January D.E.S.I.G.N. - Shannon Wasilieff Designs

Just in the nick of time, I'm squeaking by at the end of this month with my DESIGN post for January.  For those of you who don't know what that is, DESIGN is a monthly feature hosted by Leonore Winterer of the blog Needle, Pen & Sword.  The acronym stands for Designer Everybody Should Instantly Get to Notice, and each month, different participants post a series of questions about a favorite/new needlework designer they've been working on.

What designer do you want to talk about this month?

So who to feature for January?  Well, that was a bit of a challenge for me, because due to the Crazy January event, I don't have a lot of consistent progress on much of anything right now.  But after some contemplation, I decided to feature Shannon Wasilieff.  She's the designer of the Gingerbread Houses SAL from Facebook last year that I'm working on as part of my Turtle Trot projects for this year. 

Have you stitched a project by this designer before?

Yes, this is my first project by Shannon, but I don't think it will be the last. I actually found out about the SAL and Shannon's designs through a post she made on the CrossStitchForum.com website.  I had never seen any of her stuff before, but I do love her designs.

Would you buy/stitch a design by this designer again? Why/Why not?

Yes, I think I will. Her designs are so very cute, and they don't have a lot of fractionals (which always make me crazy).   In fact, I have a copy of 3 of her charts that were featured in World of Cross Stitching magazine, so I will probably do one of those next.  However, if I wasn't already doing a gingerbread house themed piece with the SAL pattern, I definitely would make this Gingerbread House Street design of hers my next project. 

What made you choose this particular design/designer?

As I mentioned, I found Shannon through the cross stitch forum I participate in, and that led me to her Facebook group, which lead me to the SAL. And I pretty much can't resist anything Gingerbread House themed. Hmmm... not sure why that is though.

Did you notice anything that distinguished this designer from others?

This is going to sound weird, but Shannon has a very "blocky" sense of shading. Not sure how else to describe it, but the way she creates the effect of shading by layering colors is very unique from what I've stitched before, and I like it. I like that it's not always just the next color down (DMC 605 to 604 or something like that) but she actually uses different and coordinating colors to make her shading stand out. Of course, she uses a lot of single stitches too, which drives me crazy a bit since I'm a bit of a neat back freak. But I can deal with the frustration of that because the outcome is so worth it.

So thank you Shannon for making so many wonderful designs!  You can follow Shannon on her blog or through her Facebook group.  She's got lots of designs coming up in the British cross stitch magazines soon, but you can also find her great patterns in her Etsy store too. 

Until next month!

Progress Update: Day 8-11 of Crazy Challenge (Long and Picture Heavy again, sorry!)

Sorry, this is going to be another picture heavy post for those who are on slow connections.  This whole not having internet at the house thing really puts a cramp in my updating abilities over the weekend, and I wasn't able to post my update from Thursday last Friday before I left the office.

So here's what's been going on in my stitching life lately.  Luckily I'm happy to report that I have still kept up totally with the challenge, even if it hasn't been a lot of stitching.

As I mentioned in my last post, my plan for January 8th, last Thursday, was to work on a WIP project.  I pulled out my Tree Frog Trio kit from Dimensions for this day, since it is also one of my Turtle Trot pieces for this year.  I started it back in July or August last year, and it's kind of fallen into the UFO pile.  So here's where I started on Thursday:

And here's where it ended up:

Not a lot of progress, but I'm starting to see some.  I started with that frog on the left because it is the one that has (gasp!) blended threads, which I've never done before, so I figured out with the difficult thing first.  If I can finish this one by Christmas, it will go to a friend who loves frogs and is back in California for a Christmas present.

January 9th was Friday, so I decided to pull out something a little less complicated since my brain was shot from the work week in general.  I decided to pull out this perfume bottle design that I'm doing for World of Charity Stitching.

I got a good block of color for the first stripe on the bottle done, which is more progress than I've been able to do on anything lately.  This was a freebie pattern I found off a french blog, and it's going to have a very pretty purple/pink old fashioned atomizer bottle with a couple of yellow flowers by it when it's done. 

I spent most of the morning of January 10th on Saturday unpacking boxes.  We've been in the new apartment since Thanksgiving, but I've kind of been putting off really unpacking most of my things other than the basic essentials of what I need all the time, so I figured it was time to work on that.  Then Saturday evening I had a sort-of-date, so I ended up getting back to the house and working on my stitching kind of late. Since it was late, I decided I needed another brain dead project, so I pulled out this Yin Yang Horse pattern.

The nice thing about this is that it's all one color, only black required.  This is another piece for WOCS, and it was charted by me based on an online clip art gallery I saw.  I actually got a good chunk of this done (for me anyway), but had to quit a little earlier than expected because I had a "helper" glue himself to my lap and keep trying to steal the thread as I pulled it through fabric:

 (Brownie you are so not being helpful right there)

Yesterday was the 11th, and due to the fact that I'm running out of Q-snaps to hold my projects, I decided to start a project that already had been put on the frame, although I hadn't started it yet.  This is a Gingerbread House Facebook SAL designed by Shannon Wasilieff that she hosted in her group last year.  My intention was to start it before Christmas last year, but presents pushed it out of the way and I was never able to get a start.  So I pulled on one of my Christmas Q-snap huggies and gave it a go.

I may have gotten a little farther than this, but I was distracted by watching our DVR recordings of Agent Carter and Galavant and I totally messed up the spacing.  I had to frog a bit, and then decided to re-grid my pattern, rather than re-grid the fabric or frog everything I had done to make it match.  The joys of stitching, huh?

And in addition to my new starts, I am also hard at work on trying to finish my Giraffe Print Mitten for WOCS.  I've made some good progress on that, I figure I'm about 1/3 way done by now.  Hopefully it won't take much longer. 

Well, that's how things are right now.  I'm hoping to do more daily updates this week (instead of these huge block of updates), so stay tuned for those!