Challenges/Stitch-A-Longs, Family & Friends, Stitching, Works in Progress

What I Stitched This Week – Jan. 9-15, 2023

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The past seven days have been a heck of a rollercoaster here in Measi Land. I celebrated my 48th turn around the sun on Wednesday with a wonderfully relaxing day off. Then it quickly turned sad, as one of my Stitching Sisters of New England friends, Carol, passed away early Saturday morning. She was older – I refuse to go down the “elderly” road – and had been looking frail over the last few months, but it still came as a shock. So my brain and emotions are all over the place. My stitching circle has had a very rough couple of years between members dealing with cancer, heart attacks, other hospital-related illnesses, two Sisters’ deaths, and the losses of loved ones. Somehow, though, we just keep moving, reminding ourselves to hold each other a little closer in our hearts. I’ve been a bit more distant from the group as a whole lately as I work through some personal emotional/mental stuff. This is my reminder to stop hiding, even when everything in my brain wants me to.

I’d planned on making a WIP Parade FlossTube this weekend, but it’s just not the right time. Sometime soon – once I take a little breath about everything.

(deep breath)

So… despite that rockiness, it was a pretty good stitching week.

ABCs of Parenting by Lizzie Kate – as of January 12, 2023 – stitched 2 over 2 on 28 count cream Monaco with customized DMC colors

I started the week with some work on my ABCs of Parenting by Lizzie Kate, which was the second of my four WIPGO pieces for the month. It also wound up being the focus piece for Week Two of “Choose My WIP” over on Semi-Sane Stitchers on Facebook. I featured it this past week with my “before” photo here. It stitches up pretty quickly, and I’m happy with my WIPGO progress on it. I may put this in as one of my monthly focuses later this year for WIPocalypse, because I could probably get it done easily if I just did a length or two per night on it.

Flying Lesson by Silver Creek Samplers as of January 14, 2023 – stitched 1 over 1 on 18 ct Hazelwood Aida from Fiber on a Whim with charted DMC threads

On Friday night I just felt like curling up with something fairly easy as Erich and I watched The Matrix Resurrections for the second time. I grabbed Flying Lesson by Silver Creek Samplers and threw some green and black stitches in to complete the header text and the very top of the witch hat. I fully expect to finish this piece for Halloween this year. Once I get that witch hat and the moon behind it completed, the rest of it will go super fast. Hopefully it comes up on an early WIPGO month and I can just devote a week to it or something. It may come up next week for Choose My WIP – it’s only down by one vote right now! Maybe I’ll toss it in the ring for Week 4 if it doesn’t win this week. I’d like to get that hat done so I can move on from black floss for a little while.

The Fruit of Plenty by Modern Folk Embroidery – as of January 14, 2023 – stitched 1 over 2 on 40 ct Antique Ivory linen from Silkweaver with DMC 800 and 840.

I’d originally planned on working on my 3rd WIPGO piece for Saturday and Sunday. After the news about Carol, though, I knew I needed a night to work on one of my pieces that she’d expressed a lot of interest in. Solid color stitching, some basic rows, and nothing complicated. It helped ground me and let me work through my thoughts, both happy and sad, as I stitched late into the night after everyone else was upstairs. On this piece, I added the light blue at the top (where you see the “2” outlined), carrying it down the right side of that brown-outlined triangle. This is the other piece that is currently up for Choose My WIP for week 3, winning by one. If it wins, I’ll be working the blue down to the right (to outline the “0”) to form the other side of the octagonal motif just to the left of my needle minder in this photo. For those familiar with how this stitch-a-long was divided in 2021, it’s the February portion. I have January’s complete and have moved down into April a bit to let that blue Assisi-style band flow naturally. I do plan on roughly stitching the piece generally in month-release order. Where it makes sense to skip around to form a motif across the month dividers, though – I’ll make the jump.

Apache Wedding Blessing as of January 15, 2023 – stitched 2 over 2 on Antique White linen with charted DMC threads

Finally yesterday I started on my WIPGO piece, although I have to admit I’m just not feeling it. It’s one of my oldest pieces and all I have to do is backstitching – a LOT of backstitching – and a bit of fill-in repair where my stitches were way too tight. This was my first piece ever attempted on linen, so my tension was way off in a few spots – and I think that is part of my mental block about getting it done. I’m just annoyed with my stitches in the top left where I first started. I need to add a stitch over the originals to fatten them up here and there, and they’ll look much better. I’ll be doing a bit more work on it tonight – backstitching, and then it will sleep for a while. One of these days I’ll just suck it up and push through the rest of it. For now? No. I’ll just do what my goal was for WIPGO, which was the entire point of my goals. Some of these pieces I won’t be feeling as much. That’s okay. WIPGO will let me at least touch them for a couple days so I can remind myself where I am on everything.

So what’s in store this week? Apache tonight to complete my WIPGO goal. Tomorrow night I’ll be joining Abi Bellastitch on her #StitchYourAlphabet SAL. She’s working ABC Hornbook by the Primitive Needle. I’ll be working Alphabet of Stitches by Morning Glory Needleworks, since I have that fully kitted and partially basted. Wednesday/Thursday/Friday will be Choose My WIP focus, which will lead me into the first 24 Hours of Cross Stitch Marathon next weekend and a batch of “whatever I want” chaos.

A busy week – both past and upcoming! Hope all of you have a good week – see you next weekend!

Challenges/Stitch-A-Longs, Stitching, Works in Progress

WIPGO 2023 – Week 2 – ABCs of Parenting

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Week Two of WIPGO 2023 brings me to ABCs of Parenting by Lizzie Kate. This is the first of Lizzie Kate’s patterns that I’ve ever stitched, although I have a few of them in my stash. I love the style of LK’s patterns, although like many designers, I get a bit limited due to the religious nature of many of them. This, thankfully, was one that was much more universal.

I acquired the pattern and some enclosed floss via a freebie table at either Stitcher’s Hideaway or Celebration of Needlework sometime 2019ish. It was charted with a mix of Crescent Colors (now Classic Colorworks) and DMC, but whomever had stitched it before donating it to the freebie table had converted the entire thing to DMC. I have decided to go the DMC route, providing any missing colors from stash with “as close as possible” conversions of my own. The irony being that it was the DMC colors I needed to swap! That’s the beauty of patterns such as this – you really can’t go wrong with whatever you choose. I’ll likely make a few changes along the way. I already changed that small diamond shape next to “fair” to a yellow instead of the same color as the text.

ABC’s of Parenting by Lizzie Kate as of Jan. 6, 2023 – stitched on 28 ct cream Monaco with DMC conversion (listed below).

I began my version of the project, like Week One’s Colonial Sampler, for the #nye12x12 stitch-a-long on December 31, 2021. I’m stitching it on 28 count cream Monaco (evenweave) over two with two threads. My photo to the left has the fabric showing it as quite white, but it’s a cream that borders a light lemon yellow.

Getting these first couple words in was a little tricky – the chart is quite small and not the clearest. But now that I have this initial bit in, I expect this to fly pretty quickly. Most of the piece is simple one-stitch wide lettering. It’s easy to bounce placement of new motifs and letters now.

My conversion, based upon the anonymous stitcher’s conversion, is as follows. Originals are Crescent Colors unless noted:

ORIGINAL COLORCONVERSION COLOR
Blacksmith BlueDMC 3799
Eve’s LeavesDMC 3364
Prickly PearDMC 3609
Queen BeeDMC 676
Red RibbonDMC 3350
Tyler Boy BlueDMC 813
DMC 829DMC 420
DMC 937DMC 3346

This is one of those pieces that I could stitch up pretty quickly, so although it’s only out right now for the two days of WIPGO, it may come up later for one of my focus months to complete it. We shall see. 🙂

For information on this blog series, please go to the WIPGO 2023 Introduction Post.

Challenges/Stitch-A-Longs, Stitching

WIPGO 2023 – The Introduction

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This year I’m going to do a weekly series to re-introduce the majority of my current projects back onto the blog through a WIPGO post. I’ll be showing the finished photo and the status of it as of the night I post, and a little background on the project. By the end of the year I’ll have all of the two WIPGO boards I’m running this year introduced. Think of it as a (very) slow motion WIP parade. A more live-action WIP parade will be coming to my FlossTube soon as well.

If you’re unfamiliar with WIPGO, it’s a play on BINGO. Pick 25 goals (or 24 with the traditional “free space”) that will challenge but not overwhelm you. It can be on a single project, or as many projects as you choose. It can be specific or as broad as you like. Put the goals into a 5 by 5 board, just like a bingo board, and number the squares 1 to 25. Every month on the 25th, the founder of WIPGO, Jessie, pulls two numbers randomly and those are your goals to complete for the month. On the month she pulls #13, there are three goals active. The goal is to get as many squares completed as you can over the year. Totally for fun – the only rewards are ones you make for yourself and maybe some silly bragging rights on Facebook.

This year I’ve decided to run two boards with almost all of my current WIPs spread across them. My goal is very simple – just stitch for two days on each project. No stitch or time minimums. Just put some stitches into each project this year. If by chance I finish a project before it gets called – I have a couple more projects I can add into the boards that are started. Otherwise I’ll leave them as a free space to put some extra love into something.

Here are my two boards:

January’s called numbers were 6 and 10 – so this month I’ll be putting stitches into The Colonial Sampler by Betsy Stinner (Earth Threads), Apache Wedding Blessing by Kooler Designs, Mute But Not Silent by Amy Mitten, and ABC’s of Parenting by Lizzie Kate. Those will also be the projects I feature here this month.

It seems like a lot – but that basically equals a week and a day out of the month to get stitches into four separate projects. Not that bad, honestly. I’m planning to do most of my stitching on these projects on Friday and Saturdays.

On Sundays I’m planning a wrap-up post of all of my stitching for the week, and then you’ll hopefully see my progress if I keep myself on a bit of a schedule! 🙂

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