Why I do what I do

For those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I do a lot of charity stitching.  Well, I thought it might be fun to show off some of the quilts that were recently finished with my contributed squares.

By the way, both charity organizations I stitch for are always looking for new stitchers and always have new themes coming up, so if you think you'd like to donate a square or two, check out their linked websites from this link.  The quilts go to such good causes (sick children and needy seniors) and it's kind of addicting searching for the right pattern to stitch for an active theme.

First up is a quilt featuring my Rainbow Mandala pattern and finished by World Of Charity Stitching.
This quilt featured the same pattern done in many color palettes by each stitcher. My block was a neon rainbow contribution, and you can see it here in the finished quilt top outlined in red.

Next up is another WOCS quilt.  This one featured the same mitten outline with different fill patterns.  (Incidentally, WOCS is currently doing another quilt along these lines, this time with butterflies.)  I contributed two squares to this one, Leopard Print Mitten and Giraffe Print Mitten .  These were actually my very first finishes for 2015.  Both of them made it into a single finished quilt, and you can see both here in red.

The other organization I usually send squares to is Love Quilts (the USA branch).  Unlike WOCS, which stitches by theme and then finds a recipient, Love Quilts takes signups for individual children whose parents have chosen a theme for the squares of their quilt.

That Baby Tinkerbell pattern I worked so hard on showed up nicely in this Disney princess themed quilt.  This is going to a 7-year-old girl who has already gone through surgery and chemo for a rare type of tumor 3 years ago, and is currently undergoing a second round of treatment for a baseball sized tumor in another area of her body.

The last quilt I have to show you today was the one I finished my Friends for Life square for.  The theme was realistic cats and dogs, and I admit my square is a little small next to a lot of the other contributions, but it ended up being a necessary evil due to time.  This is going to a teenage girl who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy.

By the way, you can click on all of the quilt pictures to see them larger if you wish.  

If you take a gander at my Finishes page you'll see several more finished squares for both organizations that have been sent in, but they haven't been made into finished quilts yet.  If you enjoyed reading this post though, I'll do another one when a few more quilts have popped up.

I've made a bit of progress on my newest WOCS stitching project too.  Here's where Sunshine by Satsuma Street is currently at:

It's coming along nicely.  The main sun is almost done, except for I still need to get more of the yellow I ran out of.  Once I finish the inner ring (that's what all the gaps in the rays is for) I'll start on the larger outer ring, and it will be ready to send off.

And I made a pitful bit of progress on my latest square for the Frosted Pumpkin Round Robin.  Still now tower for Rapunzel yet, but the forest below her is finished...

Progress Update: Days 16-20 of the Crazy January Challenge

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.  It was a long holiday weekend for us here in the US, so I'm back today on a Tuesday with my long update from my (internet-less) weekend instead of a Monday.  Once again, this is long and picture heavy, so you've been warned.

Last week was the week of the My Little Pony projects, so Friday had a bit of progress on Apple Jack (again, only a sneak peek right now because it's for a gift):

Saturday I had a busy day of working on unpacking boxes, so I didn't get much stitching done, just about two rows:

The lighting was really wonky when I took this picture, sorry.  The fabric is normal white aida, not blue.  This is called Cat Lady Kit and is a pattern from dailycrossstitch.com.  The two rows I got done are part of the top of a cardboard box flap.  It eventually will be the whole box with three different cats sitting in it.  Nice, easy pattern, just didn't have time to do more yet.

Sunday I knew I would have a little more time, so I got this done while watching rerun of Agent Carter and then Galavant.  Luckily, no frogging this time.

This is an old pattern from a back issue of CrossStitcher magazine.  Unfortunately I don't remember which issue off the top of my head, and I don't have it in front of me to look up.  I don't even know the official name of the pattern, but in my head I'm calling it the Purple Paisley project.  Can you tell the English major likes alliteration?  It is on Lavender aida, and so far, yes, I've only stitched with purple DMC, so the progress is kind of hard to distinguish. 

Monday (yesterday) I had off from work, but the rest of my family did not, so I took the opportunity of an empty house to work on a (maybe) Christmas present for my Mom.  It will be a maybe depending on if I get it done by December this year or not.  This is also from a back issue of CrossStitcher.  I am not posting the official name here, since it will give away what it is for now and I'm not sure if Mom reads the blog or not.  So if you read this Mom, fess up so I know to hide it better in the future.  For myself, I'm calling this one Polka Dot Bouquet.

Got a nice start on a couple of the leaves yesterday before I went back to unpacking boxes and organizing again. This is on light blue aida (yes, actually blue this time).  The pattern calls for it to be on white aida with blue polka dots, but since that is a little hard to source in the US right now, I went for the light blue option instead.  This is my second project on the blue aida, the first being the Gingerbread Houses SAL project from last week.

In other stitching news from this weekend, I have another finish for 2015!  I was finally able to get Giraffe Mitten finished, so it's now on its way to become part of a quilt for World of Charity stitching. 

I was so glad to get this done, because it's actually a bit late, but being sick right after Christmas just threw me for a loop stitching-wise, and I've been behind ever since.

Onto today's progress... So during lunch I went ahead and started up the last of the MLP patterns, the final member of the "mane six" Fluttershy:

For some reason, I decided to start with her mane instead of her tail like the others.  *shrug*  Go figure.  Fluttershy is my favorite of the group, so I will enjoy this one.

So, what will tomorrow's stitching adventure be?  Guess we'll find out what I pull out of the box tomorrow!

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!

Progress Update: Christmas Gifts and Crazy January Challenge Days 1-5 (Long and Picture Heavy)

I was finally able to remember to take pictures last night of what I've been doing, so it's time to post a few updates, mostly for the Crazy January challenge.

First off were the Mill Hill kits I was finishing up for Christmas presents for my aunt and her family.  I did manage to finish them a few days before Christmas, so that was good.  So Tropical Kitty, Provence Rooster, Hot Stuff, Be Merry, and Teton Santa have been moved to my 2014 finishes page. 

The bad news about that is that I completely forgot to take pictures of them before I gave them for Christmas.  Oops!  Luckily 3 of them were still on the tree when I went over to my aunt's for New Year's Eve, so I managed to grab a picture of those ones.

I already posted a finish picture for Tropical Kitty, but here it is hanging among the branches and lights:

And Teton Santa (so much beading, but turned out pretty good):

And Hot Stuff, pretty much the easiest project of the 5:

I am still trying to get pics for Be Merry and Provence Rooster, but for now you'll just have to use your imagination. 

So that updates me up until the end of the year.  Well, then starting January 1st, I started on my Crazy January Challenge, which is to start/work on 31 different projects, one for each day in January.  Unfortunately, my plans I originally posted about have already changed, since I've had a couple projects I thought I would get done after above ornaments and before the end of the year.  Needless to say they didn't get done as planned, so now I'm shuffling my Crazy projects a bit.  But that's okay, I'm just going to spill over into February a bit (haha).

So onto my daily updates, since the lack of internet access has put me behind on reporting a bit.

For January 1st, I spent the morning making a big breakfast for my cousin and my brother, and then we went to go see Into the Woods in theaters (which I highly recommend, by the way).  Then the afternoon was spent preparing for a date (yay!) so needless to say, I didn't get home until 10:00 and I didn't get much stitching done.  Since it was the start of the year, I decided to pull out my January start for the 2015 Flower of the Month SAL I'm hosting this year.  Since it was so late, I only got a bit done:

And by a bit I mean like 7 stitches.  But hey, I finished one color block, so there you go.  I plan on picking this one up again before the month is over.  

January 2nd was the first of the imposing projects I mentioned. I needed to finish my mitten squares I am stitching for World of Charity Stitching.  I started with Leopard Print Mitten, since that's the one I had started already.  This one was a WIP, so this is where I started:

And after several good hours of stitching, I was able to scrape out a finish:

My first finish of 2015!  It is VERY unusual for me to have something done so early, even if it's something small.  But oh well, it's a finish.  So happy dance anyway.  So Leopard Print Mitten has been moved to my brand new 2015 finishes page. 

January 3rd I spent most of the day trying to unpack boxes, and we also had a massive rainstorm/tornado watch that meant we spent several hours sheltering/trying to entertain our sister missionaries.  So my stitching plans kind of went out the window.  But I did manage to start Giraffe Print Mitten, which is the second of my mitten squares for World of Charity Stitching:

Doesn't look like much so far, but hopefully I'll get a good chance to work on it this week and finish it off. 

January 4th was Sunday, and my brother's family birthday party, so again a short stitching day.  Also, it was the season premiere of Galavant, which I enjoyed immensely, but didn't get much stitching on during it.  But I did get one ring done in my Rainbow Mandala square.  This is a freebie pattern that I'm changing the colors on, also a project for World of Charity Stitching (notice a theme going on)?

January 5th, yesterday, was a start on Frosted Pumpkin's 12 Days of Christmas pattern.  I'm doing a Frosted Pumpkin Round Robin through a group on Facebook, and this is my pattern I'm sending out.  I'm doing the border of the piece before it leaves, and each member of the group will complete a different square from the pattern until it eventually makes it way back to me.  So I got a good start on the border, which hopefully I can finish tonight really quick. 

Don't know what will be for tonight's stitch, other than there probably won't be a ton of progress made on it.  Mostly because I need to finish the above border and mitten (not to mention the Rainbow Mandala) soonish, so those will take precedence over anything new.  So my new start may look like the January Carnations one up there.  Only like 7 stitches.  But I am determined to start something at least!