Stitching Thursday: January 26, 2017

Here's my progress on various and sundry things this past week:

I put about 900+ stitches into my Decorating the Wreath by Heaven and Earth Designs.  It now looks like this:

I watched a really helpful tutorial on YouTube by Pam of Pam's Crafty Corner about working a single color of thread cross-country per page, and the lightbulb went off for me, so I'm going to try working the remainder of the page in this fashion.  It seems to speed up the stitching (or at least it appears that way), since you aren't changing out colors and starting/stopping threads as much this way.  I figure it's worth a try to see if I can make some more focused progress on this piece.

I'm also thinking of switching up my rotation going forward in February, and making this my focus for a finish piece by working on it during Fri/Sat/Sun of every week, and then keeping the other 3 projects I've got going on a weekly rotation for the other 4 days.  It will mean those other projects won't potentially get finished as quickly, but it will mean I will finish this one up faster (that's my hope anyway!).  I'm going to give it a bit more thought, but I'm leaning towards that.

This week in my current rotation was time to work on The Drawn Thread's Winter Garden.  When I last worked on it, I had finished page 1 of 3 (with a bit more on page 4, but not a full page), and here's where I am on it currently (about halfway through page 2).  The center of the design is the middle of the red door (located over the word "winter" pictured below).

I'd thought I'd get through most of page 2 while it was out for rotation this week, but the house is taking a lot longer to complete than I thought it would, so likely that won't happen.  I'll have another day or two to work on it, but then it'll go away for another couple of weeks until I rotate back to it in February.

Next week part #2 of the Under the Sea SAL comes out on February 2nd, and this Friday the next clue in the Welcome mystery SAL will be released as well, so I'll have those to work on here in the short term.

Stitching Thursday: January 19, 2017

This week, I've been working on my Decorating the Wreath/Heaven and Earth Designs project.  I'm going to be switching up my weekly rotation a bit, as I've decided to participate in Terry/Stitching Petunia's challenge #2, and will be working on this full-coverage project a bit every week.  I calculated that I would need to work about 325 sts every week from now until the end of 2017 in order to have this project finished (which I really want to have happen!), so I'm going to put this in at the beginning of every week's rotation and try to stick to that.  I'll then work on whatever other project I have earmarked for rotation that week for the remaining days.

So... Decorating the Wreath now looks like this, and I'll be focusing on it for the rest of this week - thru Saturday.

Last week, I finished up the 2 clues that were released for the Tempting Tangles Welcome SAL, so that is caught up until the next clue releases in another week.  I'm loving the thistles!

I also finished up block #1 of the Village of Hawk Run Hollow, and I recharted the bits of block #2 I wanted to personalize, so I'll be ready to start that in February.

For next week, after I finish up my 325 +/- stitches on Decorating the Wreath, I'll pull out my Winter Garden piece from the Drawn Thread and put some time in on that one.  (Here's where I was when I put it away in December.)