Was this a bad week?

It's literally getting to where I can't tell anymore. I did find out that the trailer park people are going to charge WAY too much for new skirting and a new deck, so that's off the table. And the pups were both quiet this week, so I'm taking my ups on that front. Stitching-wise though, I did make a significant amount of progress...for the three days I stitched. I started one of the new WIP's on Tuesday, Amour et Vengeance by Dailen Ogden, charted by GeckoRouge.

Surprisingly, I got 4616 stitches done (out of 183,366) and made it to 2.52% done in just 15.45 hrs! Yeah, even I'm impressed by that, but it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm just stitching one color and it's all block. This pattern is dithered, I'm just not there yet. And, this is probably the first time ever I've focused on just one color at a time. I can't say it will last throughout the entire project, especially when I get out the "frame" area, but it's obviously working for me so far:

I was already waining last night and wanting to switch to something else (namely Belle of Bonaventure), but I'm not sure it will hold by tonight. I don't think any other project is going to give me this much progress this quickly. I still haven't gotten my new stand stuff (I need to check on that), so A Discovery of Witches still can't be started, but I still have two left to go, Kitchen Fun and Monet's Garden Path. Kitchen Fun is an easy kit, but the Yiota's kit is turning out to be more difficult than I initially anticipated. The chart is on an extra large size of legal paper, so I scanned it in and shrunk it, but then I realized that the shrunk version was too small to read. Markup-RXP didn't read it too well either, so I'm left with reading the original papers, but those are too big to work with as I stitch. They are way bigger than the whole project (even on the scroll rods). I guess I could always copy it on regular paper and run over a bit on the edges to make up the difference, but that's a whole lot of work with no guarantee it will do any better. I've put Garden Path by the wayside for now until my brain can get around the big paper.

I've been staying off of pattern sites and Etsy for needle minders, but I inadvertantly got a "craving" for a pattern (or a series of patterns, I should say), while watching FlossTube. There are a series of Hogwarts Library scenes for various Hogwarts Professors (Magonagall, Snape, Trelawney, Dumbledore and Lockhart...so far) and I'm trying hard to keep myself from buying them. They aren't cheap, $18 a piece, and I'm not sure how often the Cross Stitch Studio (the designer that has the best ones) has sales. There are actually a lot of people doing Snape's Library on FlossTube, but I saw one person doing Magonagall's and I liked it, so I went in search. When I examined all the patterns, I realized I like Dumbledore's the best, so that's probably what I'll start with if (or probably when) I get them. Here is what it is via the CCS website:

I've kept myself in check on these because: a) they are not small and I have enough big patterns to last five livetimes doing nothing but stitching; and b) I don't have the money to throw around for the pattern, let alone the fabric, MORE scroll rods, and even more thread. Ugh. Let's see how long I hold out (place your bets now)!