My February WIPocalypse update

Hi to everyone popping on for WIPocalypse browsing! If you read me often, the first half of this post is likely stuff you’ve seen before.

It’s been a good month since my last update.  I gave up on Crazy January (and don’t plan on ever attempting it again).  I returned instead to a few pieces – some of my new starts for this year, some WIPs, and one traveling pattern (which is my first finish of the year!)

All of these photos “pop” if you select them so you can see larger sizes if you choose.

Here’s my first finish of the year. This is a traveling pattern by Lizzie*Kate that’s now en route to the next person in the Stitcherhood. I pulled random colors for this. The original called-for colors are much, much softer. Blame it on watching the Winter X Games, perhaps – but I wanted to stitch BRIGHT.  I’m planning on finishing this into an ornament for my tree, dated with the year and the stitcherhood on the back.  I’ll make the backing out of the same fabric and whip-stitch it together, just as I do for most of my ornaments.

Floral Bellpull continues to progress well. I finished all of the cross-stitches in the Morning Glory square and started on the backstitching. That leaves me with two full squares to go before it’s done. My goal this month is to get the border for the next square stitched up so I can start filling it in during Stitcher’s Hideaway next month.  This is the big focus Teresa Wentzler piece for me this year – and I’m confident I can get it done. With the glut of TW projects in my WIP/UFO pile, I won’t be starting any more anytime soon. My plan is to start weeding them out one at a time, one year at a time. If I manage to get more done, great… but I really want to get these done and on my walls!

Cowboy Cats is one of the pieces I began for Crazy January. It’s not on any timetable, and since I’m in those starting doldrums, I haven’t quite gotten a rhythm going on it yet. It’s a good commuting piece, but I had it in my bag during a seriously insane portion of last month and just didn’t move it along as I hoped. I made most of my progress on this during one evening when all of the Amtrak and MBTA trains were tied up going out of Boston last month. Three hours of hanging out on a train provides a LOT of stitching opportunity!

Deep Blue Sea continues to progress. This is probably the best color-accurate photo I’ve managed to get of the fabric. I’m still not done with part one, but I’m getting there. I managed to take this on a few commutes in and out of Boston to push it along, and I also focused on it during a stitch-in at Bush Mountain on Superbowl Sunday. I did soooo many eyelets on Sunday that I needed to take a serious break from it and work on light fabric for a while. I’d really like to get all of part one done by the end of the month. It’s definitely possible, although I’ve set it aside for now – I’ll come back to it later once I’ve progressed some of my pre-2012 WIPs!  I will admit, it’s getting much easier to stitch as time goes on and I have more reference points to line things up.  I did add a little “this way up” arrow to the center of the piece (which will obviously be removed at the end).

I think what I’m surprised about as this center mandala develops is just how BIG the thing is.  I’m used to seeing gorgeous centers for all of the Chatelaine designs on other stitchers’ blogs, but photo size doesn’t quite give a good sense of size reference.  For some reason, my brain was interpreting the photos I’ve seen as only 4 inches across or so.  But no… from the top to the bottom yellow lines is just about the same length as my hand from tips of fingers to the heel of the hand.  It fills up a significant chunk of space on my 11″ Q-snaps!

Last but not least, I played a bit with Inn at Fox Run Mill today while hanging out in the jury duty pool. The top border is now at its full width. I report to jury duty again tomorrow, so I’m going to fill in the acorns that are missing, the small leaves that are missing, and then carry down from there if time permits.

It’s definitely been a productive month! And next month promises to be even better, thanks to the three-night retreat (and week of vacation!) I have coming up.

Happy stitching everyone!