Progress Update: Crazy January Challenge Days 15-18

Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend, and those off in the US had a good 3 day holiday.  It was nice to rest and relax for most of the weekend.  Luckily my cold hasn't blown into full on sick mode yet, but I definitely am still feeling off my game.  Monday I had a visit to my thyroid specialist for my monthly checkup and apparently the radioactive treatment I had in October has finally taken full effect.  So my sick symptoms could be caused by the fact that I am now officially hypothyroid.  I'm going on a new medicine for that starting tomorrow, so hopefully that will help bring me back up to feeling better in the next few weeks.

In other news, my brother made it to Florida okay and has now completed his first few days of working at Walt Disney World.  Yay!  So proud of him. If anyone would like to read his adventures about working as a Walt Disney World cast member, he has his own blog here.

But now onto stitching.

Things were slow on the January Challenge side of things, mostly because I got far enough into Swirly Lollipop that I wanted to hurry up and finish it.  So ta-da!  It's now done:

This is a chart from Dailycrossstitch.com and was done on 14 count white aida with the charted DMC threads.  I did modify a few of the stripes slightly and I made the lollipop stick only 1 row instead of two because I thought it looked better.  This is a project stitched for WOCS (World of Charity Stitching) and was started on January 3rd and finished on January 17 of this year.

Friday I decided I wanted to start something new since I have a bit more extra time on the weekends instead of working on a WIP.  So I pulled out this piece of fabric for a project I'm calling Butterfly Sampler:

As you can see I only got a stripe of 1 color of 45 stitches in.  By the time I tracked down and pulled all the colors, I was pretty tired from the long week and ready to go to bed.  This is a series of 4 freebie butterfly charts by Durene Jones that I'm stitching together as one piece.  I think it will look really neat when it's done.

Saturday was another new start.  This is Homegrown Melons from an old copy of the (US) magazine The Cross Stitcher.  Sadly, I'm not sure who the designer is.

My plan is to frame it and gift it to my mother, since watermelons were a large theme in our kitchen and house when I was growing up.  Right now I just have a few stripes of a pink blob, but I actually didn't want to work on this one too much because I ended up working on it when we got together to watch a movie Saturday night.

My project for Sunday was also a new start (noticing a theme?).  This is Britty Kitty stocking by Brittercup Designs.  I've gotten the crazy idea in my head to attempt to stitch stockings for my family over the next year, and these is the one I've chosen for myself.  I spent most of my stitching time on Sunday finishing up Swirly Lollipop so this actually didn't get much attention, but I got two rows of a tree branch done.

Monday's project was also a stocking; this one is called Tate's Stocking and is done by Raise the Roof Designs.  It's originally charted on a 20 count linen from Weeks Dye Works, but I don't particularly like working on linen because of the uneven weaving and slubs, so I swapped it out for a sparkle evenweave instead.  I then spent like 30 minutes (no kidding) on trying to decide to do it over 1 or 2 threads.  If over 1 thread, it will be slightly smaller than the other stockings I'm doing, but if over 2 it will be much, much bigger than the other stockings.  So in the end I decided to stitch it over 1 and just have this one turn out a little smaller.  I'm probably going to get flak for it later on from the person I'm giving it to, but oh well.  After all that time debating, I only had the energy to make the barest of starts on it:

After that I needed some mindless stitching, so since Swirly Lollipop is now done I moved onto Sweets for the Sweet for a bit more progress on the lettering.  That turned out to be a good thing because most of the night was spent stitching while having a massive discussion/argument with my aunt about getting scholarships for college and so the mindless stitching was nice to not have to think too much about:

Not sure what today's project will be yet.  Honestly, I was still pretty tired from being sick/not sick/whatever all weekend, so I didn't plan the rest of the challenge out all the way like I was thinking I might.  So we'll see what I pull out of the WIP or new pile when I get home tonight and see.