September WIPocalypse

Another month has passed, and what a month is was! My stitching retreat in Basel has well and truly recharged my crafty batteries, and ever since I've been happily crafting away on various projects. And after a brief period of wanting to work on and start everything right now, I think I now ready to go back to somewhat more organized crafting. Which is good, since I still got some goals to accomplish this year! Which will also influence my choice for the focus months challenge, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, for the question of the month: Are you a seasonal stitcher? If so, which seasons do you find yourself more productive or less productive? I'm not massively seasonal myself, but the way life works, I'm usually more busy in the summer months (in terms of events, visiting people, and traveling), so naturally I find less time for crafting and if I do, it's more travel-sized projects. Which is why I am so happy about autumn coming out to play now, so I can cozy up on the couch and get some serious stitching done!

Now this is usually the spot where I get to talk about my progress on The Loneliness of Autumn, which I am SALing with Rachel at a very conversational pace. This year has ended up with both of us being massively behind, but I am very happy to report that in September, I finally managed to get a full month stitching in, finishing a total of three colours, and even managed to catch up a couple days I missed earlier in the year! Still lots of catching up to do, but I'll get there. It's my mantra!

My new totals are 90845/118800 stitches or 76.47% done, with 1869 stitches added in September. Maybe I can make it to 100k finished this year?! I might, if I focus, which brings me to the last part of this post. October is the last One-Stitch-A-Day focus challenge of WIPocalypse, and I usually make this one length a day on whatever project I pick. I've been thinking about what to pick for months, but now that I'm hear and so far behind on TLoA...I decided to double down. So for the month of October, I'll try to do a total of 62 lengths on TLoA, which would bring me just about back on track to where I was supposed to be at the end of the month, give or take a week or so. Let's do this!

September IHSW at Stitch Basel!

I finally sorted through all my stuff an took the appropriate pictures, so here we go with the reatreat post! 

You know I don't usually post for IHSW - more often than not I forget all about it until after the fact, or I remember but the weekend in question is just too busy to allow for any kind of hermitting. But the weekend of September 15th to 17th was a special one - it was the first Stitch Basel cross stitch retreat! So about 50 stitchers from all over the world (mostly Europe, but we did have one or two ladies flying in from the US) gathered in Basel, Switzerland, and we hermitted together. I apologize in advance that I won't post any pictures of the venue or actual stitchers, but I didn't feel comfortable to post pictures of other people on this blog without asking...if you go around Instagram or Flosstube, I'm sure you can find some impressions under the #stitchbasel tag, though!

The retreat started on Friday morning and was running until Sunday evening, with the stitching room (located at the Bar du Nord at Basel Bad Bf) closing up late each night and opening up early in the morning. It was organized by three lovely Swiss ladies (Dawn, Ina and Amy) who made sure we had the perfect location (including an outside stitching area by a fountain), drinks, snacks, and the best time ever! 

Since I don't live too far from Basel (about an hour door to door, taking the slow train) I didn't get a hotel room, but instead opted to go home every night (which turned out to be a good thing, as I could bring my goodies home every day and didn't have to carry everything at once on the last day!), an I arrived shortly after the 10am opening on Friday morning. At first I was a little intimidated, as a lot of the people already there already knew each other (apparently, there is a surprisingly big German/Swiss flosstube community called Die Stechmücken that I didn't even know about!) and the tables were either full, or completely empty. I decided to settle down on an empty table and was soon joined by Mia, an impressive stitcher and multicrafter from northern Norway, Marion from France, and Paolo, who was local to Basel (and working on the most gorgeous Chatelaine I have ever seen - a smallish Mushroom-mandala that will definitely go on the wish list!). In the afternoon, my friend Giselle also joined us, so there was a familiar face among all the new friends.

That first day, I had a hard time settling in to actually stitch. Too exciting all the new people to meet and things to look at! A couple of vendors had joined the retreat, both as participants and to sell their stuff - from Hungary, we had xJuDesign with her wonderful fabrics, SnowflowerDiaries and VintageTulip, both with wonderful patterns. There was Starparade with his patterns, ColourFever from Switzerland with the most wonderful floss, and the Stechmücken Shop from Germany with a mixture of fabrics and little goodies. This first day, I only bought a piece of fabric and a set of patterns that I couldn't resist, and will show a little later.

Our wonderful organizers had also found a long list of sponsors, including DMC, Zweigart, Sulky, Casa Cania and many more, and filled a goodie bag for each of the participants. This is not even everything that was in there, but will give you a good idea of how very spoilt we were!

 

There was a freebie table too, where people could unload unwanted supplies and sometimes WIPs for other people to adopt. There was a lot of gorgeous things going around, and I was trying very hard not to be greedy, so I only ended up with a couple of things.

Later in the afternoon, I finally manage to settle in for some stitching. I had brought several projects, but this first day I worked on Kitsune, one of my UXS projects (that still needs a page finish this year), and added a couple hundred stitches.

That first night, me, Mia, Marion, Giselle and her boyfriend went out for dinner (which was delicious but damn, food is expensive in Switzerland!) and then I took the train home together with Elena, another new friend. Who apparently grow up less than 2km from where I grew up, is the same age as me, and it took us 34 years and a trip to Basel to finally meet!

Saturday morning, we were back in the stitching room bright and early. Saturday was the day I did most of my shopping - I had picked some stuff out the day before, slept on it, and made my decisions. Not that some last minute purchases wouldn't slip in on Sunday - oops! 

So I got some patterns (the center set is the one I got on Friday)

and some more fabric. I wasn't too naughty, I got plans for both of these! The brown 40ct will be nice for the patterns I bought, plus some other smalls, and the moody-green one is for the Greenhouse of Oddities by Lola Crow Cross Stitch (if you haven't seen that one yet, check it out - I had eyeing it previously but someone brought a finished version to the retreat, and NEED!)

I also picked out some of the gorgeous colour fever flosses. For these I got at least...kind of...a plan? The blue-ish cottons I wanted for the border of the Cloudsfactory Magical Creatures Calendar that I've been meaning to start for years now. The purple silks maybe for a small-ish Ink Circles and the blue and orange go well together and I'm thinking maybe some kind of quaker-ish design? I'll have a deep dive into patterns eventually, but don't need any immediate start plans right now!

Also on Saturday was the Smalls Exchhange, but I've already told you all about that! What I haven't told you about was that some of the participants also had prepared small gifts to share with all of us. I felt woefully underprepared and am already thinking about what I could prepare for next time!

 

I also had my retreat start. I had not actually planned to have one, but the goodie bag I showed you before also contained not one, but 4 (or maybe 1/2) fully kitted and exclusive projects! Exciting, isn't it? There were a biscornu and pin cushion, designed by VintageTulip and SnowflowerDiaries and kitted up by xJuDesign:

These two I have no doubts I'll end up starting sooner rather than later. The third one though was a retreat pattern designed by LillyPillyStitches, with different motifs with a connection to Basel and/or Switzerland, and that one I wanted to start during the retreat, while the memories were still present and fresh, and that's what I did!

I stitched that cute little goat on the mountain and most of the multicoloured diamonds (they were inspired by the roof of a church in Basel) during the retreat. The four little Edelweiss-flowers were added a couple days later, I didn't take a proper picture of my retreat progress.

We went home a little earlier on Saturday since we were (well, at least I was) pretty exhausted after two long days of socializing (although being around like minded people and stitching helped a ton with keeping my social batteries loaded!) and then back early on Sunday. 

First on the agenda was some last minute shopping, as the vendors were starting to pack up! To back up a bit, in the goodie back there was also a beautiful project bag, hand sewn by one of the organizers for each of us. Now I had so far resisted the call of these bags, since I was pretty sure once I bought one, I'd have to buy them for all my projects...well...I was right, and so I bought one more, and maybe will be getting some for Christmas...(left was in the goodie bag, right is the one I bought, with a sneak peak on that fabric from Friday!

At this point I had bought something from all the vendors but SnowflowerDiaries and Starparade (they both have patterns that I really like, but neither brought any paper copies of the ones I might have bought), so I looked at what else they had on offer, and got a needle minder from Starparade and selection of adorable wooden buttons from Snowflower Diaries!

This has been a long post already, but we're almost at the end! On Sunday, there was some more relaxed stitching...mostly outside, enjoying the morning air and some good coffee, and then inside, as more and more people were leaving and the remaining stitchers moved closer together. I think we were all a little sad to see it end and part with our new-found friends! 

So after some last stitches stitched, finishes admired, prizes handed our...wait, prizes? Yup! There were doorprizes (raffled off at every full hour...or usually, a bunch at a time, once a day), a quiz, and some prizes for special achievements. One last prize was given out for 'most stitches done during the retreat' and I think I just got lucky because most of the heavy hitters had already left, or just weren't counting their stitches, but I won with about 1.6k stitches done over three days! My prize was this beautiful Dimensions kit on the left (the Russian kit on the right was the door prize I won on day one).

But after that, it really was time to go home. I had retreat hangover for a couple of days - it really was hard to get back to normal life after three days of such fun! - and am now anxiously awaiting the announcent of the next stitchy event. But thankfully, I got in contact with a lot of stitchers who live not too far away, so we'll probably have some get togethers in the mean time too! 

As a last note, the retreat also totally revived my stitchy bug and left me with a terrible case of I-want-to-stitch-it-all...so I've been flitting around projects a bit. I promise though, I'll be back with some mores erious progress on things soon! There has been one more sneaky post-retreat start, featuring that gorgeous fabric I've been teasing you about...turns out it was a great match for some Jodyri-floss I got a couple years back, so I started my first Ink Circles, Cirque des Cercles, on this amazingly soft 40ct evenweave!

I hope you enjoyed this 'little' excursion. Regular updates will (hopefully) resume soon :)

Gifted Gorgeousness & Fully Finished Gallery for September

Well hello, beauiful people! This post is exciting for several reasons! For one, it is the first one I am writing from my new laptop. That's right, no more greenish tints and pink spots, I can see actual colours again - even prettier colours than before, as the display is better as the old one was to begin with, so I can't wait to explore all your blogs again! And secondly, I have returned from my first retreat, and I have much to share. That will, however, be a topic for another post - including all the stash I brought home, the stitching that happened, and the friends I met. Today, I am talking about something I stitched before, and for, the retreat. Just give me a moment and you will see why this is a perfect fir both for Jo's Gifted Gorgeousness, and Rachel's Fully Finished Gallery!

You see, one of the events held at the retreat was a smalls exchange, so even though my stitchy bug was a little awol at the time, I had to put some thought into what to make. You've already seen my first attempt, but it felt too small, too little, so I decided to give it another go, and went and bought a pattern I had been eying for a long time, and that was Ring a Ring of Foxes by FabyReilley Designs. 

I just loved the colours in this - autum colours are my favourites - and the little beads that look just like tiny berries! And then of course the foxes - aren't they cute?! I loved them, and working on this absolutely revived my stitchy bug! This reminds me so much of the Zoe Box I made some time ago, with the leaves and their different colours.

As you can probably guess by the stitching, this was finished as a not-so-little biscornu. Following the instructions, I did not put beads on the edge, but used different colours for the backstitched outline and the whip stitch, which gave the edge a very unique strip-ey look.

It was almost too precious to give away, but I did so anyway. It want to Veerle form the Netherlands - I don't know if she got a blog, but she is @verle1606 on Instagram.

The whole exchange was held by randomly picking out a packed object, and the package was supposed to give you a general idea of what was inside. Mine had a dried leaf on it, and inside was this beauty:

!!! I love it so much! Thank you for this wonderful gift, Franziska aka Colourfever Floss (if you don't know her, check out her Etsy shop filled with wonderful hand dyed silks and cottons. And if this doesn't convince you, just wait until I post about my stash purchases!)

So that's it from me this month (well, for these two SALs at least, I have lots more to post) - see you soon, my friends!

The People Chose: Small

With just a small (haha) delay, I am here for Jo's wonderful all-purpose SAL, and this month's topic is 'Small'. Now I am not as much a stitcher of small objects as our wonderful hostess, but I have stitched some smalls over the years nevertheless. Here are some of my favourites that I don't get to show off as often (I left out my ornaments of the month for that reason, I'm showing them all the time!):

The Cursed Zig-Zag Bag - 10 Hours

With the Zig-Zag Scarf done I needed a new easy break project (both Sekamelska and Delicate have been worked on plenty on lunch breaks and during meetings, but both have sections that need more focus as well) and so I decided to revive another long time WIP. Although this one could barely be called a WIP - I spent about two hours trying to start this in 2020, but it uses a bit of a different 'cast on' row and I just couldn't get it to look as neatly as I wanted, so I had nothing to show for it. On one boring care ride, I took this with me as my only distraction and tried again, and this time was satisfied. 

So I starting to set up the pattern, got a couple rows in, was feeling pretty good about myself...only to realize then when joining in the round, I had twisted my project, and now what was supposed to become a bag some day was now in a moebius loop. Rip rip goes the frog, back to square one (thankfully, I was able to save that 'cast on' that was giving me so much trouble, so not all was lost). So by the time this was finally going the right way, I had already 'wasted' about five hours! Still, I eventually got it right, and it's been growing nicely since, so gotta count it as a win. So this is technically-ten-but-actually-only-five hours of progress on this zig zag bag:

I don't think it shows in the picture, but the yarn is a colour gradient cake in pure cotton, the the blue will get lighter towards the top. This should become one very pretty bag when I finish it, which might be a while but at least it's well on the way now!

August WIPocalypse

So once again I am checking in for the monthly WIPocalypse SAL, still a little late, still not quite caught up on everything I wanted to post about, and certainly not caught up on everything I wanted to stitch on!

So my confession this month is that I have not touched The Loneliness of Autumn, my monthly SAL with the wonderful Rachel, at all. I've been carefully reviving my stitchy bug, had two new starts and managed to finish them both, but the second one, which was an exchange gift for my reatreat next week (and you will get to see it after that!) took up all my time. I just barely managed to finish it yesterday, and have to admit that by the end of it, I was quite 'over it' - it's super pretty but I just wanted it done and work on something else! So I pulled TLoA back out and hope to start working on it again today, hopefully catching up on some of the stitching I missed over the last couple months.

Sadly, this means that I don't really have anything to show for WIPocalypse this month. So I am only going to answer the monthly question, which is What is your comfort zone regarding the number of projects to have kitted and in progress at any one time? Now, I have a lot of kits and kitted up projects ready to go. I couldn't even tell you the number and I don't much care about it, either. Stash is just potential to me and I love having choices. I know I'm not spending more on it than I can afford or have space, so I'm not feeling all that guilty about it.

Projects in progress, however, is a different topic. My standard answer to the question used to be - around 50. For years, I had about that number of WIPs (mind you, if I'm talking number of WIPs, I mean all crafts combined, not stitching especially), and all attempts to get it down failed miserably. But I also didn't go over much, and I was pretty okay with that. This year, however, things changed, and suddenly I felt like that was *way* too much and I've even made some headway on getting the number down - to 43 currently. Which still feels like too much but I can only work so quickly, so things are moving in the right direction, but are moving slowly. I have not yet found my new 'comfprt zone' in terms of WIPs. I think I might want to get down to 30, but that will probably take another year at least to reach. We'll see how I'll be doing!

Zig-Zag Scarf Emma - Finish

I last showed progress on this shawl in April, around the halfway mark, and actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, I just never got around to taking pictures! Better late than never, I guess?

The Zig-Zag Scarf named Emma (don't ask me why it's named Emma, this designer is giving all her designs girl names) was started in late 2016, and after being abandoned at maybe 10% done I finally picked it (her?) back up this year to work on during work meetings and on my lunch break. Nice and easy knitting and just a two row repeat? Perfect! So she grew and grew and after two whole balls of yarn she's finally done!

She's still folded over here, in total she's about 8 feet/2.5m now and very hard to take pictures of! As are the colours, which are lovely in person. I think this picture, taken in natural light, is pretty close, though:

So that's one old knitting WIP down...I already picked up another project to work on during breaks (crochet this time), but that is a story for another day!