The rollercoaster that I’d mentioned in my January 16th post continued through last weekend, and so I’m now behind in updating what’s been going on in my stitchy life. Along with Carol’s passing, we had to say goodbye to the last of our original band of (pre-Max) cats, Noby, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on Saturday at the ripe old age of 17. It wasn’t unexpected – he had been quite ill for a long time, and we’d been avoiding facing reality over the holidays. I’m glad he’s no longer suffering and that he’s able to run free with his sister and the extended cat family we had. I miss him though – even his annoying, gross habit of sneezing right in my face.

Work has been kinda busy lately too – the usual uptick of meeting preparations seems to be coming about a month earlier than normal. It’s not a bad thing, but I felt like I was caught a little flat-footed the past couple weeks. I made some good headway to get back on track early this week though – so all good there.

With the emotional and work weirdness, my stitching hasn’t been quite as productive the last couple weeks. I’m still quite happy with what I accomplished, though!

I completed both of my remaining WIPGO goals for January in the last two weeks of the month – two days of backstitching on Apache Wedding Blessing, and two days on Mute But Not Silent.

For Apache Wedding Blessing, I focused on the top left corner of the piece – outlining that upper feather and then running the straight line outlines for a couple of the poles. I’m happy with two nights of progress. I may bring this with me to Stitcher’s Hideaway later this month to get a bit more basic backstitching in on the poles on the other side. I would estimate I’m about one third through the backstitching at this point, and then I have a little more tension cleanup work on the left hand side where I originally pulled a bit too tightly. I’ll be fixing that side by simply running a tent stitch over my existing stitches to fatten them up a little bit.

On Mute But Not Silent, I decided to focus on the first of the two large H’s. While a good chunk of the work was double running stitch outlining the outside, I did also add some cross stitches in the center of the structure of the H to give it a bit more dimension. I still need to add a four-sided stitch into the center of each of those circles, and then that H is complete… and I can move on to the next one. These Dutch-style letters are quite ornate! And they don’t match each other – the stitches are put in different configurations, so I need to count almost the entire time.

Even though this is a “murder mystery” piece, I do know what the entire piece looks like. I posted it here on my WIPGO Week 4 post. The mystery will be linking the individual motifs to the storyline so they make sense. Definitely a fun way to stitch a piece – and have a little extra “if you know, you know” behind it on the wall.

With my WIPGO stitching completed, I decided to pull out a couple pieces that were yelling at me to get some work done and threw them into the option pit for Semi Sane’s “Choose My WIP” challenge.

The first was Fruit of Plenty from Modern Folk Embroidery. I managed to get a little over 1,000 stitches in on this one in about a week of puttering. I’m very happy with the progress. And it will get more in February since it’s a featured WIPGO piece!

I outlined the entire cartouche you see centered here, plus filled in some of the blue at the top of it (where the “2” is shaded in). For February I’m going to try to finish up this section, which represented the February block in 2021. It’s super-intense stitching, so I do not expect to keep up with this throughout 2023. But I’m going to push it as far as I can this year. My goal was a modest three months completion. I should make that just fine.

For the final week of Choose My WIP, I stitched on the 2021 Temperature Tree by Stitchin’ Mommy. I have had a heck of a time overcoming the tree trunks on this one. Not sure why I’m struggling so muich – but I just have hit one of those ruts. I’m sure once I get that final trunk in, this piece will move a lot faster as I stitch in the individual leaves. I’m very happy to have added three limbs onto the tree – just a little more to go! About one and a half limbs!

This piece will definitely get finished this year. I already have a couple of other temperature projects waiting on the wings that I’d like to start – but I won’t until this one gets done. The heart you see is custom. This piece didn’t have a year or initials added in as part of the design, so I decided I’d carve my initials and the two-digit year right into the tree. I’d waffled whether I would change this to 2022 or… since it’s now 2023, the current year. I decided to leave it as a 2021 piece. I already have found a couple other fabulous temperature record pieces that I’ll work for the most recent years.

I will post my WIPGO Week 5 piece tomorrow, even though it’s not Wednesday. For now I need to head to bed… it’s been a long day and I’m wiped out!

If you want to see what else I worked on in January, my weekly updates are here and here.