Stitchy Progress and New Stitching Challenge

Well, we made it through Mom's knee surgery and she came through okay, so hopefully things will be settling down soon.  In the meantime, I made progress on the next Lizzie Kate Round Robin piece.  This was the letters S and T from the ABCs of Aging Artfully:

I had to break it up into two pictures since the S was at the end of one line and the T on the beginning of another.  Actually, I was scheduled to stitch a little more than just these two letters, but since last month's Etsy RR piece (the sugar skull) took so much time, I ran out of time to finish my section of these completely.  Oh well!

My next up piece was the second round of the Etsy rotation, and I have to say this is a project I love.  It's Disney, so what can I say?  I've done Chicken Little, most of Aladdin (he's missing his hair), and started on Lady from Lady and the Tramp so far:

This is the piece that kept me from going crazy while waiting out the surgery in the hospital.  Just need to finish up those three then stitch Ariel and it will be onto a new home.  I'm not sure I like the red color of Lady's ears.  I always thought of them as more of a reddish brown, but in real life they really are like a dark red.  Other than that, this has been super fun to work on.  Funny story, I almost picked this same pattern as my Etsy piece for this round robin, so there's a good chance I will cave and purchase it later and you will see it again sometime.

So as you can see, most of my stitching so far this year has been round robin stuff.  I haven't really done much personal stitching since January.  Frankly, I've lost my stitchy bug a bit, and the only thing that's keeping me going some months is that the RR pieces are mandatory stitching (for lack of a better word).  Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy doing (most of) them, but the motivation comes more from a sense of obligation than anything else.  I find I love planning and picking projects, but I don't have a lot of finishes lately.  I have a bad case of start-itis for sure.

So I decided a stitching challenge might be what I need to get me out of the slump.  And being the crazy person that I am, I found two.  As you probably know, tomorrow is the start of the Summer 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.  The Olympics are one of the few sports I actually enjoy watching, so I look forward to them every couple years.  So when I found two Olympic challenges on Facebook, I knew it would be perfect.

The first is Stitchlympics hosted by the Cross Stitch It's Fun! Facebook group, and the second is the Summer Olympic Challenge hosted by the Stitch Maynia Facebook group.  Both groups have an individual stitching challenge for each day of the competition.  I'm going to try and combine daily challenges wherever possible.  Stitchlympics is a team competition, so hopefully I will do well and help bring my team to victory!

So along with wanting to stitch along with the challenges I'm going to try and keep up my blogging progress every few days as this goes along.  Wish me luck!  Tomorrow (the opening ceremonies) the challenge is to stitch for at least two hours, and for Stitch Maynia, to stitch on something blue.  I think I can come up with something that meets both of those.