Back From a Break

Hello! It’s been longer than I thought since my last update. I’d been away attending a wedding, followed by related ceremonies and functions (which spanned days, with breaks in between.) This is the same function for which I’d added a tassel fringe to the saree I’d intended to wear. I quite enjoyed wearing sarees and all of the other apparel, and had a lot of fun with kith and kin.

Now that I’ve been back, I’ve not fully resumed all of my regular crafty projects. We spent some time ‘resetting’ from our travel–washing, cleaning, resting–and in between all of that, I made a bit of progress here and a bit there.

2024 SAL by Cliffside Stitches

I do like how this one’s turning out. It’s been a while since I stitched a band sampler, and it feels weird, but it’s growing on me with every new band.

I’d apparently miscalculated the stitch gauge, but thankfully, I over-estimated the fabric requirement, and now I have a lot of space around my stitching. That’s good, because I’m combining cross-stitch and blackwork again, and the SAL creator has advised that though the all-cross-stitch and all-blackwork band versions will end up being the height that is indicated in the project, any combination of the two might not, since the individual band heights for a given week’s cross-stitch and blackwork vary often. So I now have a lot of buffer to account for that!

If I’d been struggling to keep up with this SAL earlier, I’m definitely lagging behind now! :-p My next band, a cross-stitch one, uses a different set of colors. I’m hoping to have the cross-stitch bands make a gradient using whatever colors of floss I own. Fingers crossed it turns out okay.

Dynamic Squares Throws by Susan Heyn

Only 4 of 16 squares remain! Given the amount of free time I’ve had over the past few weeks, this is the most crocheting I’ve done! Do you notice something different in one of these groups though-

It turns out somewhere along the line, I mixed up the ordering of the middle colors, the white and the blue. (The bottom group differs from the other two.) I’d already crocheted a couple of mixed-up squares before I realized this, so I decided to just continue that way and crochet an equal number of each ordering.

I’m done crocheting all 8 squares with the ‘correct’ order, so now I’ll need to be very careful now and crochet the remaining 4 in the ‘wrong’ order. It’ll probably be hard to recover from any mistake with this remaining set.

Other projects

I’m also working on the Fox and Rabbit 2022 MSAL, and will show a before/after picture pair as usual when I complete stitching all 4 sides of the design with my current color.

I’m also thinking about my first quilting project, and I’m deciding between making a large project (e.g. a wall hanging) that might be easier to stitch but not have many places where it’ll be used, or a small project (e.g. placemats or large coasters) that might be a bit more challenging to stitch but end up being used. Any thoughts on what you’d pick?