April Fully Finished Gallery

Another month of fully finishing our work...and another month that I have just one small finish to show (and it's not even one from the box of shame, but one explicitly stitched for this SAL and the Easter Blog Hop). I am, of course, talking about my Ukrainian-style Easter egg. Here it is before assembly:

The pattern is by NevaSirenda. She has Ukrainian roots and has been releasing these eggs for the last ten years or so, one pattern per year. I'd been meaning to stitch them for years, and this year it felt fitting. So I started with the 2021 pattern (you can find it here and click through to the others, the 2022 was just released and is so pretty!)

As you can see, I fitted the outline to the egg shape and then whip stitched it shut with the cord you can see on the right. It wasn't all that easy to follow the shape of the egg and I'm trying to think how to finish the others in a better way while still making them look like a set (I'll probably go with the egg shape for the bigger ones and put the smaller ones in a square or something).

Easter Treasure Hunt Blog Hop 2022

Happy Easter, everyone! I know a lot of people won't really feel like celebrating this year, but I think if two years of pandemic has shown us anything, it's that we need to take and treasure the good times as they come up, so I wish everyone as much happiness, sunshine, and family time as possible. And chocolate, of course, don't forget the chocolate!

As every year, Jo is sending us on a wild egg hunt to look at pretties and collect letters, and as every year, I am proud and glad to be part of the fun. If you have no idea what I am talking about right now, I suggest you check out her post here to get all the rules and details.

If you do now, you are probably here for a letter. I can offer you an E, and this picture of my little spring corner with a Ukrainian style Easter egg I stitched this year (details to follow in my Fully Finished Gallery post, probably later this weekend).

Now hop on to the next participant, which is Beth!

The People Chose: Series of Designs

This month in Jo's wonderful all-purpose SAL, the topic is Series of Designs - ahh, series. They are both a blessing and a curse, don't you think? So many of them are so pretty, but of course if you start, say, a monthly series, you can't just do one of them, you need the whole set! At least I can't stop at just one. I do like more open series though, like holidays or just different animals...I still have that urge to stitch all of them, but if noone can tell it's an incomplete series, it's not quite as bad, haha :D 

Sadly, I have quite a few unfinished series going on, myself. There are my ornaments of the month, of course, which I started when they were released in 2015(!):

I added one or two since I took this line up, but there are still a couple missing (there is more than one ornament for some months).

There is this cute seasonal series by Durene Jones and as you can see there is only one more missing! So hopefully, this one will be finished this year.

And then there are the Little Sheep Values I started last year. These are fun because they were technically a monthly series (themed through the seasons too) but they don't have the names of the months on them or anything, so you could also just stitch a couple of them! I do have all the charts and buttons though, and hope to add to the collection soon:

So many more fun series out there that I can't wait to start, but can't stitch everything all at once, sadly!

The March SALs

In the last days of March (and the first days of April, actually) I was once again working on my SALs. That means I stitched up the 4th installment of the Magical Kingdom SAL (since I started this one in December) - it's one of my favourite Disney movies, and maybe my favourite panel of the SAL. I think it's also the biggest one, but doesn't have a lot of detail so it stitched up more quickly:

I also stitched up the March branch on my Temperature Tree (and made a start on the April branch as I needed some more stitches for one of my stitching games). March saw a pretty steady progression from the cooler blue to the warmer greens (but then temperatures took a nosedive again in the beginning of April).

March WIPocalypse

And just like that, a quarter of the year is already gone! My sense of time is still totally of, but I guess I'll just have to believe what my calendar tells me. It's been a weird year so far, but there's still nine months left to turn it into a good one. Of course, a month being over also means it's time for my WIPocalypse checkin, so let's get to that! The question of the month is Tell us about a technique, designer, pattern, or anything else in stitching that you’ve been nervous or afraid to try. I think my answer on this has been the same for the last couple years, and maybe this will be the year I conquer my fear, but I also say this every year - Hardanger! I really want to try it, it looks so pretty, but I'm also terrified by the idea of cutting into my fabric.

So March for WIPocalypse was a focus month, and we were to pick a project to work on every day. I picked my The Loneliness of Autumn, which I am SALing on with Rachel. I've been falling a little behind lately - I'm supposed to stitch one length of thread every day, but I fell off the wagon sometime in January. For March, I decided to not try and catch up, but just stitch my one length every day, and I managed to do just that! I even doubled up on a couple of days, effectively catching up five days or so, but that's just a bonus. In total, I managed 2079 stitches over the course of March, and finished the DMC 869 which had been dragging me down so much...only to be replaced by 1966 stitches of DMC 400, which sadly doesn't look all that different! Of those, I still have 1439 stitches to go, which should be doable over the course of April. Current total: 57,592/118,800 stitches or 48.48% done.

 

I had actually picked a second focus project for April, and that was The Puppeteer by UXS. I'm doing just the black on this for now, extreme cross country style, and I managed one length per day for a total of 1718 stitches. New total here is 58,522/112,000 stitches or 52.25% (and yes, that is all black!) with 3429 stitches of black left to go. I can do that this year! June and July are the next focus months, so you should see it again no later than that.

Guardian of Wayfarers - 20 Hours

Guardians of Wayfarers is my new focus project, and I'm still enjoying working on it a lot! Enjoying it enough that I already finished my second rotation on it, in fact. Last time you saw it, we had this fun vomitting/slug eating frog to laugh at:

I kept working on the blues, turning that frog into some kind of shark, and on the greens, which really look like a dragon's wings now, so now more being mistaken for sluggy vomit! Then I filled in some of the space between the two and now I think it's really moving away from any amphibian roots.

 I believe the tip of that wing is just about ten stitches away from the edge of the circle. I'll probably spend the next ten hours filling in some background, moving upwards around that edge, which I strangely am very much looking forward to!

I finished my oldest WIP

For the longest time, when someone asked me what my oldest WIP was, I had to point to that really old table cloth I bought and started over 20 years ago. I had lost the pattern, and the parts that had already been stitched looked terrible, but I was determined to not just throw it out. 

Eventually, sometime last year, I sat down and drew up the pattern - there were just two different small motifs on the cloth, a house and a tree, and I had already stitched one house, so that was easy to copy. I only had half a tree, so some artistic freedom was needed on that part, but eventually I was content with that as well. 

I stitched one of each, and then I frogged the old stitching, and then I stitched some more. In total, there are four houses and eight trees:

Some time in early March, I just decided that it was time to get this out of my list, so five of the trees and three of the houses were stitched up this month - and suddenly it was all finished!

It certainly felt good to get this one out of the list! However...my oldest WIP is STILL a tablecloth, as I have two more on the list xD