Queen of the Pirates - 20 Hours

I'm not only working on my random wheel projects, sometimes I also focus on stuff for different reasons...in this case, it's a quest for one of my stitching games that has me giving some love to my Queen of the Pirates! 

After doing most of her face, I now started working on the hat, and reached the upper rim which is very sparkly and golden. Which looks great although it is not that much fun to stitch - lots of partial stitches, in DMC Light Effects metallics, and blending two different colours together so I can't even use the loop method! It will be worth it, though, just see how pretty it looks:

 

I just picked her up a couple of days ago and added 600 stitches so far, and brought me to 20 hours...and for this quest I got over 2000 stitches left to go. Pretty sure I'll reach 30 hours and show you more progress before I get there! 

2026 WIPocalypse Kickoff

Hello everyone - in 2012, we all joked about the end of the world, and now the WIPocalypse SAL is starting its 15th year! For me, it's the 13th year I participate - this SAL just won't die, and aren't we all glad about it. Measi's brainchild is such a nice, low-key way to keep us all engaged and checking in every month, and this year, there are lots of fun events planned revolving around the upcoming Winter Olympics and FIFA Worldcup.

Today is the kickoff for the new year of this SAL (well, it is for me...being late with all the check ins is kind of on par for me, but we don't talk about that). This is the time to make (or reveal) our grand plans for the year, but I have to admit, mine are VERY unspecific at this point.

I am starting this year with 58 WIPs (that is all crafts combined), which is about 10 more than I'd like to have. So my goals are a) reducing my WIP count to get under 50. Of course I got some ideas about which of these I'd like to finish (and others I'd like to make progress on), but we'll see how it goes.

Now b), some of these 58 WIPs haven't seen the light of day in WAY too long. Some of them needs some house keeping (changing disintegrating floss cards, switching from paper patterns to digital, and sometimes, figuring out some things I should have written down YEARS ago, lol), others I haven't worked on so long I don't even know whether I still enjoy them. Either way, I want to work on as many of them as possible this year to get a feeling for what I still got going! To help with this, I put all my WIPs into a random wheel spin app and whenever I don't have anything specific I want to work on, I will spin the wheel and then aim for about 500 stitches (or the equivalent for whatever craft comes up) on the WIP in question.

So far, it's going well and I am already working on the third random pick of the year. You've already seen the first one of them - the diamond painting Towards the Light. It was nice to pick up this WIP (and also another one that I hadn't worked on in a while) and see some real progress. Hopefully, things will continue to be fun and satisfying - and if this doesn't work out, I'll think of something else!

So yeah, this is the plan for the year. I'll check in every month with the current WIP count and possibly an update on what WIPs haven't come up in any other way during the month. We'll figure things out as we go, as usual! 

Towards the Light - 10 Hours

 As I will explain in more detail once I get around to doing my WIPocalypse kickoff (any day now, I promise!), this year I am trying to give some more love to my older, neglected WIPs. And the first lucky candidate is one I haven't douched in over a year and I think I never showed here before!

It's actually not cross stitch, but diamond painting. Yes, I got a couple when they first where all the range, but never worked on them much. This one is a pattern by Unconventional X Stitch called Towards the Light - on the smaller side for a full coverage cross stitch at just 38k stitches, but as a diamond painting it will still be almost 50cm x 50cm. 

After 10 hours, I'm a little over 10% in, and look how pretty and shiny it is! 

 In case you're interested how it'll look like when it is finished...some day probably far along the road...here is the pattern mockup:

That being said, I currently really enjoy working on this, it doesn't have too many colours and I can finish up a 400 stitch quare in under an hour. I will probably do a little more before I pack it away for now!

 

 

December WIPocalypse

Hello, my lovelies! I am still busy catching up on blog reading and blogging, but meanwhile, have had a good start into the new year. I do still owe you some updates on what I was up to, and this is an important one!

So for December 2025, the question of the month for WIPocalypse was Recap your accomplishments for the year! (Your finishes, your final before/after photos, etc). For 2025, I only had one big goal for WIPocalypse, and that was to finish The Loneliness of Autumn by Leonid Afremov, as charted by Love Thy Thread. 

I had started this project on January 1st 2020 as a SAL with Rachel the Ten Hour Stitcher, and the plan was to do one length of thread a day. I kept up with that for a couple of years, until I fell off the waggon a bit, but always kept working on it, even if at a slower pace. When I started, I did extreme cross country - finishing one colour over the whole design before picking the next one - but somewhere around the middle I switched over to filling in the missing colours in each page, so it was easier to see progress. 

The total stitch count of this project is 118800 stitches, and it took me a total of 770 hours and 59 minutes to complete it - 144 hours and 37 minutes in 2025 alone. And as you can probably guess from these statistics - yes, I finished late on December 14th!

I have yet to pick out a frame for this, but am very happy to have it done and think it was worth the work. Chances are I will not be pickung up an other Afremov anytime soon, but it was a fun journey over all and will find a place of pride on my wall! 

I hope to soon get the January kick-off post up, but as a little spoiler - no big goals this year, just progress and fun! Until I get another bee up my bonnet, that is... 

                           

SAGA - 40 Hours

 Hello, my lovelies! I am sorry for being awol the last couple weeks and very absent even before that - life has been busy, and not been helped at all by a nasty flu Felix and I both caught in early December! I got a lot to show you from the last months, and there are some posts coming up as I get caught up with both reading and writing, but I wanted to wish you a happy new year first and also try to get my current things posted, even if that might mean things get out of order. You know, perfect being the enemy of good an all that.

So for the last couple days I have been working on Long Dog Sampler's Stories Amongst Graceful Arches, SAGA for short, and made it to 40 hours of progress total. Which, of course, is a very small amount of work for a project of this size! In fact, I just reached 6% of total progress on this. There is so much more to do, but I enjoy it a lot and think I might keep going on this project for a couple more days!