NEW START: July Bear

I started to stitch the June Bear before I had all my eye surgeries.  I wasn't sure I would ever stitch again.  I could so I finished that Bear probably back in 2005 or 2006.  I really wanted to stitch all the month bears and use them as a calendar some how.  So . . . . even though I haven't finished any of my current projects I went ahead and started another one of these.  I picked which one I would do several months ago and I couldn't wait.  It's the July Bear (with the flag pole and the fireworks in metalic threads - yeah me!).  Below is the front and back cover of the booklet.  I think when this one is done I'd like to do the October bear next because it's just so cute.

 I've been working on it for just over 2 weeks and this is how much I've got done so far.  I'm not looking forward to the doing the metallic threads but now that I have some beeswax they might be easier to use.  I'm doing it on 14ct, 2x1 full, Silver Aida.  It's not a shiny silver just a dull gray/silver color.

Japanese Beauty #1 - update

So I've (almost) finished another page.  Everything is done on the page except a small section of hair that I'll wait to do when I do the top page.  That way there won't be a page line showing through the stitches.

(Almost) All my WIPs

Here's a picture of (almost) all my WIPs in one spot.  What's missing?  The Wild Thing Birth Annoucement that I gave up on in favor of the Traffic Sampler I did.  And my Chinese Symbol WIPs is composed of several smaller separate designs but I think of it as one WIP project.  I'm not in the middle of stitching one so that project wasn't included.

Sprial Fractal - update

It took a week but I was able to redo the greens and blue from the 2nd page and stitch the third page.  The bottom row of pages is now done.  The top three pages will be full pages as these ones were only about 3/4 of a page.  I'm glad I fixed this error and did another page but I'm setting this aside to work on other things in my ramshackle rotation.

My progress so far:

Crimson Omen update

I finished the first page of my Crimson Omen project.  All that dark blue was boring but it went quickly . . . just over 3 hockey games worth of stitching.  It's funny how I'm counting my stitching time in terms of hockey games.  Now that baseball season has started I might be counting time spent by innings instead of hours.

Here's my progress so far:

Crimson Omen - new start

I’ve had an idea to do a thank you gift for a friend after he did some very nice things to help me out over a year ago.  I got the perfect idea and just had to work out all the details before I could finally get started.  Skitzzzzz made up the chart for me and did a FANTASTIC job.  It’s the Crimson Omen from the Gears of War video game franchise.  I’m doing it on 25ct Aida in 2x1 tent stitches.  It will be 10x10 inches when done.

This is what it is suppose to look like:

This is what I’ve done in just over an hour of stitching (I had forgotten how fast tent stitching is).  I've got a few more reds to fill into that section which is the bottom right of the page.  The rest is all background color.:

After I'm done make this as a gift I just might have to make another one for me because I love the design and what skitzzzzz did with the pattern.  I have a few other images I'd like done that I'm sure I'll have skitzzzzz do for me again.

Sprial Fractal - negative progress

Some times negative progress is still progress. 

I had to unpick all the outer blue on this page because when I went to start the next page I realized my colors weren’t matching up.  That was because I didn’t stitch the darkest green on any of those spokes.  I put this project away for a couple of years because I was so disgusted with myself.  It’s been nagging me ever since. 

So for the last 2 days I’ve very carefully unpicked all of that blue.  I only nicked a small thread of the fabric once but not enough to make a hole.  Once I restitch over that it should be fine.  I also somehow picked up a purple thread in the small section on the bottom left part.  I decided to rip the whole single line of purple threads out even though I only caught 1 color and there was 2 or 3 in the line.  It was about 8 stitches so I don’t mind redoing those. 

This is another project I’d like to finish this year.  I think it will be my UFO project each month until it’s done.