Weekly Update-Slow Stitch Week

I'm not sure if I just wasn't feeling it, or because I was setting up for the new starts, but I had very little stitch progress this week, really only stitching on Saturday and Sunday, and even Sunday was a bit of a bust. I didn't touch Everest at all. I'm not sure why. But I did move on to Happy Haunts by Neni Designs (and I'm not that's still even her store name anymore, she changes it like every five minutes). This has always been one of my least favorites and now, I'm not sure why. I did OK on it this weekend, all things considered. I did have to reload it in Markup-RXP, again, not sure why I didn't do it right the first time, but a lot of symbols and colors were missing. Then, I had to remark off all the progress so far.

This was a project I haven't touched since 12-31-2023, again, probably because I hated it. The colored patterns are just too hard to work from and I really don't like 18ct Aida anymore. I really should have done this on 28ct, but I think my logic was the design is a bit pixelated, it needed to stay that way, so it was better on a bigger fabric (or at least that's all I can come up with for my 2017 brain). I had previously stopped at 28,862/62775 stitches which was 45.98% and 165.03 hrs.

This weekend, I made it up to 30,813/62775 (another 1951 stitches) or 49.08% and 177.83 hrs (another 12.8 hrs, most of which was Saturday). The Hatbox Ghost and the head of the Opera Singer is really starting to pop. I also changed out the needle minder from one of my new ones from MadForMinders. It is more of a Disneyland Haunted Mansion pattern rather than Disney World (the Haunted Mansion store at Disney World is named Memento Mori), but I'm OK with it.

I have gotten most of the new projects put on their respective scroll rods. I'm still waiting on two more scroll rods (for A Discovery of Witches and Hook, part deux) as well as the modification hardware to my stand. All the fabric is gridded up though (I still have to draw grid marks on gridded fabric to make sure I hit the lines the same since the pre-grids actually cover an entire row and column of blocks, but the pregridding saves me all the counting). I'm also having issues with storage (shock...lack of room in my house for more "stuff"). In this pic I have the Aimee Stewart Bookshelf just hanging from the wall, but I have since taken the big projects and put them in another gray bucket in the floor. But here is what the situation looked like at least until Thursday:

Speaking of Aimee Stewart, I finally broke down and emailed Michele at HAED about seeing if Rio could be charted up completely. I have the one that HAED released already even though it's not typically my type of chart:

But what most people don't know is that the full image also has Duran Duran in it! It was something Aimee did for a contest or something. Even finding images of the full image on the internet is hard and, although I have it in a file somewhere, I don't feel comfortable posting it here because I'm not sure about copyright issues. I planned on just charting it myself (as long as I don't sell or share it, that's OK, right?), but if I could get HAED to do it, all the better. Michele also said that, if Aimee agrees to having it licensed, it would be the full cost of a custom chart (which is $125), but I'm cool with that considering the subject matter. If I could get it in a max color chart (not sure if I want it super-sized, have to consider that), it would totally be worth it to have a professionally charted Duran Duran pic! We're still waiting to hear back from Aimee, so I'll either be starting another project soon, or I'll chart it up myself at some point in the future (when I rebuy some charting software...plus, I won't have to worry about dithering if I do it myself, although I'm now wondering if I can request a non-dithered pattern from HAED with the custom stuff). I'm probably getting ahead of myself on this idea, but whatever. I did not, however, ask Michele about Tudor Rose by Jasmine Becket Griffith. I still think it will appear eventually.

I also cleaned out more stuff from the Duckroom. My therapy Zoom session last week was me walking her through my house, and I'm still not "calmed down" from the process. I don't like being judged for my stuff (although the judgement is probably all in my head). Like I always say, there is a thin line between OCD and hoarding. So, since I've been so anxious about it, Friday night I got rid of all my Magic Band boxes (yes, I even keep empty boxes, so sad!). I tried to get rid of the external boxes for the Funko Marvel sets that togther make a display (the cardboard boxes, not the actual Funko boxes, those I'll keep forever), but I couldn't do it. My logic is that the cardboard is protecting the empty Funko boxes (flimsy, but it's the way my brain works). I found some old Christmas bags and, since I don't participate in Christmas anymore, I was able to get rid of quite a bit of them, well, the ones that weren't Disney. I even had an empty box from a Blu-Ray player two Blu-Ray players ago! Needless to say, it was still enough stuff to fill a giantic-sized garbage bag. Now, I just have to actually take the bag outside and put it in the can. I might be better bringing it to work and putting it in the dumpster. Work trash gets picked up every day. Knowing that stuff is sitting in my can till Friday might mean I dig it all back out again.

I've put The Bride Dollmaker in my stand to jump back into tonight. I barely touched this when I started stitching again, so let's see if I can do a bit better. But then again, I'm starting to think I might start one of the smaller new starts. We'll see when I get home. So, until next week, that's this update!