It has begun!

Last week I tried to continue on with Night Wish and I started strong on Monday with progress, but then I didn't stitch for the rest of the week. Let's get the progress out of the way, and then I'll explain. I left off here last time:

Even though it doesn't look like much, it was all the Petit Treasure Braid on this one side, as well as the rest of the final touches around her face. It was definitely a lot of work for one night, even if it doesn't look it:

I don't really even have a good excuse. Although I finished watching Castle and it was OK (I can at least say I've seen it), I was not oblivious to the number of Firefly references throughout that show, it became like my Hidden Mickey game in Once Upon A Time. But it also meant that it put in me in a Firefly mood, and Firefly, well, let's just say that Firefly is one of my obsession shows that takes over for quite some time and it's a hard pit to dig myself out of once I'm in it. Like any other of these obsession fits of mine, I will just have to let it run its course, but it may be a long one, so I've just accepted it and am dealing the best I can. Hey, it could be worse, it could be Twilight, right? I might not want to give myself any ideas, so I'm going to change the subject now.

By Friday, I was able to scroll rod up the fabric for the new projects (at least some of them, still waiting on some supplies to come in), and by Saturday morning, I started my first project! I went for the US version of the Harry Potter Bookcovers (in case you don't remember, it looks like this:

So I started with a blank slate (and more on the fabric and the gridding on the gridded fabric in a minute):

I had a little trouble focusing on Saturday, because I had to catch up on some of my YouTube stuff, I'm more than a bit behind on all the channels I watch (and I was still going back and forth between that and Firefly, god help me when I start watching reactors reacting to Firefly), so I only stitched about 6 hours (not great for a weekend):

but I got in a good solid 8 hours of stitching on Sunday, so I almost finished the first page (but that's not saying much and I'll explain more on that, again, in a minute):

First up, the magic guide fabric. You will notice that I did add grid lines myself. Until I get used to the magic guide, I thought it was for the best. Up close, the magic guide covers a row of stitches and, as long as you plan it out, you can work out in your brain where to start and where your block is, but until my brain figures that out on it's own, I needed a bit of help.

It's way easier than griding yourself beccause there was no counting involved and now I feel a bit spoiled (I spent several hours Friday night griding up the first row of both Evil Queen and Merida because they were on non-grided fabric, so I had to count it out and count it twice, the joys of OCD). If the fabric itself works out nice, I can see myself using this for all future projects! I decided to go with top and far left for my grids on this, and it's working out well. I initially only gridded the first page of HP, but I went ahead and moved into the second because it's pretty easy and I'm not ready to do it myself yet.

The other snag is the pattern itself. I don't know about most people, but I tend to stitch like I read, left to right, top to bottom. There are some notable exceptions, but as a general rule, that works best for me. This pattern, the top row of pages is technically the last row of pages. Here is the page chart map:

So even though it looks like I'm breezing through the first row, it's not even a full row because it's the partial bottom row. It's SUPER weird. And, of all my new WIPs, it's not the only one to be arranged in a non-standardized (left to right, top to bottom) pattern arrangement. There are more than a couple, each with a different arrangement. I don't get the logic in it, and I'm not a fan, but oh well, it is what it is.

I wanted to start all these new WIPs in the month of February for Leap Year, but I don't think that's going to be possible since it's already almost the end of the month, unless I start switching them daily. I'm really enjoying Harry Potter, and I want to keep working on it for now. To be honest, I thought this one was going to be WAY more difficult than it is. When I first saw this, it was somewhere on a Reddit post (I don't have a Reddit account, but it was just something I came across while looking for HP patterns) and I remember the poster saying it was the hardest pattern she had ever done and had taken her years, even though she was an experienced stitcher. I'm pretty sure I got the same version as her, the super-sized version, and I used her post to find the pattern in the first place from Fox and Teacup Designs. I know I'm using a smaller fabric ct (I'm using 28ct and I think she was using like 12 or 14ct), but that's the only difference I know of, and that usually doesn't make something more difficult if it's what you're used to (12 or 14 would make it more difficult for me, but for someone else, 28ct might be harder). If I focused steadily on this, I think I could finish it in a couple of months (but obviously I'm not going to do that) and the chart is VERY easy to follow. I'm a bit confused now on what the difficulty was. I'm starting to wonder if I got the wrong pattern or something. Oh well, again, I'm not going to complain about it. It was an older Reddit post and since I don't have an account, I could only follow the string so far down before it blocked me anyway.

The other issue, one you can't see, is that in the actual pattern I printed off, J.K. Rowling's name is at the bottom of the books and looks like this (not the image you see above):

I got two patterns when I bought it and I didn't understand that one of them had her name at the bottom and one didn't (although the "unnamed" version should have been my first clue...I just figured it out when typing up this post, I can be pretty thick sometimes). I just printed one at random (which happened to be the one with her name). I've been trying to figure out how to stitch her name out this entire time and whether or not I should. Now, considering it's just one row of pages, it's an easy fix because I just need to print off that row instead of a whole new pattern. Easy fix or not, it's still a question of "should I?" because, despite the obvious reasons of her personal views (which I do NOT agree with), she is still the author of the books and these are her bookcovers, US versions or not and I like true representations of things. Like a lot of HP fans, I've chosen to give up on her and not the franchise, but I think this is kind of a special case. I'm not sure I feel comfortable with her name at the bottom of my project to be honest, true representation or not. So I'm at a weird cross roads. At least I have a choice now, so I think I might print the extra row and make the decision when I get there. Maybe things could change by then.

Next week will see if I've moved on to another or if I'm still in Harry Potter world (although technically, I do have two new HP projects in my new WIPs, so we'll see), so have a good week everyone and aim to misbehave!