Final Progress Update on Crazy January Challenge: Day 30 & 31

Hello stitching friends, how was your weekend? 

Mine was pretty good until the "almost mini tornado" hit late Sunday night.  That was interesting.  Some days I'm a little freaked out by the new weather patterns I'm getting used to since moving to the South. 

The other reason my weekend could have been better was this:

I had planned to have it completely done by Sunday night.  Yeah, as you can see that didn't happen.  I mean, if you look at just the missing stripes on the bottle it seems like I could almost be done.  But then there's that weird blob missing from the bottom; those are the flowers I still have to fill in.  *sigh*

Actually, this one gave me a bit of bother on Saturday night.  I was all prepared to start filling in the spray ball thing (don't know what it's called at the moment) on the right side of the bottle when I realized that somehow I miscalculated/measured my fabric wrong and the design was going to be a little too big.  So I had to re-chart it so it was not nearly as tall, which made it more oval instead of round.  I thought it was terrible at first, but I think it turned out okay in the end.  Sadly I ran out of thread 2 rows before I finished it.  Grrrrrrr!  I hate when that happens.  So I had to dig into my stash and cut some more, which wasn't really a big deal, but on top of everything else... but at least the frog didn't show up, so that's something to be thankful for. 

So anyway, with that rant over, it's time to show my last two projects for the Crazy January Challenge. 

January 30th was Friday, and although I had the whole weekend ahead of me, I didn't make much progress.  This is going to be another square for Love Quilts when it is finished.  I call it Sparrow on Vine. 

I got the top of the bird's head done.  I kind of like the two tone effect, but that's just because I haven't done the other half of part of the stitches in that section yet. 

January 31st was Saturday and as it was the last day, I saved the big project for last.  And this one qualifies as big in several ways.  It's an I Love Britannia design by Jan Constantine that appeared in an old issue of CrossStitcher magazine.  I'm stitching it up for my aunt, who loves all things British because of the 18 months she lived there while serving a mission for our church.  So I pulled it out and here's my progress so far. 

What?  That many stitches took an hour?

So here's the reason I refer to this project as "the big one".  In addition to being large in size (finished size of the cushion will be 18 x 18 inches I think), this is my very first time stitching on evenweave fabric other than aida.  Ahhhhh!  So it's my first time stitching over 2.  This is 20 count, so the weave is quite large, which means I'm stitching 4 over 2, so I'm a little weirded out not only by trying to get used to counting by two threads at a time, but also because the stitches seem so big and chunky to me so far.  I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually...

I'm kind of feeling bittersweet now the the challenge is over.  On the one hand, it will be nice not to have pressures to start something every single day, but on the other hand, it was kind of fun.  But my WIP list is outrageously long now, so I'm going to try and limit the new starts in the next few weeks. 

So what's on the list next?  Well, I do need to finish that silly bottle, and then it's time to finish Rainbow Mandala and Horse Yin Yang, as those are all squares due for World of Charity stitching.  Then it's off to try and finish those six Mill Hill kits before those are due as gifts in mid-March.  Then I need to finish the My Little Pony magnets by early April for a birthday gift.  And then on top of that, I have two Love Quilts squares that are due March 1st that I need to start working harder on too.  And I will of course be stitching my rounds for the Frosted Pumpkin Round Robin I'm participating in, in between all those other projects too. 

Phew!  No rest for the weary stitcher.  :)