Progress Update: Day 14 & 15 of the Crazy January Challenge

Well, I meant to get this post up on Thursday, but sadly I had to stay home from work that day due to a huge migraine I woke up with first thing in the morning.  Ugh.  And still no internet out at the farm, so if I'm stuck at home = no blogging. 

So for Day 14 and Day 15, I have updates on two more of the My Little Pony patterns.  Again, can't show you the whole thing yet, since they are for a gift and I don't want to risk them being seen early, but here's a sneak peek. 

Here's the beginnings of Twilight Sparkle's blue tail:

And the beginnings of Pinky Pie's tail.  Have to say I loved stitching the curls on this one. 

Someone asked what kind of fabric I was using on my last update post.  These are stitched on 14 count white plastic canvas, 3 over 1.  The plan is to turn them into magnets, so I needed something that was sturdy enough to stand on it's own, and believe it or not the plastic was cheaper than the perforated paper. 

Also, you may notice both are mostly half crosses.  I forgot to mention this in another post earlier, but a lot of my progress pictures have shown only half crosses.  That's because I'm a firm cross country stitcher, and I also on top of that have a weird habit of doing outlines/blocks of color all in one direction and then filling them in with the other direction once the whole block/outline has been done.  So these projects aren't all meant to be half crosses, they're just not that far along yet.  :)

The nice thing about staying home with a migraine is that once my excedrin kicks in enough to take the edge of the pain, I can do some limited activities (as long as they don't involve moving much).  Perfect for stitching.  So I did have the chance to work on the Giraffe Mitten piece I'm doing for World of Charity Stitching.  Here's where the progress from the first half of the week had left me:

And then the progress as of last night.  I just have a bit more yellow to finish filling in and then backstitching the border, and then it will be off to its new home to be sewn into a quilt with its brothers and sisters.  I'm hoping I'll get it finished soon, since it is a bit late (oops). 

The other nice thing about staying home with a migraine is that kitties will insist on keeping you company.  As long as you feed them, they'll curl up in a nice quiet ball with you while you're stitching. 

He is fast asleep and snoring in the picture.  Hmm, maybe I'm posting too many cat pictures lately.  Can you tell he's my baby?  :)

I will probably be back with another super long update on Monday with this weekend's progress.  Until then, happy stitching to everyone!

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!

Animal Print Mittens: New Start and Progress 12.9.14

I recently discovered something that is both good and bad for my stitching progress: stitching for charity.  I've recently joined two groups that use squares stitched and donated from members to sew up quilts for disadvantaged/sick children and seniors.  I just love the idea of my stitching going to a good cause!  Not that stitching for friends/family isn't a good cause (LOL).

This is a project for one of those groups, World of Charity Stitching.   We are using a free cross stitch mitten pattern with lots of different motifs using the same shape.  I actually wasn't signed up for this project originally because the deadline was shortly after I joined the group, but they posted a couple weeks ago that they needed more squares to finish the quilt, so here I went. 

Since so many of the free patterns had been done already, even though duplicates are allowed I decided to create my own patterns.  There's a cute cow print one that's already been done, so I figured to go along with that we needed something leopard print.  And of course I picked pink leopard print.  :)  Here's the progress so far:

Not much to look at yet.  When I asked my brother what he thought, he said my cloth looked like it had cancer.  Gee, thanks.

I'm still trying to finish up a few Christmas presents left over from MMMM, so I haven't been working too hard on this one yet.  Which in some ways is bad because I only have until the end of the year to finish!  I'm going to be doing a giraffe print after this one is done if I can manage it. 

Anyway, I've signed up for several other charity projects, so you'll probably see several of those popping up here in the next few weeks, especially with the Ultimate Crazy 2015 Challenge coming up next month.