My May WIPocalypse Update

If you’re looking to check in with your WIPocalypse updates, here’s the correct post. 

Due to some insanity, I missed my update entirely for April, so my progress is actually two months’ worth of work. I’ve made some good progress on a few different pieces and have finished one WIP. I’m starting to really see some progress in my stitching this year, and that’s making me feel quite happy with what’s going on.

The two pieces that really needed their own posts for updates were my finish – Ye Olde Coffee House by Little House Needleworks and progress on Deep Blue Sea by Chatelaine.

I’ve also done some work on other pieces that don’t need quite as much story telling, but have progressed nicely.

Witchy Washy (Raise the Roof) is coming along nicely. I’m using the original overdyes called for in the pattern, and I’m stitching this on an older piece of Manhattan Mist from Silkweaver. I’ll be working (and hopefully finishing!) this piece in June, but it’s taking a rest for a few weeks.  As it stands, it’s probably about 60% done.  The hat is the final thing that’s sittig on the clothes line to stitch.  Two trees, a couple objects on the “ground” and the Witchy Washy title, and this one’s done.  My witchy hat needleminder will NOT be staying on it, despite looking like it should remain on the piece!  This is a fun little piece – I don’t know why it’s taking me so long to stitch because I do enjoy stitching on it and absolutely love it.  For some reason, it just makes me a bit tired, too.  Almost like it’s an intense piece for me, without any real reason that it should be.

Witches Wheel (Glendon Place) is my current commute piece. I grabbed it to take to Celebration of Needlework since it’s one of those easy to transport pieces – only one color of floss needed. It also turned out to be a great identifier for people looking for me. I imagine I was likely the only person there stitching on tie-dyed orange fabric! I spent the first couple days fixing a miscount that I’d needed to frog out – thankfully it was caught early because this piece definitely depends on everything matching up correctly. Unlike so many pieces, I really couldn’t fudge a miscount here. So it was fixed by taking out the central spokes on the left side (both diagonals and the horizontal) and moving them out a square. And then I stitched the two cats on the left. For this week’s commute, I’m going to add the fourth cat, and then I’ll see if I’m still in the mood to keep adding to it. This is one of the pieces I’d like to finish this year, so I don’t plan on putting it aside for too long.

Floral Bellpull is my Teresa Wentzler focus for the year. I’m now on square five of six, and it’s going well. It looks like my stitches are a bit scattered in this square, but this is how I tend to stitch Wentzlers – I try to carry a color as far as I can go to use up my currently needled floss, starting with larger blocks of color so I have something to neatly anchor the confetti stitches onto. Other stitchers who have done this piece may realize that I made a couple of errors. I accidently started the wrong square here – instead of Pansy, which is labeled as Square 5 on the pattern, I grabbed Peony… so my last two squares are going to be in reverse order. It’s not a big deal, as all of the squares are the same size. But I did a bit of an eyeroll when I realized what I’d done.

I also have my standard “Measi makes a mistake in the piece that she’s just going to leave because virtually none of her projects are completely perfect” stitch. Unintentional again – but it’s one of those stitches that just won’t matter in the long run. Can you find it here? 

My final piece to update is my Mirabilia Round Robin from last year.  I’m stitching the bottom block and will add my name to the bottom of the center block when finished.  I’m stitching Enchanted Mermaid, flipped 180 degrees so she’s facing left instead of the originally charted right.  It’s a trivial thing, but I just felt that having four faces going left and four facing right may balance the piece a bit better.  Whether or not it does, I don’t know… but it was something I just felt I needed to do.  I don’t expect this to take me that long to complete.  Once I finish that cat on Witches Wheel, I’ll be taking my Mira RR with me on the train until the stitching’s done.  I’d hoped to have her done last month.  So this month, I’m determined!

Funny that this update wound up being the four pieces that I am gunning to finish this year, but I suppose that’s just how the stitching ended up this month.  Hopefully May will be another good month of progress.