A Brief, Belated Farewell to 2020

 I know yearly summaries should be accomplished at the end of the year, but here we are, almost done with January, and I'm just now getting around to mine. I feel like time has turned into an express train and I keep waiting for it to stop. Oh well. I don't want to spend too much time going over everything I've done for the year, but I thought I'd mention a couple highlights, and document a few statistics since I like keeping track of those.

My big goal for 2020 was to stitch on all of my wips at least once. I didn't quite succeed, but it was so close, I'm considering it a success. My main reason for doing this was to reacquaint myself with all of them and figure out if any should be ufo'd or become more of a focus. I'm really glad I did that, because I did have a few surprises, and that has helped me rearrange some goals for this year.

I started 2020 with 66 wips (I think) and, after a bit of lockdown madness that started in April and somehow managed to reverberate through the rest of the year, I finished with 77 active wips, 2 finishes, and 6 ufos. Out of all these wips, there were only 3 that I wasn't able to stitch on, and 2 of those became ufos. So, pretty much a success.

Because of the quarantine, I was able to have a very good stitching year. My total stitches for 2020 came to 153,622. (I should mention, I do count tent stitches as 1 stitch.) I think this is my highest total yet. My total time came to 792.4 hours, and I managed to stitch 355 days for the year. Not too shabby.

While I would love to show you all the progress I made on each of my 77 wips, I know that's impossible for one post. But I would like to highlight a few favorites. First up, as always, is Luna:

I had really hoped to finish off the row for the year, but that just didn't happen. But I did manage to add 20,500 stitches to this beauty, so she wasn't too neglected. She's still a focus piece for 2021, so we'll see if I can make up for my lack of progress.

Next is Elizabeth Oliver by Moira Blackburn, I've decided to gift this to my mother this May, which means I need to hurry up and finish her. I'm definitely getting closer:

I've really enjoyed stitching on this one, and I'll miss her when she's done. For the year, I put in 14,899 stitches. Yes, she really is big.

My New Year's start actually became one of my favorites as well, even though I'm only stitching the carpet at the moment. I've loved this image for so long, that may be part of the reason. This is absolute confetti with blended threads, but it's hard to put her down once I've started. This is The Fireplace, art by James Tissot, chart by Golden Kite. (Please excuse the messy threads and terrible lighting):

I've nicknamed this one Sofie, as sort of an homage to Georgette Heyer and her book The Grand Sophy. (My Sofie looks pretty grand too, right?) I wish I had picked this one up a few more times, but I'm glad I got as much progress as I did. Total stitches so far is 8872.

Last, I will show what is probably my oldest wip, Kabuki from Mystic Stitch. I spent a few months watching all of Kim Hollenback's flosstube videos, and she really inspired me to try to make more progress on at least some of my full coverage wips. To that end, I challenged myself to work on Kabuki for 30 days straight with the goal of at least 50 stitches per day. It's not a lot, but it's more than nothing:

I did my 30 day challenge from mid November through mid December, so she got a total of 53 days progress. I managed 2909 stitches in those 30 days, and 6270 for the year. I was really surprised at how much I've enjoyed working on her, as this is a pretty difficult chart. But it was hard to put her down at the end of those 30 days. I've actually picked her up again this month, but that will have to wait for another update.

Hopefully, I can get back on track this year with my updates. (If I can tear myself away from stitching to do so.) Wishing you all the best for 2021. Happy stiching!

March Update

Well, 2020 is definitely becoming an interesting year. Hi all! Hope all of you are well and hale and avoiding all the craziness. I had hoped to update sooner, but things have been hectic, and I'm pretty sure I had the flu last week. (Just the flu, thank you.) Here in Kansas City, we're about to go on city shut down mode this Tuesday. Unfortunately, since I work for a branch of the government the brings in revenue -- especially this time of year -- I am still on the job. So no quarantine stitching for me! (dang it) Of course, that may be subject to change in the next couple weeks. We'll see.

So, stitching! First I'll show off my new Leap Day start, which I'd been looking forward to for a couple months. This is, of course, Ann Tong Uffindell from Hands Across the Sea. I started in the bottom right corner and managed to finish a good chunk of the border (love all those fiddly details) and started on that big chunk of stylized grass:

I decided to be brave and stitch this on 46ct Parchment by Weeks Dye Works using Au Ver A Soie 100/3 silks. 46ct Zweigart really isn't much different than 40ct, so I'm really loving the tiny stitches. The silks took quite a while to get used to though, and I still can't really say I like them, but I don't mind finishing the project with them.

The color palette is a little different than the regular AVAS, but I'm okay with it. However, this silk tangles really easily, and it has a preferred direction: pull of the spool, cut the end, thread the end you just cut. If you do the reverse, it will fight you. I've already had to cut out a few knots, and I'm usually very good at untangling those. But this silk is very round and slippery, so a blunt tapestry needle just isn't up to the task. It's a little bit thinner than DMC, but the coverage is still pretty good. I had a problem at first with the thread constantly slipping out of my needle, but I've learned to keep a good grip on it. Like I said, a lot to get used to.

After Ann, I sort of broke away from my rotation and did some stress stitching. I wasn't feeling well, and the news was a bit overwhelming, so I picked up The Fireplace (aka Sofie) from Golden Kite and just stitched:

What I love about this project is the way it just consumes me. This is kind of true for a lot of full coverage stitching, but when working on all this confetti in the diagonal style, all I can focus on is making the next stitch, park the thread, make the next stitch, etc. It's perfect for tuning everything out. I spent 6 days on her and added about 1100 stitches, so she's up to just over 3300 so far. I also really like seeing all the designs in the carpet come to life. Just wish I could stitch faster. :)

I also made time for the February release of the Wonders of Space SAL by Climbing Goat Designs. This month was part of the Eagle Nebula, which is one of Hubble's most famous images:

To be honest, the colors used in this were pretty crazy. I had red, brown, burgundy, tan and aqua all right next to each other and thought it looked horrible. But stepping back on the finished image, it's really quite perfect. I'm almost done with the March block and looking forward to the next release already.

Finally, I made it back to my rotation to work on Kabuki, though it was tempting to keep working on Sofie. But I'm glad I made the switch:

I'm still about 6 hours off from finishing the row, but at least I got page 7 done. I'm still amazed at how well the colors blend together at a distance. Up close, it's all purple and tan and pink and gray. I may rearrange my plans and bring her out again next month. We'll see.

So that's it for the last 3 weeks. I can't believe March is almost over! Be safe everyone. Until next time!

January Blahs

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a good start to the new year. (Although Australia is on everyone's mind, and it's really terrible.) My stitching feels like it's off to a slow start this year, probably because I'm getting over holiday vacation blahs and trying to get used to working again. But I'll go over what I've done so far.

First off is my 12 Days of Christmas by Jim Shore. I managed to finish the stitching on 4 Calling Birds, and it turned out pretty nicely:

I was really happy with how my french knot turned out in the bird's eye:

The flowers were kind of fiddly, but I do think they're pretty. And of course, everything will be better once the beads are in. So here's a look at the piece so far:

And that's my start on 5 Gold Rings. I'd hoped to be a bit further along than this, but I had a major frogging incident on my first ring (about 100 stitches) and I missed a couple days of my rotation just from being too busy with holiday stuff. But hopefully #5 won't take too long. My goal is to finish 5 and 6 this year.

Next is my New Year's new start, although this one didn't exactly go as planned. I guess I'm out of practice with new starts? :) I had originally planned on starting the Village of Hawk Run Hollow, from Carriage House. It's been on my list for several years, but little things keep setting me back. Meanwhile, I'd been prepping another huge Golden Kite piece for several months (like the 6 I've got going isn't enough) and couldn't keep from starting it any longer. So here she is! This one's called The Fireplace, artwork by James Tissot:

Tissot is one of my most favorite artists. I saw this chart about 5 years ago and thought it was too big to do. I bought the chart anyway about 2 years ago. And now I've started her. This one is 562x849, 156 pages total. I started at the bottom right corner on 18ct Aida using my diagonal stitching method, which is slow, but a great method for heavy confetti. It doesn't look like much since I'm just stitching carpet, but I'm excited to see the different bands in the design appear. (I'm working on filling in the first red band now.) I've stitched 1180 stitches so far, and would love to keep working on this. But, I'll be moving along in my rotation, so I don't know when this will be out again. (sad face)

Last week, I spent my mornings working on Angel of Grace, but I only made minimal progress, probably because I kept oversleeping. Still, it's a start on her lower skirts. I'm hoping to fill in the ruffles this year:

I am happy to have the last bits of garland done on her skirt. Most of the stitching is pretty simple blocks, which hopefully won't take too long (if I can actually devote some time to her).

Last is a project I started this year to help me work on all of my wips at least once this year. I'm calling it "No Wip Left Behind." Each week, I'm pulling out a wip that otherwise wouldn't fit into my rotation to work on it for at least an hour (hopefully). First up was one I hadn't touched since January 2014. This is Tea Party, another from Golden Kite:

In all honesty, I thought this would be a give up. I stopped working on this one because I wasn't happy with the detail in the wallpaper. When I first started this, I thought I would be a little more realistic and go with the smaller version, but that strategy seemed to backfire since I became really unhappy with it and put it down. Now though, I'm thinking I need to stitch on it a bit more before I can really decide if I want to stop, because looking at it again has made me really happy, and working on it was unexpectedly fun. In fact, I managed to finish off page 2 (first page finish of the year!) and would like to finish the page beneath it. Now I'm thinking I need to reorganize my rotation (again) and fit this in. Ah, dilemmas, dilemmas...

Well, I think that's all for now. My first post of the year and I'm already super rambly. I'm trying to get back to posting on Instagram again (@impstitcher) so you can follow me there if you'd like more pictures with less rambling. I'm still not good with social media though, so we'll see how it goes. Okay, back to stitching. Until next time!