February Wrap Up

Ah, February 29*.


I'm batting two for two with another Theme-a-licious finish.
As for as March Madness (work on a different thing a day), while I probably have enough WIPs to do that I'm not going to. Instead keeping the "madness" spirit, I'm going to focus on HAEDs, which I've decided I was mad to start in the first place.

Goals for February:
1. Keep up with TAST and The Great Escape. No, I’m behind on TGE and I’m skipping the most recent TAST.
2. Finish Parts 3 & 4 of Adriana B. No, only Part 3 is done.
3. Work on SK Blue Moon. Two hours is still two hours.
4. Put some serious hours into Namaste Yes, I think so XD
Pipe dream: Finish Namaste. Yes, much to my surprise!

Unexpectedly This Month:
1. Started Blackwork Mystery Sampler.
2. Started and finished Heart of My Heart.
3. Finished Namaste.

Goals for March:
1. Keep up with TAST and The Great Escape.
2. Finish Parts 4 & 5 of Adriana B.
3. Work on SK Blue Moon.
4. Start something for the leap year.
Pipe dream: Get caught up with Blue Moon before the next part comes out.

*A day we add to make sure the Gregorian calendar stays relatively close to the astronomical calendar. It’s completely arbitrary because really, date and time are completely man-made; minutes and seconds in base 60 (thanks, Sumerians), hours in 24 and days as 365? What's the logic in that? And "relatively close" because the revolution is not 365.25 days but actually 365.242, so the extra day doesn't bring the calendar perfectly in sync. And really, this particular day only applies to the Gregorian calendar, other calendars have other modifications. I could go on for ages, but that's hardly what anyone is here for XD.

However grasping any excuse for a new start, I'm off to start something. A flower for the first person to guess what. Just one hint: it's an approved start.

Salutations

An unironed Namaste. It's currently clipped to a coat hanger and hanging on my closet door until I work up the courage to turn it into a bellpull. Also, it is a pain to take pictures of this.


The yellow is my favourite, which is odd because I'm not at all a yellow person.

Title	Namaste
Designer	Ink Circles
Start date	May 12, 2011
Finish date	February 25, 2012
Total time	51.25 hours
Fabric	32ct White Lugana
Floss	DMC as charted

Playing Catch Up

Three(!) weeks work of

.
Chevron stitch, Detached Chain stitch and Chain stitch. Only Chevron was new to me. I had no idea what to do with the chain stitch. So it's just randomly there.

28ct Golden Honey Cashel, Dinky Dyes Aquamarine
I have no idea how I fell so far behind. I'm also behind on The Great Escape.

February TUSAL

It's the new moon! It's the

February's TUSAL is presented by the 2009 Christmas Tree by Nora Corbett. Said tree is sitting with a black frame that I plan to turn red (haven't actually read up on how yet).


There's a lot more colour this month courtesy of Namaste.

Edited to add: I'm joining the chorus of people declaring the comment verification too hard (I mean I had Cyrillic letters show up once! How the **** do you type those?). As such I have removed it from my blog and will probably try once to comment if you've got it. For the love of all things stitchery, PLEASE remove the blasted thing.

Hermitting? What's That?

I was good Friday night* and Saturday morning. Then I went to the fridge for lunch and never went back :(


Namaste
32ct white lugana
I started and finished the yellow motif. Two to go.

I count the weekend as beginning as soon as I get home from work on Friday and ending when I go to bed on Sunday night/early Monday morning XD

Colour Inside The Lines

Ah Fangirl February. The designer that I'm currently mad for is actually Joan Elliot, but I don't have a single WIP by her. In fact, I've only stitched one of her designs. Instead I picked Tracy Horner of Ink Circles, whose geometric designs are just fantastic.


Namaste
32ct White lugana
I've actually finished off all the black stitches, but it's a pain trying to take a picture of the whole thing since it's so skinny. Instead there's a horrendous picture of the first three motifs. There are three colours (besides black) in each, and when I started I'd only stitched one purple. Not bad progress for halfway through the month, considering I've spent time stitching other things.

Card Swapping, For The New Millennium

OK, so the new millennium was ages ago, but I still like to think of Jo's Secret Stitching Sweetheart exchange as an update.

So who sent me this pretty little thing?
Thanks to Cucki~

And where did mine go?

SAL Directory

Since there was a bit of interest in an SAL listing I've gone ahead and set one up at

SAL Directory.

I've posted 5 that I know of. Some new, one really old. I'm defining an SAL as a design released in multiple parts, and restricting the directory to free and almost-free.

I hope that this will be useful and I'm really hoping that folks will mention SALs that they know (more enabling!). My knowledge of the French SALs is nil, so if anyone knows those I'd really appreciate a line or two.

I'm hoping to keep this as up-to-date and informative as possible and I'm counting on everyone's help and support.

Cynic with a Pretty Heart

For someone rather cynical about Valentine's I end up stitching something every year. This year is Abi Gurden's freebie for members of the Stitchspecialist group. It's called Heart of My Heart.


I like how the little stick figures are gender neutral. They could be a boy and a girl or two girls or two boys. All the hearts are various specialty stitches. There isn't a single cross in this piece.

I didn't have a suitable red in Perle cotton for the hardanger portion, so I used 2 strands for the Kloster blocks and 1 strand for the weaving. It came out surprisingly well. Good to know that other kinds of thread work. The problem is that I can still see bits of the fabric sticking out where the Kloster blocks were cut and the slide-the-needle-under-and-massage-the-threads-over technique isn't working. *sob*

But the most shocking thing? I switched out the beads for French knots! A couple of them are wonky, but for the most part they look pretty good.

Finishing this is not going to happen for a long time because I want a heart-shaped ornament and I'm not the least bit confident about such a non-four-sided figure.

Title	Heart of My Heart
Designer	Abi Gurden
Start date	February 9, 2012
Finish date	February 11, 2012
Total time	6.75 hours
Fabric	32ct peach whisper
Floss	CC Cherry Tomato, Ruby Slipper, Goldfish, Bandana

Finding SALs

So I'm just curious as to how people find SALs. I usually find out about them when someone whose blog I follow posts a link.

Is there any directory/list out there?

I know of about 10 SALs going on right now, but I know there are tons more that I’m missing out on because I never find out about them.

Would people be interested if I started a blog to advertise/publicize upcoming SALs? I’m thinking that people could submit information on SALs they are running/know about. Definitely free SALs, and also groups that are stitching specific commercial patterns together (all copyright rules being followed of course!).

So what do you think? Is this something worth a shot? Opinions, please!

Recordkeeping

I've occasionally had people comment on how I track my hours and when Lucie posted a picture of her stitching journal, I was inspired to share my (lack of) method.

My method is pretty simple. When I start something I note the title, date, and fabric. Any floss changes go there. Then it's just a matter of putting down a stroke for every hour with each fence equalling five hours. When finished I add up the fences, write the finish date and highlight the title to indicate that it's done.

Hmm, the fabric information is missing on this page because these are all WIPs from previous years (picked a bad page there). Since I try to track how much stitching an year, the count gets restarted every January. I rewrite all the information and the previous stitching gets noted in Arabic numerals. Occasionally I forget to leave space for any changes and end up squeezing them in all over the place. This one is the original page for TGE, I couldn't be bothered to copy the details of every part again, so I'm just continuing it. So there's the part, the stitch, the colour used, and the time taken.

I use my Ipod as my timer, since I actually can't stitch anymore without music/audio in my ears.

And that's pretty much the method of my madness XD

One Down, ? To Go

Since the last

update, I've managed to finish Lily of the Valley! Yay!

Lily of the Valley
32ct Waterlily Jobelan
I put a few stitches into some other projects but I just want to celebrate the slaying of a WIP a bit more XD

Something Fishy

This week on

.
The Herringbone Stitch. I've done a Triple Herringbone Stitch once, but never the actual stitch itself.

28ct Golden Honey Cashel, Dinky Dyes Aquamarine
The Herringbone Ladder was lots of fun, even if I had to be extra careful not to pull too tight. And the Closed Herringbone is incredibly high.

Apparently the herringbone stitch is so named because it looks like the backbone of a herring. You learn something new every day.