Progress Update: Crazy January Challenge Days 11-14

Despite my best intentions, this is the first opportunity I've had to come on and do a Crazy January Challenge update since Monday.  Somehow I find myself getting sick (again!) and combined with a very busy week at work again, it's really slowed me down.  Bleh. 

But enough complaining.  Let's talk about funner things.  Here's a recap of what my challenge progress is.

January 11th, Monday, I did decide to pull out another WIP project rather than start something new.  I decided it was time to work a little bit of Sunshine by Satsuma Street, since it hadn't seen any love for awhile and is actually pretty close to being finished.  So I pulled it out and took it from here:

To here:

Not too much left to go on this one, so I should be able to wrap this one up pretty quickly soon, although maybe after January and the challenge is over. 

Tuesday night I started a new project.  This is Lizzie Kate's Autumn Alphabet, which I sent out this week as the start of a new Lizzie Kate round robin that my Facebook group is doing.  That's right, I'm pretty much crazy because I signed up for another round robin at the same time.   This one was hard for me to miss though, because I absolutely love Lizzie Kate designs. 

I stitched the middle "M" block on my project so my fellow stitchers have a base point to start their stitching from.  Here's what it looked like when I sent it off:

I'm super excited about this project because it's the first Lizzie Kate chart that I've splurged for the charted Weeks Dye Works and Crescent Colors overdyed threads.  Although you can't really tell with this block because the orange is the one color of DMC in the pattern and the very slight variation in the dark brown hasn't shown up in the small amount of stitching for this letter.  I can't wait to see how it turns out as a whole though.  I plan on doing all 4 in this alphabet series eventually. 

Wednesday I decided that after all the Mill Hill kits I did in December, I was really kind of missing doing the little Mill Hill kits.  So I pulled out Kitty's Stocking and managed to put in one more stripe of color, taking it from this progress last year:

To this:

Not much progress, but hey, progress is progress, right?  I was still in a Mill Hill mood the next night, so Triple Scoop got a little love to take it from where I left it last year:

To this:

Again, not much progress, and in posting this now I see a mistake I need to go back and fix.  But most of my challenge stitching this week was done on lunch breaks, since I've been working on other things during the evening.  Swirly Lollipop has got almost all of its stripes now:

Just the green stripes, white, and the stick to fill in.  I also made a dent in my chosen mandala motif of the Ink Circles piece I'm doing for the sampler round robin for January. 

So that's coming along too.  So what's my plans for the weekend?  Well, I haven't picked my project for today yet, so we'll see what calls to me tonight when I settle in for my nightly stitching session.  Other than that, I want to organize the rest of my potential crazy project pieces and choose which ones I will most likely stitch on during the rest of the month.  Oh, and rest.  Lots of resting.  This getting sick thing is no fun, I tell ya.  : (   Good thing we have a 3 day weekend which gives me more time to recuperate. 

Progress Update: Day 28 & 29 of the Crazy January Challenge

I'm back to the two day update post today, since I forgot to take pictures of the Day 28 project, and so I didn't have anything to post yesterday.  So I managed to take some pictures last night, but the lighting turned out kind of funny, so they will look a little wonky. 

Day 28 was Wednesday, which are always my very busy, very long days, so I purposely chose something smaller.  Plus, at this point, I pretty much had the rest of my challenge all planned out.  So Wednesday was a kit by Mill Hill called Lucky Day. 

This one only has 2 colors of stitching, as the gold thread it comes with is purely for attaching beads.  If you couldn't tell, it will be a four leaf clover when I get done.  The dark green thread I started with didn't show up too well on the green paper so far.  This will be a gift for a friend who loves all things Irish. 

Yesterday was Thursday, which mean it wasn't quite as long as Wednesday, but still busy, so I chose another small project to do, a Mill Hill kit called Kitty's Stocking:

Got the top of the stocking finished.  I'm really excited about this one, since I did the Tropical Kitty kit last year and loved it.  I have one other kitty Mill Hill in my stash to do eventually too.  The one thing I'm nervous about is this one has a lot of back stitching details in addition to the beading, so I hope I can get it done in time for my upcoming gift deadline. 

And since I didn't feel like working on Kitty when I got home yesterday, I pulled Perfume Bottle out again and worked on that while we watched the new TNT series The Librarians (which is kind of kooky, but I really liked, by the way). 

The bottle itself is now completely outlined, and you might be able to see the bit of gray at the top where I started on the sprayer.  I just have the metal and ball part of that to finish, the rest of the stripes to fill in, and a couple flowers at the bottom to finish.  Hopefully I'll be able to complete it this weekend and have something new to show you.  

So now we're heading into Saturday and my weekends-without-internet, so I will be back on Monday with the updates on my last two projects for the challenge.  It's kind of bittersweet.  I loved doing all these new starts, but it is a little tiring on some days, and I am itching to go back to some of the things I've started. 

Until Monday stitching friends!