May WIPocalypse

Another month has gone by and wow, the year is really gaining momentum now! I really have to carefully look back to see where the weeks and months went. But so far, I had a good month, lots of fun with family and friends and a chill long weekend in progress - what could be better?

For Measi's WIPocalypse SAL, the question his month is How do you personally distinguish between a Work in Progress (WIP) and an Unfinished Object (UFO)?Personally, I really don't. Everything I started is a WIP, until I finish. I don't deal well with unfinished business so if I really want to abandon a project, I need to frog it/throw it away to really be done-done with it.

For stitching progress, this month was about the opposite of last month - I didn't get a page finish, but added a decent amount of stitches, from 91.13% to 92.39%, so about 1500 stitches. Most colours had a decent amount of stitches so progress was reasonably fast, and look at how pretty these blues are!

Hopefully, next month I will get another page, there's not that much to go on this one now.

June and July will also be the next 'one a day' challenge of WIPocalypse, when we are challenged to pick a WIP and add at least one stitch every day. I think I'll be good and pick up my blue tablecloth again. This is how it looked after the last event in March:

I hope that by working on this throughout June and July, I should be able to finish one more side and make a dent into a third one, so push this comfortably past the halfway mark. We'll see, though!

May Gifted Gorgeousness

Usually I have plenty of gift projects on the go fir Jo's Gifted Gorgeouness, the one stop SAL for all things gifted and giftee, but currently, I am focusing on only one - the blanket I am knitting for my second niece. We'll be visiting them most likely in July, and to finish the blanket by then I need to knit 3.5 rows every day, and by doing so, I am seeing steady progress!

 

I know it's not very exciting, but it's very satisfying to see the blanket grow a little every week, and I am almost halfway done now.

May Fully Finished Gallery

In terms of finish-finishes this month, I got one that's a couple months old, and one that isn't quite there...which kind of averages out to one new finish-finish, no?

So, here are my entries for Rachel's Fully Finished Gallery SAL this month: 

Back in December, we framed Guardian of Wayfarers to give to a friend. I forgot to get a proper picture before giving it to him, but he's now put it on his wall and send me this picture:

 

We special ordered the round mat and interestingly found out the stitching wasn't exactly round - either this evenweave isn't perfectly even, or it's been pulled out of shape while stitching. The difference was pretty minimal so and I think it still turned out great!

The 'not quite done' one is the Book of Fungi SAL. There are lots of instructions to turn the stitching into a really little book, and I am almost done with the cover now:

 It's a lot of work but I love how it's turning out! Hopefully, this time next month, it'll be all done.

Poison Garden, Part 1

So...do you remember last year, when I got totally obesses with the Book of Fungi SAL, to the point where I put all my other stitching obligations aside and worked on nothing else for a couple weeks? Well...it's happened again! Only this time I was kind of prepared and didn't have a to of other obligations to begin with. The new book SAL by LivingOnTheRainbow, the Poison Garden, started three weeks ago, I signed up, and stitched the first part of the cover as soon as it came out. Took me about two weeks, so I even had a little free time before the second part dropped today! Let's see if I can keep up.

 

In case you are wondering wha happened to the Book of Fungi...well, it's all stitched up, finished shortly before the new SAL started. But the process of finish-finishing it is somewhat involved, so it might take a little longer. I know I dropped to ball blogging about that one, so I'm trying to do better with the new SAL!

April WIPocalypse

 As I started out May with a well deserved (I hope) mini vacation to Berlin, I am once again woefully behind on my blog, but as you know, I am trying to no longer apologize for that, and just take things as they come...so here you go, this is not an apology, just an explanation! We had a wonderful time, visiting my best friend, going to a concert (any Miracle of Sound fans around?), seeing the panda twins at the zoo, eating some good food and having tons of fun in general.

Now I'm back and ready to post my check in for the April WIPocalypse! The question of the month being Let’s talk fabric – what is your go-to fabric dyer, your preferred type, count, color, etc? 

My favourite dyer currently is Jucus from xJuDesign in Hungary. She dyes wonderfully vibrant colour in a wide variety of fabrics and counts, and she's super nice and easy going to work with if you got any custom orders.
In terms of fabric types, I don't mind any type really, but my favourite is even weave. I used to be very firm in that 32ct is my go to, but I lately started some pieces on 40ct Verdal and that is so much fun to stitch on as well, so I guess it's a tie between these too! Colourwise, I use a wide variety of fabrics. There's something about just a simple, crips, white evenweave, but I also love really strong, vibrant colours, or a pretty neutral - it all depends on the project!

Now stitching wise, this is where every month I show my progress on The Loneliness of Autumn. I still think I can finish it this year, although April has been a slow month. I did finish three pages (two full pages and a tiny slice of a partial page), but they were very confetti heavy so I only went from 90.55% to 91.13%, so I added only about 700 stitches. The next page has some nice bigger chunks of colour though...now if only I would stop getting distracted by other projects, I could make some real progress here!

This is not the page I am currently working on, but the ones I finished because I want to show them off before working on: