Sunday Stitching and TUSAL

I'm still trying to focus on Rainy Wedding, but it's been rough between work and Disney. I only managed two days worth of stitching this past week, and not a lot either day.

I left off here:

And finished here tonight:


On the TUSAL front, my poor jar didn't grow much either, but it somehow found its way beside my absolute favorite haul item from my Disneyland trip:

I adore anything Aurora with a blue dress and I literally had kittens when I saw this piece. It is only my third blue-dressed Aurora, but it's by far my absolute favorite.

I also managed to finish my Disneyland pictures. I ended up with 5600 keepers, although I debated tossing out the ones with my travelling companion in them. When all was said and done, I decided that as easy as it would be to remove him from the trip altogether, they are really good pictures, so until I just can't stand it anymore, they stay. Hopefully I will have some free time next week to post a few pictures.

Stitching & TUSAL

First, I'm late (again) on my ORT jar pic. I didn't buy a bunch of stuff at Disneyland, but the few things I did buy were really exciting, none more so than the Disneyland Haunted Mansion hearse...now I have a matching set!

Is it weird that I'm so excited over having matching hearses? Probably so, but I wear my weird badge stapled to my forehead, so it's not shocking.

Last week I set a goal for myself...to finish row 2 on Alice and the B's. Thankfully, about mid-day Saturday, I managed to accomplish it, confetti be damned! I left off here:

finished the row here at 361.42 hrs (which bothers me a bit because I have six more rows...this project is going to take a lifetime to finish!):

And the full two rows:

I even managed to do a bit more Saturday night:

But I also promised myself that when I finished the row, I would go back to Maleficent, which I did on Sunday. I left her off here back on July 1st at the row finish:

I had a rough day concentrating, but I did manage a bit of work:

As excited I was to get back to her, I had forgotten what a pain the confetti is. At this stage it's pretty easy, it's just the fill-in part that really sucks and I know that's next. I think that's why I had such a bad focused day (or at least I hope that was the reason). I'm not sure if I'm going to keep working her on this or not, but hopefully I'll be able to focus. I had a strong desire to work on Cinderella Castle again (for a reason I'll reveal later). Theoretically, I could actually finish it in a week if I compare its progress to that of Sleeping Beauty Castle, I'm just not sure I'm ready to dedicate a whole week to it, a prospective finish or not. We'll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

IHSW #1 and TUSAL

I had such high hopes for this weekend, but my heart just wasn't in it. For every hour of stitching, I probably did four hours of Disneyland studying. On a positive note, I got a ton of trip stuff done though, so it wasn't a total waste of a weekend. I only worked on Alice and the B's and I left off here:

And only made it to here by mid afternoon today (before I officially gave up the goat):

As you can tell, I was even too busy doing other things to pull the thread all the way through.

It's also TUSAL time. I keep pushing the threads in my ORT jar down and it looks like they haven't grown, but they definitely have. Since I had a specific path this weekend, my ORT jar pic reflects it:


I also discovered yet another stack of Disney movies I haven't watched yet and I forgot all about the TV shows, so I am not even close to being finished with my challenge. I was really hoping to be done with it, but alas, not quite yet. Maybe another week or two.

IHSW & TUSAL

For July's ORT jar pic, I went with a Muppet theme since that's the series I watched last that has been on mind the most. I don't have a lot of Muppet collectibles, but I do have a couple:


Stitching-wise, this weekend was a complete bust. Friday night was screwed because of work. Saturday I spent the day with my T-Boo and worked on his computer, so a really great day, but again, not a good stitching day. I did take Tartan B with me to his house, but it didn't make it out of my backpack. Sunday, I didn't have the mojo at all, but I did try. I started the day with Sleeping Beauty Castle and actually managed to finish it for a total of 56.37 hrs.

Forgive the pattern underneath, that's my ironing board cover. I'm still not happy with either the colors or the backstitching, but I'm hoping that when it's framed and hanging beside Cinderella Castle, I'll be able to see it in a better light.

I tried to work on Rainy Wedding, but I really didn't want to, so I only lasted about an hour. I left off here back in March:

And barely made a dent today:

I really hate vertically scrolled patterns. Even with a floor stand, they are uncomfortable. I'm thinking that, as soon as I empty the right size scroll rod set, I'm going to redo it in a horizontal format.

Then I tried to work on Alice and the B's, but again, my heart just wasn't in it. I left off here last time:

Although I did manage to get some done, it's still very hard to tell:

It's now at 246.67 hrs.

I took a break for a few hours, but the stack of WIPs was eating away at me. In a last ditch effort, I started Cinderella Castle at bit after 9 pm and got to here:


This has quite possibly been the absolute worst IHSW I've ever had. I did manage to clear off one WIP though, so it wasn't a total loss, but it now means I have four unframed finishes, three of which aren't even mounted. Ugh. And tomorrow means back to work...double ugh. I need a vacation.

April A to Z Challenge - Cross Stitch "S" x 2 & TUSAL

Project #1: Once Upon A Time

"S" is for the Genie/Magic Mirror/Sidney Glass (and he even pulls duty as the Troll Mirror from The Snow Queen fable).  Sidney is one of those characters that has multiple monikers throughout the series. Snow's father finds a Genie's bottle and releases him, but because the King is so content with his life, he uses one of his wishes to free the Genie and gives the other to the Genie to use as he sees fit.  Well, as per usual, magic corrupts and the Genie ends up falling in love with Regina who tricks him into killing the King.  Once the Genie discovers she had no intention of being with him, he uses his wish to "be with her always", but "magic always comes with a price" and he ends up trapped in her mirrors for all eternity.  Storybrooke Sidney, although out of his glass (but ironically that's his surname), still does Regina's every bidding, even though she burns him more than once.  He ends up locked up in her private asylum for a time (which is located beneath the Storybrooke hospital) until she needs him again (although it's once again behind the glass of a mirror), but he does finally get her back by switching sides and attempting to help the Snow Queen (hence his Troll Mirror status).

Project #2: Veronica Mars
"S" is for Sheriff Lamb, of which there are two...one from the show (who meets his untimely end) and his even more corrupt brother who takes over for him in the movie.  But we'll go with Don from the TV show for this square.  Despite his backbiting and dirty politics, I actually liked that Sheriff Lamb!  His banter with both Keith and Veronica were some of the best quips in the show!  I really don't think he was necessarily bad, he did take up for Veronica more than once (even if it was a bit on the down-low), but his brother was just a sleazy creep in the movie with no good qualities whatsoever.

And, as per my usual lately, I completely forgot about April's TUSAL, so here is my ORT jar pic for the month, buried in a sea of ducks:

March IHSW and TUSAL

Let's kill two birds with one stone here. First up, March's TUSAL pic for the month, hiding in "pen world":


We didn't go to see Cinderella this weekend because poor T-Boo was sick, so I had plenty of time to stitch. I started with Maleficent and I left off here:

started the weekend here:

and got to here:

It took 131.33 hrs to finish the row, a bit too much. Hopefully the next row will go quicker. Once I accepted the dithering (although I still don't like it), it did start to move quicker and I love the appearing forest (although I can't look at it too closely because I keep seeing the checkerboard). But hey, that's 7 pages down and 42 more to go and the next row has Maleficent's head, so exciting times ahead!

I also started a new project, a Once Upon A Time sampler from Cloudsfactory. I had trouble getting into it because I really wanted to start row 2 on Maleficent (but I held off), so this one also moved slow. After 4.65 hrs, I got this far:


Lastly, I decided to finish that pesky little eye on Rapunzel for Alice and the Bouguereau Princesses. I left off here:

and made it here for a total of 78.87 hrs:

She's still a little "ghost-like" creepy, but at least I'm close to moving on to the next princess, I just have to finish the right side of her head and then it's Aurora's turn.

I also did about 10 minutes of stitching on Rainy Wedding during Needle Club this week. Only one more week of video watching before we can get back to full on stitching. I left off here:

and, even though you probably can't tell too much of a difference, it's now here at 27.85 hrs:

And that's it for the weekend. I did get more done that I thought I would, so I'm pretty happy with the progress, despite the length of time it took.

Stitching

First up, I need to get February's TUSAL out of the way since it was due days ago:


And, although I didn't work on Alice and the B's this weekend, I did do a bit on them the first of the week. So it went from here:

to here (they are now at 75.23 hrs):


For this month's IHSW, I brought home Rainy Wedding and worked on it Friday and Saturday. It went from here:

to here (now at 27.35 hrs):


Sunday I spent working on Maleficent and I finally got the blue finished all the way across and was able to start on the next color. It went from here:

to here (now at 43.65 hrs):


It was kind of nice to spend a weekend NOT obsessing over Disneyland. But I gave in and ended up putting in the Veronica Mars DVD's...again. Makes for great stitching background but not so good for OCD control. It's probably the reason why I was able to control the Disneyland issue, I just refocused elsewhere.

January TUSAL 2015

ORT jar picture time. My poor little stitchy fragments don't look like much in this first month, mainly because both big projects are using the exact same colors to start off with, all of which are dark and gloomy (about like me lately). I decided to background them with my favorite Disney "collectibles" (aka toys) throughout this TUSAL year and considering the week I've had, I knew exactly the collectible of choice...my talking interactive Stitch which can turn on you at just the slightest turn of a phrase, going from good Stitch to evil experiment 626.



And since I'm in a "mood" today (not helped by the usual chronic migraine)...meega nala kweesta to a certain co-worker who insists on getting on my bad side. Feeboogoo yuuga toobaga (think I could manage the entire day just speaking in Tantalog?) I knew watching all those episodes of Lilo and Stitch for years would be good for something! Tukibowaba!

Stitching participation 2015 and a question

My head is still in the pain zone, but it's tolerable today. I tried to stitch last night on A Summer Ball and managed all of maybe 20 stitches, most of which were white, so it still looks like no progress. It was just too much for my throbbing brain to handle. But that's not the subject of this post.

Even though I kept an ORT jar last year, I didn't do the monthly posts of the TUSAL and I kind of missed doing it, so I signed up for it this year! For those that don't know what a TUSAL is, Daffycat has the full explanation HERE, but I'll try to give you a brief overview. Basically, you keep your thread scraps in a container and post pictures of how full your jar is on each new moon, tracking your progress throughout the year. I think there is a drawing involved as well, but since I never win anything, I don't worry much about that.

I was "reminiscing" through old ORT pictures this morning and ran across this gem from March 2013, around the time after I first adopted Bam:

Wonder if he'll be a willing model much this year? I know Zach won't, heck, he runs and hides when I'm taking my nightly cross stitch status pics, but I'm gonna try and trick him at least once.

Of course, if Joysze over at Random Ramblings decides to keep up with the International Hermit and Stitch Weekends, I'll definitely be involved in those as much as I can. They are typically the third weekend of every month (but pretty much every single one of my weekends is spent locked in the house stitching, so it's not that big a feat for me).

I somehow managed to miss pretty much every single WIP signup this year, something I've never done before but wanted to do this year. Oh well, guess I'm just stitching toward my goals again and hopefully I might actually complete one or two of them.

I do have a question for everyone. I notice that some of you keep track of how many actual stitches you've done and keep progress bars showing such. I do stitch in page rows but I do typically "cross country" stitch one color at a time. Despite my orderly OCD existence, I just can't do grid by grid stitching...to me it makes it boring. I have seen some people that stitch the same way I do and still manage keep track of their totals. I don't have the focus to count every single stitch and the only way I can imagine it would work out would be to go row by row, but since Maleficent is 6 1/2 pages across and Alice is 8 1/2, it will be a long time between updating stitch counts. I was thinking that, besides the hourly count, if I had progress bars and I knew how much I had left to go, it might help some projects go faster. I'm way too impatient to wait until I finish an entire row to post a stitch count though. Sometimes I might finish the first couple of pages before the last couple and I could post it then, but again, patience is not one of my virtues and that's a long time to wait to change progress bars. For those that keep count, how do you do it? Do you count individual stitches or are you just patient and wait until you have blocks finished? I'm really curious to know how you guys do it!