people use it as an example on their entry for the SAL, but I actually started it and did my first 10 hours. I present to you...the most circly cross stitch ever made...Ink Circles 'Cirque des Cercles'.

The fabric is a 40ct Verdal evenweave, dyed by the wonderful xJuDesign in the colourway 'Teracorra Dream' and bought at StitchBasel, and this floss that goes so very well with it is Jodyri Design's 'Sahara Dunes', a lmited edition that I fell in love with and stocked up on back in 2020. And finally I get to use it! 

This actually stitches up kind of fast, and 10 hours (well, actually 10:30 because I wanted to finish the shape I was working on filling in) already got me to 9.17%. And it's tons of fun, I can't wait to get back into it soon!

Oktober WIPocalypse

So here we are, another month on, in November - I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the autumn days! For me, October was pretty productive, but still pretty busy, especially as the weather was keeping nice and sunny way late into the month! November, however, has started off gray and rainy, perfect for lounging around inside and crafting!

The WIPocalypse question of the month is How do you begin planning for the next year with your stitching? Tell us your process. To be honest, I am not much of a planner. More often than not, I will have a big deadline to work towards, and then also identify a couple more projects I want to make progress on, and plan around that. Recently though I've been avoiding deadlines, so I haven't made a lot of fixed plans, and I've been enjoying it, so I'm not sure how much planning I will do for 2024 at all!

To stay on theme with that...I did not hit my goals of catching up, or even just doing a full month of stitching (in my one-length-a-day definition) on The Loneliness of Autumn...but still, exciting things are happening! Rachel is back, and while she's not posted any recent progress on TLoA yet, we did talk about it, and talked about switching from working by colour to working by page. I've been thinking about it for a while, and she mentioned she had intended to do that once she hit 75%. As I had passed that point a while ago, I took that as permission to change my mode of stitching myself...so I set up project cards, and pulled a lot of colours to start and filling in page one.

I pulled a total of 35 colours so far - proof that if I hadn't made this change, it would have been a long time before I saw any page finishes! Of course, working page by page, I only do a couple stitches with some threads, so I'm not finishing as many full threads, but that will even out over time and my count will start to add up again...at least that's what I hope! At any rate, I completely filled in page 1, adding a total of 1864 stitches, and making a start on page 2 as well.

My new total is 92591/118800 stitches or 77.94% done. I hope to continue to fill in a page per month for the forseeable future, at least until I hit the less densely stitched parts around the middle of the design - at least I am pretty motivated to work on this one more again, as I am actually seeing some real progress here!

2023 Trick or Treat Blog Hop

Omg...if you came by earlier looking for a letter, I am so sorry! We were out of the house all day yesterday, and then I just totally forgot. And that after I worked really heart to stitch something new to show you! So without any further ado - welcome to my (very late) part of Jo's Halloween Blog Hop! If you have no idea what I'm talking about - good for you, because you weren't coming by in vain before, but also shame on you, go check it out immediatly!

Now if you are all tuned in, you are here for a letter and a picture. Since I've already made you wait long enough, I will tell you right away that letter is

T

and your next blog to check out is here. And for the picture...I pulled out an older stitch, the Pumpkin Doodle Cats by MakeItPink that I started in 2018. It's not a big piece by any means, so I have no good excuse why it took me to long, and now I finally finished it up. I only had from the lower half of the pumpkins down left to stitch, plus the Kreinik for the eyes and mouths and all the backstitch. Didn't take too long t finish, and I hope to get it framed soon!