Fiery Phoenix

 I was off work sick the last two days, and while I was feeling truely miserable yesterday, this afternoon I was feeling a lot better, so will be back at work tomorrow - but that still gave me a window of a couple hours to actually make some crafting progress, AND even get up and iron my latest finish!

I've shown you a progress picture of my phoenix already, but here she is in all her finished glory!

 I might have been worried about my fabric choice in the beginning, but now I am SO glad I went bold. Still, it's a *tad* stressfull to work on something for 37 hours before you know your choice was correct haha! Now I have to think about how to frame her...do I go with simple black? Do I make it even more bold? What do we think?

Fiery Phoenix by NeedleLotDesign, on 32ct Murano 'Devil's Kiss' my xJuDesign. 

June WIPocalypse

 It's finally cooled down a bit, and I'm hoping to be able to catch up on some things! One of which is this WIPocalypse check in that I am...somewhat late for. Well. 

The question of the month was Half-year recap:  How are you doing with your goals so far this year? My goal for the year was to get from 58 WIPs down to below 50, and it's actually going quite well! In June, I finished the Phoenix (just need to give it a nice good iron...and couldn't bring myself to do that during the heat wave, but it's also on the list for this week!) and scrapped one WIP - it was Magical's Sampler SAL, which is never going to get finished due to her indefinit hiatus. So I finally decided to just bin it, and gave what was left of that fabric (a not quite evenly woven linen) away to a friend who wanted to try embroidery. That's technically two WIPs down, but I also decided to add my two small-ish crochet WIPs to the official count as they are taking longer than I thought. Will show them to you soon. So we remain stable at 53, which is still more than half way there!

I am especially proud of myself for getting the number of WIPs down without denying myself any new starts or just going for the quick wins - in fact, I have made a ton of progress on some of my bigger WIPs this year, as well! It's a nice balance, and I am hoping to continue this trend for what remains of the year (although I got a gigantic list of gift crafting plans again, oh my.). That's it for today, posts with pictures coming up soon! 

Poison Garden Part 9-13

 Is anyone else really struggling to stay productive in this heat wave? I'm fine slowly melting on my couch, binging some TV show and stitching, but staying on top of everything else - including blog reading and writing - has become a chore. I think I am slowly getting used to this and feeling more productive, however! So here I am, trying to catch up on some things I've been up to.

I've been slowly working on my Poison Garden - most of this stitching happened in May and June, although one page was finished last August (I just didn't want to post it for just one page back then). Here are all the pages I finished since you last saw this:

 This is all the stitching on this project finished! Now I still have the quite elaborate finish-finishing left to do, but my desk is currently covered in another miniature project I'm working on, so it will have to wait a while longer!