This week for WIPGO, I’m focused on one of my oldest WIPs – Apache Wedding Blessing, designed by Kooler Designs and published by Janlynn. This piece was chosen by my college friend and sorority sister, Ivanna, upon her wedding. We’re… now almost 20 years later and it’s still not quite done. (sigh) So the goal now is to have it completed for her 20th anniversary.
My notes say I started stitching on this in January 2006. That’s probably about right. It was my first ever attempt on linen, and oh boy… there are some tension issues! I was stitching just a wee bit tightly! But thankfully the spots where my tension is particularly iffy, I can just repair by going over the stitches with an additional half stitch to plump them up and fill the space.
This piece went out into the world for an Unfinished Object Round Robin in 2011. The notes and thank you that I sent with it is still in the poly project envelope – intentionally. That way I can give some thank you credit to the lovely women who helped complete the cross stitching before it went dormant when I became pregnant with Max – Siva S. in Canada, Rachel B. in New York, Erin C. in Florida, Linda M. in Oregon, and Kristle M. in Nevada.
Apache Wedding Blessing by Kooler Designs as of January 14, 2023 – stitched 2 over 2 on 28 ct antique white linen with charted DMC threads.
What’s bogging me down now is that infamous thing that was so common in stitching of the 1990s – all of the backstitching to define the images. Most of it is pretty straight forward… outlining all of the frame poles and the feathers, plus the Canada geese at the top. But there are a few different colors for the backstitching, and the chart is a little difficult to read due to the limitations when it was printed. I’m getting there though. The most difficult part really are those feathers, just to see where lines cut in to define a few of the individual feather strands. Some of them lie right on the 10×10 grid lines (grrrrr…) so I have to play it by ear a bit.
Honestly, though – there’s not THAT much left to do. It’s just that mental block with backstitching that I need to overcome, and I can push through this one. It’s long past time to get this piece completed, get it framed, and present it to my friend. I’ll be adding this one to my MAGIC list for the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild for 2023 to kick my butt into gear!
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!
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 COLOR
CONVERSION COLOR
Blacksmith Blue
DMC 3799
Eve’s Leaves
DMC 3364
Prickly Pear
DMC 3609
Queen Bee
DMC 676
Red Ribbon
DMC 3350
Tyler Boy Blue
DMC 813
DMC 829
DMC 420
DMC 937
DMC 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. 🙂
Kicking off Week One of my WIPGO year is The Colonial Sampler by Betsy Stinner. I adopted this project from the stash of my friend Sandy after she passed in 2017. I know that Sandy attended the class held by Betsy, but I don’t know when it was. The pattern does not have a copyright date printed in it.
Sandy either completed or reused the fabric for the small pillow class teaching piece in the bottom right corner, as that fabric was missing. She never started the full sampler. The entire kit was together. I was happy to take it as a piece to remember her by as I stitch.
It’s a fun sampler with a variety of bands in different stitches – cross stitch, four-sided stitch, back stitches, herringbone, satin stitch, three-sided Italian cross, darning patterns, smyrna crosses, Greek stitch, queen stitches, etc. The flosses are all silks – a mix of Soie d’Alger and Silk ‘N’ Colors. It’s stitched on 32 ct Raw linen from Zweigart and measures 107w x 189h. This is what I’d would consider a medium-sized piece.
The Colonial Sampler by Betsy Stinner as of Jan. 5, 2023 – stitched on 32 ct raw Zweigart linen with charted silks.
I began my version on New Year’s Eve 2021 as part of the #nye12x12 stitchalong held via Instagram. It really hasn’t seen any work since January of last year, though. I started on the top band, but massively screwed up my counting – so abandoned the original start down in a corner of the fabric (until I feel like frogging it out), and instead decided to start dead in the middle to ensure I had things counted correctly. I can’t remember what I did wrong on the original – but I clearly was annoyed enough to just jump on the fabric! That’s not a common thing for me to do.
The Finnegan’s Fog silk, which is that blue to grey dye down the sides is a color I just loooooooooove. It stitches so pretty and just has this mysterious look to it. My photograph has a dark line in the center under the green – but that’s just a shadow, not stitches.
My plan for this WIPGO is to fill in that center band (“Band 11”) with the called-for satin and smyrna stitches. It’s not a particularly complicated band, but will be a very pretty starting point to make some nice progress.
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! 🙂
