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!