March Review and April Goals

Hi everyone,

So this was the first month I fell out of the wagon, and it wasn't only on my stitching, unfortunately, I've been failing on my slimming goals too, although I keep going to the gym almost every single day, I stopped loosing weight on the past 2 weeks and I put on some inches last week... and this week doesn't seem that it's going to be better, so I definitely need a new month to get into a new start, and I only posted 2 times throughout March... not good, not good at all.

So what were my goals for March:

Realistic goals:
     - Start/ Complete and Finish my Spring Project for the EmeraldIsle Cross Stitch group Exchange
     - Complete the second page of QS Butterfly
     - Stitch 1.5 columns of pages 3/5[partial page - just 2 lines] of QS Believe

Dreamworld goals:
     - Stitch 50% of pages 3/5
     - Complete pages 3/5

I was only able to complete the 1st goal... and failed miserably on all others as I didn't put a single stitch on QS Believe during March...

This being said my goals for April are:

Stitch Wise - 
Realistic Goals:
       - Complete the 2nd page of QS Butterfly
       - Start January of the Garden Journal Collection (Friendly Stitchers Yahoo group Travelling Pattern) as soon as I receive it.
       - Complete January chart
       - Start the Mail Art Envelope for my Mother, for Mother's day in Portugal (1st Sunday of May)
       - Complete the Mail Art Envelope
       - Finish the Mail Art Envelope

Dreamworld Goals:
       - Stitch 50% of pages 3/5[partial page - just 2 lines] of QS Believe
       - Complete pages 3/5 of Qs Believe

Slimming Wise - 
       - Go to at least 1 class at the gym everyday from Monday to Friday
       - Keep the Food Diary
       - Drink 2L water everyday
       - Not fall into temptation food wise as often.
       - Loose at least 3Kg
       - Go down another 10inches in total.

And because a proper post should have at least 1 piccie, I'm sharing with you my idea for the Mail Art Project, I've used the Joan Elliot "Mum cards" that are on her book and adjusted them for the envelope shape, the lines are just for guidance to know where I'll have to fold it when I'm assembling it.

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches,
Sara

Better late than never.... WIPocalypse and Turtle Trot

Hi everyone,

I've been wee busy with work so my stitching time was reduced drastically until now... But I've been stitching (and stashing as you will see) whenever I get a few minutes free.

Since the begining of this month I've focuses on my exchange project so there will be no pictures of it (for obvious reasons) until the person receives it :) I can say I'm now nearly finished with the stitching part and then just have to decide how I'm going to actually finish it.

Since last Turtle Trot and WIPocalypse the only project I stitched apart from the exchange project was QS Butterfly.
And this was how it looked before the WIPocalypse, had a bit less done during the Turtle Trot.

Before:

15.02.2014

 And this is how it is now:

01.03.2014

As I said I might not have stitched much but I've definitely been stashing and received the 2 big orders I had placed at the beginning of the month :) I got some extra money that I wasn't counting at all so my sweet other half pushed me to spend it with me and with my "addiction" and so this was what I received:

1st package coming from UK:

 5 Fat Quarter white 28ct Lugana, 1 thread snipper and 250 plastic bobbins (for my second package)

And the reason why I needed so many plastic bobbins - My 2nd package coming from USA and that arrived yesterday:

 All the DMC threads I was missing to have a full set of DMC (it's not totally full as I missed 3 threads... but it's now only 3 threads rather than 175+ I was missing before)

And this was what I spent my entire day yesterday and half day today doing:

Getting the threads on the bobbins and on their boxes :) I'm so happy with it :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches
Sara

February Review and March Goals

Hi everyone,

Hope you're all well and enjoying some stitchin time. First of all I want to thank you all for the get well wishes, I'm definitly much better than what I was and I'm almost cough free :)

Another month has ended.... is it just me or with every year the time seems to fly even faster? And with another month ended is time for the balance and I have two celebrate - 2 months, 2 times I reach my realistic goals... not bad (Ok I admit that I'm making then a bit easier, but it works better to my ego and motivation this way) so going back a month these were my goals:

Realistic Goals:

- Finish the Birth Sampler (preferably before the 10th of February to have time to frame it before visiting my brother and his family)- Stitch 600 stitches on QS Believe
Dreamworld goals:- Complete the partial page on QS Believe- Stitch 100 stitches on QS Bookend Kitties

As I said I was able to complete bith realistic goals:

Finish the birth sampler:

After - Lickle Teddy - 11.02.2014 (Finished)

Stitch 600 stitches on QS Believe - I was actually able to stitch 1600+ stitches on it and was relatively close to achieve the dreamworld goal of completing the 2nd page:

Before - 01.02.2014

After - 01.03.2014 [no stitches done today]

01.03.2014 - Close-up

Overall I'm really pleased with my progress throughout the month :)

Now what am I planning to stitch for March:

Realistic goals:
     - Start/ Complete and Finish my Spring Project for the EmeraldIsle Cross Stitch group Exchange
     - Complete the second page of QS Butterfly
     - Stitch 1.5 columns of pages 3/5[partial page - just 2 lines] of QS Believe

Dreamworld goals:
     - Stitch 50% of pages 3/5
     - Complete pages 3/5

Now is just fingers crossed for me to be a good girl during the month, and to keep stitching :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches,
Sara

February IHSW Report :)

Hi everyone,

So as a true addict I had to join to IHSW (even with this nasty cough I've been having that's making me cough non stop every 5 minutes...) afterall if there's a good excuse to spend all day stitching why not take advantage of it right :)

I've been stitching on QS Believe, this is the project I'm focussing on now; it's going to be my 2nd project of each month (to be worked on the last two weeks of the month) until it's finished.

So this is how it was on my last post:

HAED - QS Believe - 14.02.2014

 And this is how it is now :)

HAED - QS Believe - 24.02.2014

During the IHSW I was able to put in 750 stitches on it  that's nearly the entire column that I'm stitching now. I'm hoping to have the page complete by the end of the week... as now it's mainly blocks of colours to stitch it should be faster :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches,

Sara

February Wipocalypse Post

Hi everyone,

This as due yesterday but I forgot :) So before I forget to post it again tonight here it is the post for this month WIPocalypse.

And this month topic is:

"How many projects do you generally feel comfortable having in progress at a time?  Tell us about your one-at-a-time or rotation habits!"

At the moment I have way more WIPs than what I would like to and so, it's with great sorry that some of them became UFO's but this year is the year that I'm getting back into the wagon and hopefully I'll have my ideal number of WIPs in progress at the time that is 4. I'm not good at one-at-a-time, proof of that was my disapearance last year... If I stick to a project for too long I reach a point where I no longer have the same satisfaction in stitching it as I had in the beginning and I'll simply stop stitching, so for me 4 is the ideal number as that way I can rotate between two projects a month, giving one month interval before getting back to it, which makes it to be enough time to rest and that way I'll enjoy stitching it more when I get back to it :)

For now I'm actually keeping a rotation of 2 projects a month (2 weeks in each more or less) and I'm actually enjoying it this way :) - So I guess I'll keep it this way while I can :)

As per my progress since last month, I'll let the piccies talk for themselves:


No 1 - was already finished by last WIPocalypse so I'm not showing piccies of it.

 2 - Lickle Teddy Bit Sleepy

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

01.01.2014

How it is now:

Finished on 11.02.2013

3 - QS Believe

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - 01.01.2014 and 17.01.2014

How it is now:

14.02.2014

4 - No Words Needed

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

5 - Dragon Fae I

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

6 - QS Bookend Kitie

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

7 - SK Treasures

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

8 - Touch of Spring

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

9 - British Scene

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

10 - Culinary Cats

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

 11 - Sweet Flower

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

12 - Close up of a Pink Rose

As it was on 1st WIPocalypse:

Before - as of 01.01.2014

How it is now: - No progress

Thanks for stopping by,

Happy Stitches,

Sara

Stitching Update - Turtle Trot and 2nd Finish YAYYYYY

Hi everyone,

I've been wee busy at work this past two weeks so my stitching time got reduced to 1/4 of  the time I usually have. So I've been away from reading blogs and posting as I was focusing all my free time to actually do some stitching.

Yesterday was the 2nd Turtle Trot of the year - I haven't stitched on any of the projects I have listed for it so there's no progress to show :(.... but the good news is that tonight I'll actually be stitching on one of the projects as I'm now going to focus on QS Believe until it's finished....

.... and the reason why I can finally stitch on QS Believe is ....

Lickle Teddy - Birth Sampler - Finished 11/02/2014

Yesssss..... That's right the Birth Sampler is finally finished, it's now drying and tomorrow I'll frame it, after I got over all the white it stitched really fast and because I stitched it over 2 I didn't hate the 1/2 stitches nor the backstitch, I actually enjoyed doing the backstitching and seeing it getting shape.

I'm really proud of it I designed the letters with the help of PCStitch and added them to the original chart of DMC - Lickle Teddy - A bit Sleeping to make it into the birth sampler.

And now some more piccies of some close-ups I took :)

Thanks for stopping by

January Review and Goals for February

Hi everyone,

Today is the 1st of February (gosh is it just me who feels time flied).
So it's time to do the balance for January and list my plans for February.

My realistic goals for January were:
- To complete the bear bars - Done

Before - 01.01.2014

After - Finished on 14.01.2014

And to reach 50% of the Lickle Teddy - A Bit Sleeping - When I stopped stitching yesterday evening I had 68.12% done (that is 5518 stitches out of 8100stitches).
And this is how it was looking, the bright pink of the body is complete, and I just have to finish the date and weight to finish the light purple. One interesting thing to notice is that both the name and date use the same thread, but the name looks totally different because of the bling gutterman thread added :)

Before - Licke Teddy - 01.01.2014

After - Lickle Teddy - 31.01.2014

I wasn't able to reach any of my dreamworld goals but to be honest I never believed I would be able to achieve them, I'm happy to have them there just to try and achieve a bit more as I did this month.

Now as for my February Goals:

Realistic Goals:
- Finish the Birth Sampler (preferably before the 10th of February to have time to frame it before visiting my brother and his family)
- Stitch 600 stitches on QS Believe

Dreamworld goals:
- Complete the partial page on QS Believe
- Stitch 100 stitches on QS Bookend Kitties

Lets see if I'll be as good as I was this month :)

Thanks for stopping by
Happy Stitches
Sara

One more update on Lickle Teddy

Hi everyone,

So here I am again.... still stitching and still alive... :) And now it's official I've definitely been more active this month than in the past year (I only had 2 posts for 2013 :X) and I already have 10 for January alone :)

Anyway this isn't the topic of this post so move on and I'm really happy as I've finished the name on the sampler and I'm only 200 stitches away of completing all my realistic goals for January (not bad hein) and considering there are still 4 days to stitch (as I have counted the ones done today yet) I'm almost positive I'll make it :)

And because if you've been checking my previous post your probably curious about how the name turned up with the bling. I'll shut up now and move to the good part :)

The full name stitched

Close-up of the Capital E for the bling

and a really close-up of the capital E to show how the thread looks

Lickle Teddy - A bit Sleeping - 28.01.2014

And this final one is how it is at the moment as you can see I started stitching some more pink, that's going to be one of the teddy's foot.

Thanks for stopping by and for your comments :)
Happy Stitches
Sara

Progress Update on Lickle Teddy

Hi everyone,

I'm still here (Yayyy - haven't gone missing yet :)) and I've been stitching and today I finished the first colour on the birth sampler I'm making for my niece Lickle Teddy - A bit Sleeping.
And what does this means.... It means no more white to do and I can jump to somo colour (as I've actually done) at the top you can see the start on one letter. I must admit I did it even before I finished the white as I decided to do an experiment for the name and add some bling.
This is what I decided to do:

I have some really shinny gutermann that I want to use to replace the Kreinik on HAED (instead of Kreinik I use one thread of this + 1 thread of B5200 and I get the bling less the Kreinik hassle :) - win win situatuin) so I thought why not add it to the thread that goes for the name.... and so I did it...

And this was the result:

A couple of close-up piccies trying to show the bling (it's much prettier in real life)

And this is how it's looking now:

Lickle Teddy - 25/01/2013

(Sorry for the crappy light piccie - but the day wasn't that great for pictures) But in this one you can actually see all the antique white I've stitched.

So I've stitched 3099 out of 8100 stitches which makes 38.26% complete. Now I just have to stitch 12% more to complete both my realistic goals for January :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches

1st IHSW review

Hi everyone,

So as promised here is my update on my progress during IHSW, not as much as I would like but still I was able to put in 332 stitches on Lickle Teddy, so I guess it's better than nothing, considering that I had several other things to do for work that needed to be done by Monday 9.00am :).

And without further ado, here are the pictures of my progress, I'm also shareing the close-ups as it's hard to see the progress on the full piccies:

Before - 01.01.2014

Close up - 01.01.2014

After - 20.01.2014

Close up - After - 20.01.2014

Gorgeous Valentine's Give

Hi everyone,
Just wanted to share that Nancy at Vittorian Motto Sampler Shoppe is having a gorgeous giveaway for Vakentine's so if you want just click here to try your luck. And if you found it through me, please mention my name.

Hope you're all busy stitching :) I'll be posting again later with my IHSW result :)

Happy Stitches,

WIPocalypse

Hi everyone,

I apologize in advance for the long Post:

To help me be more active on blogland, this year I've decided to participate on WIPocalypse, and as I'm that commited I'm going to take part into the twist that Measi added, the discussion topic. So I'll start with the topic (as there is not much to share yet) and I'll go to the pictures after :)

And copy-pasted from Measi's blog: "This month’s topic is a proper one for the beginning of any adventure: Introduce yourself, your projects, and any goals you have for the year."

So about me: My name is Sara, and although my nick sounds Chinese, it doesn't have anything to do with it (and I don't have a clue if it's a Chinese word, if your curious I can explain the silliness of it in a future post :)) I'm 28 years old, and I'm from Portugal, but I've been living in Ireland for the past 5 years with my other-half (who I dragged from Portugal - we've been toghether for 10 years now :) ) I've learned how to cross-stitch when I was 6 or 7 and one or two years after I learned how to crochet and knit, but my passion is cross-stitch, I've stopped stitching on my early teens because it was "uncool" and then I grew-up and decided I no longer cared about what others think I wanted to stitch because I enjoyed it, my first Big project (or I thought it was a big project at the time) was the three witches of Booville and I enjoyed stitching it so much that I didn't put the needle down anymore. Since then I've stitched a variety of projects; if I had to choose I would say HAEDs are my favourites and probably antique samplers the less favourites. But I stitch anything :) I have a bunch of projects on the go now (I'll introduce them through the pictures as they are all part of WIPocalypse) and it's actually one of my goals for this year to reduce the amount of WIPs, other goals I have set for this year are, posting more here and comment more on all your lovely blogs, be more active on the stitching groups I belong to, and non-stitch related go to the gym at least 4 days but the plan is go 5 days, and get my weight down at least 10Kg until Summer and 15/20Kg by the end of the year. So this is me :)

Now as per my WIP projects, I'll decided that I'll be showing a picture of the "before" and "after" so that I can keep a monthly visual record of my progress, and I'll remove the ones completed and showed on previous months. So with no further ado:

1 - Teddy Bear's Bars for Bed Linen

Before - as of 01.01.2014

After - finished on 14.01.2014

 2 - Lickle Teddy Bit Sleepy

Before - as of 01.01.2014

3 - No Words Needed

Before - as of 01.01.2014

4 - Dragon Fae I

Before - as of 01.01.2014

5 - QS Believe

Before - as of 01.01.2014

6 - QS Bookend Kitie

Before - as of 01.01.2014

7 - SK Treasures

Before - as of 01.01.2014

8 - Touch of Spring

Before - as of 01.01.2014

9 - British Scene

Before - as of 01.01.2014

10 - Culinary Cats

Before - as of 01.01.2014

 11 - Sweet Flower

Before - as of 01.01.2014

12 - Close up of a Pink Rose

Before - as of 01.01.2014

Funny just realized I have one project for each month :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Happy Stitches
Sara