Category: Crazy January 2011 Challenge

Today I left a little later than I originally hoped, but I braved the rush and headed out to Ikea on the other side of Sydney … I love wandering around Ikea but absolutely detest the crowds that are inevitably present.  I still managed to pick up a few things that I wanted, though, including the main item I went for, a small TV cabinet, and a tall foldable clothes airer.  A new table lamp also jumped into the cart when I wasn’t looking!  As well as surviving Ikea, I also picked up a couple of items from Howard’s Storage, including a contraption that sits over your doors and allows you to hang coats etc off it … well, I couldn’t resist it, and it’s now proudly holding two scarves that Mum knitted for me, along with my cross stitch WIPs that are no longer gracing my Qsnaps – at least this way they’ll stay nice and flat and won’t require multiple ironing jobs (although the one on the top escaped the iron the first time round!!) … I also picked up a steamed pudding tin and a drinking bottle for when I get my fat carcass back into the gym this week …

After cooking up a big batch of brown rice for dinner and the freezer, I sat down in front of the electric fan and did a bit of stitching on my Day 9 project.  I had to laugh at one point, because my stitching reminded me of a stylized gherkin sitting on the fabric …

until I added a few more stitches and turned it into a stylized little hill 😉

It is, of course, the centre panel on the lady’s dress … but alas it will remain looking like a hill for quite some time …

I had a really bad night’s sleep with my throbbing leg (compliments of my buggered back), and ended up sleeping in later than I expected to today, which means I didn’t bother braving the traffic to go to Ikea today – I absolutely detest trying to find a carpark at that shopping centre, so I’ll go if I can leave early and arrive around opening time.  Seeing as I still felt a bit run over during the day, I spent the entire day sat up in bed in front of the electric fan with needle in hand with project #8 of the January challenge.  This is probably the first one I’ve been quite happy to put down after a number of hours working on it – the fabric is a standard Dimensions kit cardboard Aida, and doesn’t make the stitching particularly pleasurable (I should’ve tried washing it first, but didn’t think about that until it was too late!).  Anyway, here’s my progress from today:

After putting Tiger Reflections to one side, I started another new start, this one an old Christmas ornament by CCN called Winter’s Eve – hopefully I’ll get chance to finish this one over the next couple of days, as it’s relatively simple and easy stitching 🙂

And that’s it for me for the evening – time to get back into bed, although I can’t guarantee there’ll be much more stitching done this evening!

Alas, I didn’t get to sit down properly tonight until 10.30pm, after catching up some FB gameplay and cooking a big pot of “Dragon Curry” (not actually made of Dragons, but my Mum’s curry recipe).  The outcome is not much stitching done yet again tonight – and now it’s half past midnight so not much energy to post an update … alas this will therefore be another “fly-by” posting … and here’s tonight’s paltry progress:

I’m now on a 4-day break after requesting 2 RDOs next week, so I should get a bit more substantial stitching done during the next 4 days – although I have some other plans as well, including heading out to battle Ikea crowds on the other side of Sydney, starting going back to the gym on Monday to start some exercise therapy for my buggered back, and taking down the Christmas decorations.  All-in-all I’m looking forward to it! 😀

Well, I did manage to get a whole 1 1/2 lengths of floss into this one before I fell into a fitful sleep for the night … but at least I met the challenge … and now I’m running late to leave for work, so I’d better just shut up and post the piccie 😉

Before I started my Crazy January Challenge yesterday morning, I decided to locate some missing threads from previously kitted up projects, and making an inventory so I knew where they were when if I needed them again – this was in part due to the fact that I knew I had two skeins of NPI silk that were needed for The Goode Huswife chart in my challenge, and sure enough I found them hiding in the kit for Drawn Threads’ Three Friends design.  I now have a lovely Excel spreadsheet showing where each thread is located.  This has partly come about from when I was housesitting 3 years ago and had all my stash put into storage for 9 months – I kitted up many, many projects with the fabric already cut out and ready to go, and as many of the threads as possible, and they were placed in individual sealable plastic bags and then in boxes within easy reach of my storage unit … the idea was that all I had to do was put my hand into the box when I needed something to stitch, and just had to pull something out and start stitching!

Well, I’m ashamed to say that there are STILL 3 drawers full of those projects (plus the equivalent of another drawer that is out and about in my room awaiting stitching), not to mention all the new ones I’ve since kitted up since moving to Sydney (ahem) … I’m slowly starting to work my way through them, though, and intend to make a decent dent into the Christmas ornies that were kitted up ready with their working copies from previous JCS ornie magazines.  (Previously there were 4 big file boxes so it has been condensed somewhat.)  I was surprised how many needlerolls were in there ready for stitching, though – this stemmed from a SAL that Katrina was doing a while ago stitching a needleroll every month … maybe that will become my challenge for 2012 … 😛

Anyway, back to my 2011 challenge … I eventually picked up my first project for the challenge, DMC’s Rainbow Lorikeets.  I decided that I refused to do housework all day, and intended staying in my jim-jams all day watching TV and stitching … which I did {{insert happy sigh here}}.  Alas, I was so engrossed in watching TV it took me a while to realise that I had made a big blue with the kit threads – what I thought was Yellow Green Lt thread was in fact the Moss Green (although why the hell you would call something moss green that actually IS yellow-green is beyond me) … I didn’t realise until I had stitched a huge amount of the adjoining green, and then looked and thought “what the…?” – sure enough, a quick review of the chart piccie confirmed my worst suspicions …

Now I do hope the old wive’s tale isn’t true, that whatever you do on 1 January you will continue to do all year (which is partly why I chose to stitch all day in the first place) … ‘cos I really don’t fancy frog-stitching every single project I start this year!  Oh well, I persevered and unpicked and restitched straight away while watching Dirty Dancing (sad I can even remember which movie sparked the frogging), and by the time I switched off at 1am this morning I’d made pretty good headway!  Thankfully the thread I had misjudged and had to be frogged is a DMC thread, so I can replace from my stash, as I had used every strand up in the original stitching … phew!  Ah, the joys of stitching from kits 😉

Of course now I’m champing at the bit to get it finished, because it’s so close to being finished I can taste it … so I think I’ll do that this morning, then I’ll start my next project immediately afterwards, which will probably be another small one – and tomorrow I’ll start one of the bigger designs.